delivered twelve months ago. It is an imitation of Weber, showing much labour and little originality; very deficient in melody, and often obscure in the accompaniments, from a want of power arising, probably, from inexperience-to develop ideas which seem to have existed in the composer's mind. The harmonies present a crowd of notes, a constant attempt at something, and almost as regular a failure in execution. There is scarcely any relief-little repose; and the few good things in the piece are not enough to keep our spirits from sinking almost to zero before the curtain finally drops*.

On the 9th of last month, a new "musical drama," under the title of The Irish Girl, was produced here. The following are the characters :

Lord Kilmore, doubtless unable to find a banker, keeps his money in canvass bags in a closet. His steward, Mandeville, abstracts a considerable portion of it, and buries it in O'Rourke's cabin, which is haunted by ghosts as well as gold. The peer discovers his loss. The steward leads his lordship to suspect Sir Leinster Leybrooke, who is received at the mansion, disguised as a singing-master, under the name of Gerald. The Irish Girl also gets into the same quarter as a needle-woman, and pretending to be asleep, is witness to Mandeville's propensity to appropriation. The rogue then accuses her of the robbery: she discloses all: he is punished; and Sir Leinster, whose only object was access to Lady Julia, receives her hand from her father, Lord Kilmore.

This is a melo-drame, and, like most such things, is full of events that never could have happened in real life, brought about by means which, any where but on the stage or in a novel, would be utterly impossible. The incongruities are not few. In an Irish cabin none is blessed with the brogue but the master of it. Bridget, upon being introduced to Lady Julia, bobs twenty barbarous curtesies in a minute; but an hour after is quite the high-toned heroine, declaiming and acting with all the dignity of an injured

* We have seen a copy of Marschner's new work, and so far as it is allowable to judge from a piano-forte arrangement, without having the score to refer to, we venture to report most favourably of it, hoping ere long to hear it well performed, and to be enabled to speak more decisively on the nature of its merits.

empress. Why Sir Leinster presents himself as a vocal professor does not appear; he had no reason to suppose that he should not be very well received in his own proper person. But it is a loss of time to reason with a melodrame. The piece succeeded and drew good houses to the end of the season. The music, of which there is comparatively but little, is by Mr. Hawes, and perfectly inoffensive. The overture, by Halevy, a new French composer, is of a very ordinary kind, and disappointed us much; for we had seen a few of his productions, which led us to expect something better from his pen.

The theatre closed on the 25th, after a losing season, which indeed the proprietor anticipated, for his expenses were necessarily great, and his receipts, in so small a house, unavoidably below his disbursements. It is to be hoped that his new theatre will be ready by next season, and that his activity and enterprise may be rewarded by an extension of his license, which both the public and the interests of the lyric drama loudly demand.

HAYMARKET THEATRE.

MISS PATON has appeared in the character of Rosina, and the public overwhelmed her with applauses. This manifestation, let us hope, arose out of the endeavour of a small number of injudicious persons to get up an opposition to her, which, being resisted, led to the other extreme.

We are still of opinion that the public ought to have appeared ignorant of what report says has taken place. The facts were never fairly before them, and if they had been openly and legally disclosed, the punishment attempted was greater than the offence; for the indiscretion of an actress-who is always in a situation of dangeradmits of considerable palliation, and should not be visited in a manner that would be thought severe even in private life. If a public performer is found guilty of a crime which the law declares infamous, let such person be immediately driven from the stage; but conjugal infidelity is not classed among such crimes, and however prudent it may be to banish from domestic society a female who has been unfaithful to the marriage vow, there is not the same motive for expelling her the boards of a theatre-from a situation where chastity is not an indispensable virtue, and where example loses much of its effect.

Miss Paton never sang better than on this occasion. Were she anything but an Englishwoman, her failings would be overlooked, and her talents valued as they deserve to be above those of any performer of the present day.

PIANOFORTE.

"Sailors' loadstar," Song. -Mrs. C. B. Wilson. "My fair Madeline," Song. Miss Deacon.

"The heart which loved thee dearly," Song.-Miss Sheridan.

"Adieu to the land of the sun," Song.-Captain Colebrook.

"Erin, I'm thine!" Song. -Finlay Dun. "Marsellaise Hymn," Song.-J. Braham. "True Blue," Song.-S. Wesley.

QUINTETTS.

Two Violins, Viola, Violoncello, Flute, with
Pianoforte (ad lib.)

