and the right of property lay more in the manner in which ideas
were presented than in the ideas themselves.

In 1886 I spent a delightful day with Dr. Chrysander at his home in
Bergedorf, near Hamburg, and he told me the story of how on one
occasion, when Keiser was incapacitated by the vice to which he was
habitually prone, Handel, who sat in his orchestra, was asked by
him to write the necessary opera. Handel complied, and his success
was too great to leave Keiser's mind in peace. So he reset the
book. Before Keiser's setting was ready for production Handel had
gone to Italy. Hearing of Keiser's act, he secured a copy of the
new setting from a member of the orchestra and sent back to Hamburg
a composition based on Keiser's melodies "to show how such themes
ought to be treated." Dr. Chrysander, also, when he gave me a copy
of Bertati's "Don Giovanni" libretto, for which Gazzaniga composed
the music, told me that Mozart had been only a little less free
than the poet in appropriating ideas from the older work.

One of the best pieces in the final scene of "Fidelio" was taken
from a cantata on the death of the emperor of Austria, composed by
Beethoven before he left Bonn. The melody originally conceived for
the last movement of the Symphony in D minor was developed into the
finale of one of the last string quartets. In fact the instances in
which composers have put their pieces to widely divergent purposes
are innumerable and sometimes amusing, in view of the fantastic
belief that they are guided by plenary inspiration. The overture
which Rossini wrote for his "Barber of Seville" was lost soon after
the first production of the opera. The composer did not take the
trouble to write another, but appropriated one which had served its
purpose in an earlier work. Persons ignorant of that fact, but with