Haweis on Music.

The Rev. H. R. Haweis publishes "My Musical Life," a chatty embalming of his tuneful recollections. He ranges over Mendelssohn, Balfe, Wallace, Costa, Hullah, Macfarren, Bennett, Benedict, and all the masters and queens of song.

In Goring Thomas, composer of the operas of "Esmeralda" and "Nadeshda," we have a fresh and strong composer, holding his own against the memories of the "Bohemian Girl," "Satanella," "Lurline," and "Maritana." That fleshy, so-called oratorio, the "Rose of Sharon," stamps Mackenzie as a worthy rival. Sullivan throws himself away on the class of work which Rossini, as he tapped off Offenbach's "Grand Duchess" on the piano, termed "one-finger music."

Gounod almost belongs to England. His "Redemption" is a grand work, followed up by his "More et Vita." In opera he never could reach again anything like the mark of Faust, though his "Romeo and Juliet" is liked in France. His "Polyeucte", and "Tribut de Zamora" were elaborate failures.

France is to the front with composers. Planquette gets £12,000 for an indifferent work like "Rip Van Winkle," although he has scarcely the luscious depth of Audran. The "Lakme" of M. Delibes was made a great hit in Paris by Mdlle. Van Zandt, whose star has paled there. Massenet's "Roi de Lahore" was a more ambitious work. Another leading French composer is Saint-Saens, whose latest opera is "Henry VIII."

The revival of the compositions of Berlioz, especially in London, indicates that this great French composer of the last generation is becoming enrolled among the immortals. His genius has not to lay dormant for two centuries like that of Bach, with whom, Beethoven, and Mozart, he is destined to live.

Wagner has quenched everything in Germany. At all events, our musical contemporaries there do not send a ripple to England or France. But Hungary yields the gifted Dvorak, who has rushed to the front in London in a manner which recalls Mendelssohn's visit, with his ever-memorable and matchless "Elijah."

Sunny Italy is almost as barren of rising musical originality as America or Australia. Verdi, the versatile assimilator of Rossini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer, and Wagner, is working hard in retirement, apparently with the same spirit which animated page 73 Turner, the artist, in accumulating a mass of paintings for posthumous display.

Mr. Haweis' narration of the struggles, privations, and patience of Wagner is sympathetic and touching. When his "Flying Dutchman" had failed in Paris, he was so reduced that he had to sell the libretto, to which new music was set by a composer named Fouche, and the work thus improved had a success. Imagine the cutting indignity of this, the iron entering into the soul of the mighty composer. It is hardly necessary to add that the music of Fouche has been stripped off and flung into oblivion, and the glorious inspiration of the master restored.

Sir Julius Benedict has gone. A sixth-rate composer, but a thorough artist, with a Catholic appreciation of old and new, Mozart, Rossini, and Wagner. It mattered not to him whether a composer was Italian, German, French, or English. He did more for music in England than any Professor since the immortal Handel, whose "Israel in Egypt," with its score—that is to say twenty—of magnificent choruses, has been the central glory of his Centennial Celebration.