Overture, "Guillaume Tell," arranged by J. Adenjoyed during his lifetime, the exalted patronage by which he was distinguished, and the many high professional stations he was called upon to fill, the materials for a biographical notice of him are more than usually scanty. We have not, after much research, been able to add any thing of importance to the short accounts which preceding writers have given of him. Yet the rank he once held in the musical world makes us unwilling altogether to pass him by; and it may be neither uninteresting nor uninstructive to cast a retrospective and comparing glance over such of his works as have survived their author, compositions which little more than fifty years ago filled all Europe with their fame, and yet most of which, if produced now, would most probably not even survive a second performance. GIUSEPPE SARTI was born at Faenza in 1730. The school in which he acquired the rudiments of musical science, and the masters under whom he studied its higher branches, are alike unrecorded; but as early as 1756, he appears to have filled the office of chapel-master to the court, and musical instructor to the royal family, at Copenhagen. During his continuance in this situation, it is to be presumed, that neither his invention nor his pen were idle, and, indeed, he is said to have composed some admired operas for that event, but their success and reputation were confined to the capital in which they were brought out, and not even their titles are now remembered.

We next recognise Sarti at Venice, where he was appointed chapel-master of the Conservatorio della Pietà, and soon rose to so high an estimation amongst his countrymen, that he is said to have been unable to compose operas with sufficient rapidity to answer the demands of the Impresarij, who were vying with each other in endeavours to secure the services of the Maestro divino, as Sarti was then called by the enthusiastic Italians. Yet of these compositions not even the titles are now known. In 1781, however, we find that he wrote a comic opera, La Giardiniera brillante, for the court of Dresden; and the best known of all his operas, Giulio Sabino, for the theatre of San Benedetto, at Venice.

The popularity of this last was instant and excessive: the composer was immediately installed chapel-master of the Duomo of Milan, and Giulio Sabino in a few years made the tour of Europe, was received every where with unbounded applause, and even reached St. Petersburg. The autocratrix of all the Russias, the celebrated Catherine, determined to secure the talents and services of the Maestro divino, and offered him the situation of imperial chapelmaster for three years. Sarti accepted the appointment, and in 1785 made his debut as a composer in the Russian metropolis, by a concert spirituel, on Good Friday, in which he introduced some of the Russian psalms, sung by a chorus of sixty voices and accompanied by a band of one hundred Russian horns in addition to the usual orchestra. To moderate, however, the surprise which the uninitiated reader will feel at the employment of one hundred horn players at once, it must be remarked, that in the Russian horn-music each instrumunt is limited to one single note, NOVEMBER, 1830.

generally attained under the severest discipline) consists in sounding that single note in exact time and tune even in the most rapid passages. On a subsequent occasion, namely, a Te Deum for the capture of Oczakow, Sarti is said so far to have descended from the dignity of his art as to have introduced actual discharges of cannon obbligati, to mark time; but whether by single discharges or salvos, his historians have left posterity in the dark.

In 1786 he composed an opera seria called Armida; upon the representation of which the empress not only presented him, according to the custom of Russia, where jewels form a kind of current coin, with a diamond snuffbox and ring, but appointed him director of the Conservatorio at Catharineslaf, to which office was attached, besides lodging and a table, a salary of thirty-five thousand rubles and an allowance of fifteen thousand rubles for travelling expenses.

In Russia Sarti remained till the commencement of the present century, in undiminished favour with the court. In 1801 he solicited permission from the Emperor Alexander to proceed to a warmer climate for the re-establishment of his health. He received leave of absence accordingly, and got as far as Berlin on his way to the south; but his constitution was too seriously shaken for change of climate to restore, and he died in the capital of Prussia in the year 1802, aged about seventy-two.

The principal operas of Sarti, of which the names have come down to us, are:

La Giardiniera brillante, opera buffa, Dresden, 1781.
I Contratempi, opera buffa, Dresden, 1782.
Giulio Sabino, Venice, 1781.

Il Trionfo della Pace, Mantua, 1783.
Didone, 1785.

Armida, 1786.

1 Pretendenti Delusi, opera buffa, 1788.
Cleomene, opera seria, Bologna, 1788.

La Calzolario di Strasburgo, opera buffa, 1788.
La Clemenza di Tito, 1788.

Idalide, Petersburg, 1785.

Le Nozze di Dorina, opera buffa, 1790.
L' Avaro, an interlude.

Gl' Amanti consolati, opera buffa, 1799.

In some lists he is also said to have written an opera seria called Epponina, for Turin, and a comic opera, I Rivali delusi, performed in London; but we are inclined to conjecture, that the first is mistaken for the Giulio Sabino, the name of the heroine in which is Epponina, and that the latter is probably the same as the Nozze di Dorina, a trio from which, beginning with the words, "Che vi par, Dorina bella," was long a favourite in the London concerts.

Of Sarti's compositions for the church, hardly any thing is known, in this country at least. The late Mr. Shield, in his work on Harmony, printed an Amplius lava me," from a Miserere by him, arranged to English poetry, which has been since published, with the original words, in the second volume of Latrobe's Collection of Sacred Music*.

