his noble patron and went to Paris, where his customary success attended him, and where he was especially noticed by Marie Antoinette. He went thence to Milan, where his brother was staying, and was received by the Italians with an enthusiasm that is the more notable on account of their national indifference to instrumental music. His return to Paris was welcomed by the queen; but the horrors of the Revolution drove him from the French capital, and he came to London in the latter part of 1789. As a player, as a teacher, and as a composer, he found here general acknowledgment, for the eminent talents of Clementi, in the same branch of art, had well prepared the lovers of music in this country to appreciate the excellence of the new comer. Dussek married in 1792 the daughter of Dominico Corri, who, then but seventeen years of age, was already distinguished as a singer, a harpist, and a pianist. He composed several pieces for this lady, and often played with her in public, duets for two pianofortes, and also for pianoforte and harp. The great demand for his music induced him to open a warehouse in the Haymarket, in partnership with Montague Corri, his wife's uncle; and, that he might derive every advantage from this establishment, he wrote a great number of pieces for the sole purpose of sale, which illustrate no point of his artistic character but his fluency of production. Dussek, however, was no man of business; his habitual failing was to be unpunctual, and to have no regularity; and the music shop did not prosper with him. In the course of a few years he became so involved by the non-success of his commercial undertaking that, notwithstanding his large income from his profession, he was unable to meet his creditors' demands, and fled the country to escape their urgency, in the year 1800, leaving his wife with his daughter Olivier scarcely a year old. He took refuge at Hamburg, where his talents attracted the attention of a lady of princely family, and his manners won her affection, and he lived in retirement with her for two years at a retreat upon the frontiers of Denmark. In 1802 he revisited his native town for the first time since he went to the university, twenty-five years before, to lay at his father's feet the European honours he had won since he quitted the parental home, and to prove to his first instructor, what fruit the seed had yielded which he had implanted. Passing through Madgeburg when he left Haslau, Dussek was there introduced to Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, with whom he formed a friendship, which, brief as was its duration, was one of the most remarkable that ever existed between a musician and a patron. Few, if any royal princes, have had such innate musical capacity as Prince Louis Ferdinand, and no one has so matured his natural talent by cultivation. This may in some degree explain his regard for Dussek, amounting to affection; and the elegant scholarship of the musician, and his gentle and refined manners, served to strengthen the bond of union. The prince attached his artist friend to his household, and studied continually, under his direction, both composition and pianoforte playing. This interesting intimacy was cut short by the death of the prince at the battle of Saalfeld in 1806; but Dussek has immortalized it in his "Harmonic Elegy," the passionate beauty of which tells, with all the intensity music can embody, the grief he felt for the loss of his friend. Prince Ysenburg now became Dussek's patron, and in the appointment of court musician retained him in his service for three years. In 1809 Prince Talleyrand gave the pianist a similar engagement, to fulfil which Dussek went to Paris. There his playing created a still greater effect than it had done at any place on any previous occasion, and his public concerts were widely renowned, as the most interesting musical entertainments of the time. It was now that he wrote and published his sonata "Rétour à Paris," which was reprinted by his admirers in England as a rival to the Ne Plus Ultra of Wölf that had just appeared; and in reply to the assumptive title of this work, they gave Dussek's sonata the name of "Plus Ultra." A natural tendency to corpulency had for some years so greatly increased upon Dussek that, though it did not affect his playing, it rendered every other personal exercise extremely irksome to him, and in the indolence thus induced, he now passed nearly all his time in bed, when he was not required to appear before the prince or the public. He could only rouse himself from the lethargy consequent on this habit of life, by the excitement of wine or ardent spirits, under the effects of which his constitution gave way, and he died when his creative and executive powers were at the highest. He was interred at St. Germain-en-Laye.
The immense amount of Dussek's compositions for the pianoforte have by no means equal merit; many of them were written for the mere object of sale, still more for the purpose of tuition, and some with the design of executive display. Of those which were produced, however, in the true spirit of art, expressing the composer's feelings in his own unrestrained ideas, there exist quite enough to stamp him one of the first composers for his instrument; and while these are indispenable in the complete library of the pianist, they are above value to the student in the development of his mechanism and the formation of his style. A strong characteristic of the composer is his almost redundant profusion of ideas; but his rich fecundity of invention is greatly counterbalanced by diffuseness of design, resulting from the want of that power of condensation, by means of which, greater interest is often given to less beautiful matter. Excess of modulation is no equivalent for contrapuntal fluency, and thus the works of this master would form a bad model for one who possessed not his exquisite sentiment and his exhaustless treasures of melody. Some of the best of his works are the concerto in G minor, the sonatas dedicated to Haydn, the quintet, the quartet, and, above all, the sonatas entitled "The Invocation," "The Farewell," "Plus Ultra," and "The Harmonic Elegy."
Dussek had a brother, Franz Benedict, who was born in 1766, was a proficient on the violoncello and violin, went to Italy in the suite of the Countess Lutzow, where he composed and produced several operas, and in 1790 finally settled at Leybach as organist of the cathedral. He had also a sister, Veronica, who was born in 1779, was distinguished as a pianist, and came to London in 1797 by her brother's invitation, where her talent was highly considered. She married here an Italian named Cianchettini, and her son Pio, who was born in 1799, became a respectable professor of the pianoforte.—G. A. M.
DU SOMMERARD, Alexandre, born at Bar-sur-Aube in 1799; died, August 19, 1842. The great work which entitles Du Sommerard to the regards of his countrymen, as well as of all persons of taste and lovers of antiquities who visit Paris, is the hotel de Cluny. The building itself associated with middle age history, is the more precious because connected with the remains of Roman baths, erected by the Emperor Julian. Du Sommerard, who had served in the republican army in 1796, declared for the Bourbons on their return, but appears, as soon as government became settled, to have devoted himself to the collection of those curious objects which made the delight of his life. He travelled over Italy, as well as through the old towns of France, in search of whatever he found calculated to illustrate manners and customs. In 1832 he purchased the hotel de Cluny, and on his death, which took place in 1842, the government liberally resolved on preserving for the nation so valuable a collection. The writings of Du Sommerard are confined to treatises on archæological subjects, of his competency to deal with which there can be no doubt.—J. F. C.
DUSTON, Hannah, an American woman, noted for her escape from the Indians. She was the wife of Thomas Duston (or Dunstan), who lived on the outskirts of Haverhill in Massachusetts. On March 16, 1697, a band of about twenty Indians attacked their house. Mrs. Duston, having given birth to her eighth child only a week before, was unable to leave her bed; while Mr. Duston, by the greatest skill and courage, was barely able to save by flight the seven older children, whose ages ranged from two to seventeen years. Mary Neff, a widow who was nursing Mrs. Duston, was also captured. The Indians forced the sick woman from the bed, pillaged the house, and set it on fire. Setting out on the march, though night was coming on, they travelled about twelve miles before encamping, and Mrs. Duston was forced to go with them on foot, after seeing her infant's brains dashed out against a tree. In the few succeeding days she walked nearly a hundred and fifty miles. At length the captives were divided. Mrs. Duston, Mrs. Neff, and a boy named Samuel Leonardson, fell to the lot of an Indian family, consisting of two men, three women, and seven children, who then all started for their place of destination, an Indian village two hundred and fifty miles from Haverhill, where the captives were to run the gauntlet. On reaching a small island at the mouth of the Contoocook, six miles above Concord on the Merrimack, the prisoners resolved to attempt an escape. The boy, by Mrs. Duston's direction, learned from one of the Indians, without rousing suspicion, how to scalp. On March 31, at midnight, the three rose, and used the newly-learned art upon the sleeping
