to emphasize this particular line at the expense of the foundational training. The equipment of the musician who goes out from a collegiate institution with a Bachelor of Music degree ought to be quite analogous in every respect to the equipment of the student who secures the Bachelor of Arts degree. He has completed a course of general foundational knowledge, with special stress laid on one particular branch. But it is only after further pursuit of specialized study that the student becomes an authority in his chosen subject. Similarly, a Bachelor of Music candidate can never expect to be at graduation a great pianist, an accomplished vocal artist, a violin virtuoso. It will only be after further years of concentrated specialized study, that artistic mastery can be obtained.

An American National Conservatory of Music founded and maintained as a kind of graduate school, offering highly specialized work of the finest type only to those who have had adequate previous training, would be of the greatest benefit to music in America. One of the functions of the University School of Music would be, then, the offering of this adequate previous training to the young musicians of the State, that the most talented might go on with the higher education in their particular branch of the profession.

Thus the School of Music in a State University stands in a position to make a signal contribution to the country, to the State, and to its University. It may not be possible to reach all the students, but to many there will come through music the joy of visions of a new world, a spiritual world untrammeled with human sordidness. The ideal kept constantly in mind should be to give to the people of the State through its Music School an enviable opportunity for the foundation of a professional education, and to make it possible for good music to touch the life of every student in the University, that he may realize in some degree the transcendent power of the art to assuage the burdens of mankind and to give joy and peace to life.

A

ROSSINI: A STUDY

By EDGAR ISTEL

FULL century ago there rose above the operatic horizon of Venice a brilliant star. Tancredi was the name of the magic opera that took all hearts in Italy, and soon throughout Europe as well, by storm. In a twinkling all the misery of the war was forgotten; from gondolier to nobleman, everyone was singing the famous cavatina "Di tanti palpiti," and even the arrival of Emperor Napoleon could not eclipse the fame of him who had suddenly become the hero of the day-the twenty-oneyear-old Gioachino Rossini. A few years later, Napoleon's world-imperium lay in ruins, and the all-powerful Corsican, banished to a barren islet, suffered the fate of Promethides. But Rossini, already compared by his contemporaries to a butterfly flitting over a battlefield, spread his wings ever wider and sang (the "Swan of Pesaro") his new songs on and on to an enraptured world-till suddenly, at the zenith of life and creative power, he fell silent. Thus there lies between Rossini's first triumph and his last but little more than a decade; and while a century separates us from his apogee, only half a century has elapsed since his death.

Who the poet well would know,

To the Poets' land must go.

And whoever would thoroughly understand Rossini, must have been in his native land.

By the violet-blue waters of the Adriatic, very nearly in the latitude of Florence, lies Pesaro, a town of some 20,000 inhabitants. Here the extreme foothills of the Apennines so closely approach the seashore, that scarcely room enough was left for the building of a city, whose port, formed by the narrow river-mouth, accommodates only vessels of the smallest type. The main currents of traffic have barely touched Pesaro, and so the little town, with its cleanly streets and lanes, breathes a spirit of comfortable seclusion. The finest view of Pesaro is to be had from the summit of Monte San Bartolo-the very name reminds one of Rossinia hill between six and seven hundred feet in height, on whose

western declivity stands the famous Villa Imperiale (now the property of Princess Albani), a beautifully situated countryseat erected by Alessandro Sforza, the cornerstone of which was laid in the year 1469 by Friedrich III, the Roman emperor of the German nation.

Truly, in this land one may, careless as Papataci in the Rossinian aria, "with love and loveliness, jesting and fondling, slumber, and eat, and drink, and ever again slumber, and eat, and drink." Did not the divine

(thus he once jestingly set his name to music) do the same in his time? His conquest of Italy's favor, at the age of twenty-one, with the opera Tancredi, reads like a fairy tale; one short cavatina, written in a few minutes, made Rossini the favorite of the nation. (This cavatina, "Di tanti palpiti," was known by the gastronomically jocular title of the "Aria dei risi," because Rossini wrote the piece during the preparation of his repast of rice, which is eaten almost raw in Italy, being boiled only four minutes.) In his old age Rossini once remarked to Auber that in fifty years this melody would probably be the only one of his still extant. Auber advanced the contrary opinion, that the Barber of Seville would still be played a hundred years from then, and we know that Auber has proved to be the better prophet of the two. How few now know that renowned "Di tanti palpiti"! Swaying to and fro over the simplest of accompaniments, with a mere handful of supporting chords, it still floats before us in all its charm as a veritable vision of genius.

