VOLUME I.


CHAPTER I.


THE OVERTURE

Musicians as lovers! The very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of
amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys
that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while
he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of "the
inexpressive She;" the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit
youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the
dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous waltzes; the duets; the trills
and trinkets of flirtatious scherzi; the laughing roulades; the discords
melted into concord as solitude into the arms of reunion--these are
music's very own.

So capable of love and its expression is music, indeed, that you almost
wonder if any but musicians have ever truly loved, or loving have
expressed. And yet--! Round every corner there lurks an "and yet." And
if you only continue your march, or your reading, you always reach that
corner.

Your first thought would be, that a good musician must be a good lover;
that a broken heart alone can add the Master's degree to the usual
conservatory diploma of Bachelor of Music; that all musicians must be