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54 National Music of the World. |
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certain passages, in accordance with the humour of the moment. The Abbe gives curious anecdotes of these wild and lawless people when domesticated in Transylvanian households. It was their habit to accompany armies on the march as musicians so late as the beginning of the last century. But I fancy (save in such a ministry to illicit luxury as they offer in Russia) the palmy days of the gipsy musicians are over, and that we shall hear no more of such prodigal doings as those of the Hungarian noble who bound up a vagrant violin-player's arm in a bundle of bank-notes. Year by year they must fade out, and be absorbed into the world of more civilised races.
I cannot close these paragraphs without pointing out, as among many marking characteristics of the kind which distinguish him, the felicitous adoption of the wild style of gipsy music by Weber, in his ' Preciosa' march. Nor has Signor Verdi, whose use of local material is habitually slight and thrown into the most conventional of forms, been without a touch of the right spirit, thrown into the beginning and close of the chorus which opens the second act of ' II Trovatore.' Those who recollect the audacious incorrect performances of M. Remenyi, the |
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