MUSICAL LEGENDS

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 181, 2 May 1925, Page 18

MUSICAL LEGENDS

“HARMONIOUS BLACKSMITH” STORY “Birds of Wonder,’’ says George Meredith, in a characteristic sentence, “fly to a flaring reputation,” and musical history affords many illustrations of the truth of the remark. From the very earliest days of the art, indeed, examples might be drawn, beginning with the case of Orpheus, who with his lute performed those marvels of which the poet tells us. Take, for a beginning, the famouu Air and Variations of Handel, known as “The Harmonious Blacksmith.” Of this charming composition it has been caustically observed that it has probably occasioned the writing of more nonsense than any piece of music eve. written. The legend is that Handel heard ths air sung by a blacksmith at Edgware, to the accompaniment of sturdy blows from the anvil, and that he gave the piece its picturesque name accordingly. The actual fact is that the work was never known/ by this name at all till years after Handel’s death, the whole story being an absolute fable from beginning to end. Who invented it? It is believed one Richard Clark, a music publisher, who, with a view to “adding verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” informed the world further that the mythical blacksmith combined that muscular calling with the role of parish clerk, at Whitchurch. Equally devoid of justification is the title by "which one of Beethoven’s most famous piano works, the so-called “Moonlight Sonata,” has come to be known. Certainly Beethoven himselt had not the smallest responsibility for the title, which is believed to have had its origin in a remark by an imaginative critic of a later day, named Rellstab. The first movement of the sonata, he suggested, might be a picture in tones of a boat conveying a pair of lovers drifting idly by moonlight over the placid waters of the Lake of Lucerne. After which hint the enterprising publishers, ever anxious to affix, if possible, an enticing label to their wares, could be safely trusted to do the rest. Towards the end or his troubled life, when he was in a very weak and overwrought condition, Mozart received a visit from a mysterious stranger, who requested him to name his own Terms for composing a Requiem Mass'for a client whose name the stranger declined to disclose. The circumstances were so extraordinary that to the imaginative and the morbidly inclined master it seemed that there could be only one explanation of the matter. The stranger could T» none other than an emissary of the Evil One who had commissioned him in this way to compose his own Requiem I In reality he was, of course, merely the correct and solemn majordomo of the Count Franz von Walsegg, but Mozart never learned this, and he went to his grave all too soon thereafter in the strange belief which’had taken possession of his superstitious mind.—“ Sunday (Times.”