ume of excerpts compiled by Friedrich Kerst, contain many passages of interest to the music student, but they cannot be regarded as literature. Their style, the translator assures us, is "careless, contradictory, and sprawling." Beethoven certainly knew nothing of literary art. Schubert and Weber remained ignorant of it. Poor Chopin knew enough to stick to music. Paul de Musset replied to George Sand's Elle et Lui with another roman à clef defending his brother, but when Lucrezia Floriani appeared, Chopin contented himself by answering it on the piano. Mendelssohn's prose, exposed to us in his numerous published letters, is as sentimental as his music, and not nearly so pretty.
Jean-Philippe Rameau, composer and inventor of the system of the "fundamental bass," wrote several books: Traite de l'harmonie reduite a ses principes naturels (Paris, 1722), Nouveau système de musique théorique (Paris, 1726), Génération harmonique (Paris, 1737), and Code de musique practique (Paris, 1760). I have not attempted to read these books, but J. E. Matthew[1] says of them: "It must be admitted that the style of Rameau is greatly wanting in clearness, so that some resolution is called for in reading his works." Grétry's Mémoires, published
- ↑ In The Literature of Music; Elliot Stock; London; 1896.