* This terzetto was first brought to England by Charles Hatchett, Esq., the scientific and well-known chemist, described by Shield as 3 Q

The opera of Giulio Sabino, which has been published in the full score, may be taken as a fair sample of the claims of Sarti to eminence as a theatrical composer; and certainly its enthusiastic reception will not raise our admiration of the state of musical taste in Europe forty years since. It may perhaps be best described by negatives: - It has no concerted pieces, unless one trio may be so designated. Except a Marcia Funebre, it contains not one movement in a minor key. There are neither clarinets nor flutes in the score, nor a single prominent feature in any part for the wind instruments that are used; nor is there in the whole opera a piece, in the course of which the modulations wander beyond the dominant or subdominant of the original key. In the recitatives a diminished seventh is occasionally to be found, but throughout all the songs, one duet, and a trio, of which the opera consists, it occurs only once. The popularity of Giulio Sabino must have been founded on the beauty and simplicity of its melodies, and the singing of Pacchierotti, for whom the part of Sabino was written, supported by a prima donna, Signora Pozzi, and a first tenor, Panati, both of whom, from the songs written for them, must have possessed extensive voices and great powers of execution. On the whole, it may safely be pronounced far inferior to the best contemporary works of Sacchini, Paisiello, and many other writers; and to be surpassed in every point by our own Artaxerxes, written many years before.

In the same year in which Sarti wrote the Giulio Sabino, Mozart also wrote an opera, his Idomeneo, the least known but most laboured of all his theatrical compositions. Love and hope were the inspiring deities of the great German, and the fair hand of Constanza Weber, his exceedingly great, but, at the same time, almost his only, reward. No pension, no diamonds, no imperial invitations, followed the production of Idomeneo, and yet on comparing the two works, it will hardly be believed possible that they should have been produced in the same age, much less the same year. But Sarti wrote for singers and immediate applause; Mozart for fame and posterity.

dwelling of the deceased, Schwartzpanier Haus, on the glacis by the Scotch Gate.

"At three o'clock the corpse was brought out; eight singers of the Opera House, Eichberger, Schuster, Cramolini, A. Müller, Hoffmann, Rupprecht, Borschitzky, and A. Wranitzky, having offered to carry it on their shoulders. After the priest had pronounced a few prayers, the singers performed a grave chorale of B. A. Weber, and the whole procession moved forward in the following order :

"1. The cross-bearer. 2. Four trombone players, the brothers Böck, Waidl, and Tuschky. 3. The master of the choir, M. Assmayer, and under his direction, 4. A choir of singers; M. Tietze, Schnitzer, Gross, Sikora, Frühwald, Geissler, Rathmeyer, Kokrement, Fuchs, Nejebse, Ziegler, Perschl, Leidl, Weinkopf, Pfeiffer, and Seipelt, which, alternately with the trombone quartett, performed the Miserere. This walking orchestra was immediately followed by, 5. The high priest. 6. The coffin, borne by the above-mentioned opera-singers, and attended by the chapel-masters, Eybler, Hummel, Seyfried, and Kreutzer on the right, and Weigl, Gyrowetz, Gausbacher, and Würfel upon the left, as pall-bearers. On both sides, from the beginning of the procession to the coffin, were the torch-bearers, thirty-six in number, consisting of poets, authors, composers, and musicians; among whom were M. Auschutz, Bernard, Bohm, Castelli, Carl Czerny, Signor David, Grillparzer, &c. &c., the whole in full mourning, with white roses and bunches of lilies fastened to the crape on their arms. Next followed Beethoven's brother, (the last friend of his youth and his executor,) the pupils of the Conservatorio, and the scholars of capell-meister Drechsler, the thorough-bass teacher of St. Ann's; the whole deeply lamenting the loss which music had sustained.

" In the church, during the blessing, the choir sang the Libera me Domine, de morte æterna, originally composed by Seyfried, with orchestral accompaniments for use at the performances of Mozart's Requiem, now, however, arranged merely as a vocal chorus. The corpse was from hence carried in a hearse to the cemetry at Währinge, followed by many carriages.

"At the cemetery, M. Auschutz, the actor, surrounded by a circle of mourners, recited a discourse to the memory of the departed, written by Grillparzer. Baron von Schlecta and M. Castelli read short but eloquent poems to the sorrowing multitude; and before the grave was closed, M. Haslinger put into the hands of Hummel, who was standing near him, three wreaths of laurel, which were sunk upon the coffin. The mourners waited until the earth was smoothed over Beethoven.

"The history of the Miserere performed is as follows: When Beethoven was, in the autumn of the year 1812, visiting his brother, at that time an apothecary at Lintz, he was requested by the cathedral chapel-master of that place, M. Gloggl, to compose for him an equale for four trombones, as such is usually performed on the Festival of All Souls. Beethoven willingly undertook the task, and put together two very short but masterly compositions. This valuable MS., having fallen into the hands of M. Haslinger of Vienna, he, on the morning of the 26th of March, 1827, when all hope of Beethoven's recovery had been abandoned, repaired with it to capell-meister Seyfried, with a request, that he would adapt the words of the Miserere to this equale, that the body of the prince of musicians might be accompanied to its everlasting rest by its own creations. M. Seyfried, in pursuance of this idea, undertook the work, which was finished the night following Beethoven's death."