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T/ie National Music of America. 309
of the two above-mentioned, was more fortunate in its evolution of a song which came near to being national.
During the Civil War there lived in Boston a German composer named Matthias Keller; he was a kind, simple, and lovable old man, who struggled along in poverty, trying his hand at all the smaller forms of composition, and failing to attract the attention of the public in any of them. In common with all the composers of that time he evolved a war-song ; it was called " Save our republic, oh, Father on high," and it resembled a chorale rather than a military work. It attracted temporary notice and then fell out of sight.
Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, a very enterprising Irishman, — not too heavily burdened with classical tastes, — in 1869 gave a festival in Boston, celebrating the close of the war. It was a very different affair from that with which, in 1815, Boston had celebrated the end of the War of 1812 ; ten thousand singers in |
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