Stendhal (Henri Beyle), the enthusiastic first biographer of Rossini, tells us:

It made a fine, a genuine furore, as they say in that lovely Italian tongue, created for the arts. From the gondolier up to the greatest lord, everybody was repeating "Ti rivedrò, mi rivedrai." The words mi rivedrai. ti rivedrò, demand the emotion or a recollection of the fond love of the South.

Of course, Rossini himself immediately became the object of insensate amourettes, and many were the fair aristocrats and artists who, with facile Romanic sanguinity, invited the adored master to tender rendezvous-until some scandal, great or small, made it seem advisable to remove the scene of action to some other town. But only for seventeen years, whose incredible fecundity produced no fewer than fifty operas, did Rossini's star illumine the skies of art; at the age of thirty-seven the master laid down his pen; after the completion of William Tell he disappeared from the public eye, and for forty years longer gazed smilingly down, with many a witty observation, on the fevered activities of his ambitious colleagues, who heaped score on score while Rossini, the philosopher, in cheerful enjoyment of the good things of this life, held the composition of a pie to be of more importance than that of the modern orchestra. "Je ne suis qu'un pauvre mélodiste," he would remark with noble modesty when the conversation turned to the intricate scores of a Berlioz and a Wagner, whom the succeeding decades were jubilantly welcoming. In his secret heart he revered only one among the mighty, for whom he felt an affinity, although he could never hope to equal him: the master of The Marriage of Figaro, compared with which (so he himself opined) his Barber of Seville was a mere farce. Mozart's comedy-operas, Rossini once said, were genuine dramme giocose, whereas everything that he himself had composed after the pattern of the Neapolitans was, strictly speaking, simply opera buffa. And he presented the celebrated singing-teacher Piermarini with a portrait of Mozart, with the words: "I offer you a portrait of Mozart. Take off your hat, as I do, to the master of masters." The story is also told, that Rossini knelt before the original score of Don Giovanni, and kissed it. One of Rossini's finest observations on Mozart, however, we owe to a conversation with Emil Naumann in Paris, to whom he said:

The Germans have always been the greatest harmonists, and we Italians the melodists, in musical art; but since you in the North have brought forth a Mozart, we Southlanders have been beaten on our own field. For this man rises superior to both nations; he combines the full charm of Italian cantilena with all the depth of German sentiment as displayed in the interaction of the parts in his so genially and richly developed harmony. Should Mozart no longer be esteemed as beautiful or sublime-well then, we oldsters who are still left over can cheerfully give up the ghost; but I feel well assured that, in Paradise, Mozart and his hearers will again meet each other.

Rossini, uniting his easyflowing music with thorough workmanship, might have become, thanks to the fairly incredible scope of his talent, a kind of Italian Mozart, had not fate denied him the advantage of a sound training. This was probably also the reason that Rossini halted his creative work so abruptly: he perceived that his technical faculty was incapable of further development, and so he thought it better to cease writing rather than to go on imitating himself after he had produced, in Tell, a work that raised him to the rank of the greatest French opera

composers.

However, although Rossini had withdrawn from his proper domain, the operatic stage, he did not pass his days in sheer idleness. He composed a number of works for the Church (the most celebrated among these being the "Stabat Mater"), of which, to be sure, he remarked: "This is no church-music for Germans; my most sacred music is only semi-seria." Indeed, towards the close of his life he called his operas, too, nothing but "old-fashioned stuff," though the author of the Barber and Tell has not yet become old-fashioned as regards his best works. But during the decades of his retirement Rossini chiefly occupied himself with writing a series of short, facetious compositions which he carefully concealed from publicity, allowing only a very few to be printed and very seldom playing them to his intimates. These little compositions, which are still as good as unknown, can be inspected only at Pesaro in the Liceo Rossini, formerly the palazzo Machirelli. This Liceo Rossini, one of the best Italian conservatories (Mascagni was for a time its Director), occupies premises of princely grandeur; in the garden stands a statue (the work of Marocchetti in 1864) of Rossini, whose name the institute is proud to bear. One carefully guarded room, profusely embellished with portraits and busts of the master, together with most various souvenirs, is also the repository of a vast number of manuscripts which are shielded only in part by glass cases, and to which additions are continually being made. Here are kept the scores of Rossini's operas Otello, Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra, Maometto Secondo, La Donna del Lago, Armida, Adina, and fragments of others. The two first-mentioned operas are the most interesting for the reason that in them may be found celebrated themes from the Barber of Seville. The common bond between Othello and Queen Elizabeth, on the one hand, and the jovial Figaro, on the other, is not readily perceptible in our present period of strict differentiation between the serious style and comedy; however, Rossini's unscrupulosity during the years of