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166 National Music of the World.
other royalties, affected the foreign style, and until a very recent period recognised no other. True, they opened their courts to great musicians, but those of home-growth often met with strange entertainment—apart from the stipend, which sometimes placed them in easy circumstances. I need not recall the struggles of Mozart to get something better than a lackey's pay and a lackey's treatment out of the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, nor the total neglect which darkened Beethoven's latter days in Vienna; how Spohr, after he was a European celebrity, when admitted to play at a certain Court, had to work hard to get a thick carpet taken up, which had been laid down expressly to make the music of the household band as inoffensive as possible, in order that the card-players, to whom the music was an accompaniment, might not be disturbed ; how the pianoforte music of Weber (that most national of German compesers, as we shall presently see), was exhibited at the Court of Saxony to the jingle of knives and forks, while the Court was at dinner. The musician was decorated with orders and endowed with maintenance; but whereas in Italy he was in some sort an equal, in Germany he was, after all, but a vassal, and this till within a late period. |
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