The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1

ce that occurred to the numberless minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the old time. Some of these instances are simply hints, upon which the fervid

ful she must have been. Her name, too, was Joanna Gavadia-a sweet name, surely never wasted on an ungraceful woman; and on her tombstone she is called "pudicissima

ny musician who feels humiliated by the struggle for existence with its necessities for wire-pulling and log-rolling and sly advertisement, and by the difficulty of stemming the tide of public ignorance and indifference, let him remember that at least he is a free man, and need lick nobody's boots

ge of eighty and the father of twelve children, he had to stoop to appeals for charity; again at ninety-seven he appeals. At ninety-eight he pleads to be retired with a pen

f old age, and twelve children raised at great cost, to enable them to earn their bread, have left me at his death in indigence the greater since my son Laur

d a faithless administration, have prevented, at least during my lifetime, all that I could hope. Save for the tenderness of a daughter, who is herself hardly in easy circumstanc

e is Jacques Buus, who makes various appeals for aid for his increasing family. A refreshing novelty in these annals of sordid poverty is given us of H.J. De Croes, court-organist at Brussels in the eighteenth century, who wa

e a widow, Ana Wickerslot, who implored the king to gran

t organ-builder in Europe, according to his son, who ought to have known, married in Spain a woman who was also Flemish. When he died she was a widow raised to the third degree, and she was compelled to appeal to the king for charity. In her quaint appeal she na?vely points with pride to the fact tha

Venetian school. He was a pupil of that "Prince of Music" Josquin Desprès (of whom too little is known save that the Church got him), Willaer

erved. In every one of them he mentions his wife Susana, though he never gives her family name. In each of his wills he leaves her the bulk of

n vows for his wife grows greater and greater the nearer the fatal

is daughter Catharine, who was a composer, too. Perhaps this gifted d

and. There, thrown upon his own resources in a far cold country, this forlorn Italian managed to ingratiate himself among the musicians of Mary, the unhappy Queen of Scots. She eventually noticed him and engaged him as a singer. He gradually rose higher in he