The "music of the future" prompted him to rude remarks about "long-eared musicians," and he returns to the seat of the scornful in a curt notice headed "NOT a Magic Minstrel":--
Herr Wagner, Professor of the "Music of the Future," appears, in conducting at the Philharmonic, to have made strange work with the music of all time. He alters Mozart, it appears, if not exactly as a parish clerk once said that he had altered Haydn for the singing gallery, yet in a manner nearly as audacious, altering "_allegro_" to "_moderato_"; "_andante_" to "_adagio_"; "_allegretto_" to "_andante_"; and "_allegro_" again to "_prestissimo_." Wagner would seem strongly to resemble his namesake in _Faust_, in the particular wherein that _Wagner_ differs from his master--that is, in the circumstance of being no conjuror.
The sudden disappearance of that Italianized Westphalian, the fiery Cruvelli, was a nine days' wonder in the operatic world in 1854 and is duly chronicled in _Punch_. Towards the end of this period Piccolomini, a singer of small calibre but attractive personality, achieved great popularity in the _rôle_ of the consumptive heroine of _La Traviata_, and _Punch_ celebrated the craze of "Piccolomania," as he called it, in the following travesty:--
Art is long and time is fleeting, But of genius the soul, Ordinary talent beating, Reaches at one stride the goal.
In the operatic battle, In the _Prima Donna's_ life Quit the herd--the vocal cattle, Be a Grisi in the strife.
Trust no promise, howe'er pleasant, Not who may be, but who are; Piccolomini at present, Is the bright particular star.
Outside the opera houses, music in the period under review in this volume may be said to begin and end with Jullien, so far as _Punch_ is concerned. Jullien is roughly handled in the very first number of _Punch_. In the autumn of 1857 satire has given place to affection and generous recognition. And _Punch_ was right, for underneath all his superficial buffooneries Jullien was a great educator and reformer. The present writer vividly remembers an anecdote told him by the late Sir Charles Hallé in the 'eighties. After giving a description of Jullien's flamboyant attire--on one occasion he wore a shirt front embroidered with a picture of a nymph playing a flute under a palm tree--and his habit, after performing a solo on his golden piccolo, of flinging himself with a _beau geste_ of exhaustion into a gorgeously upholstered armchair, Sir Charles Hallé went on to recall how Jullien had once said to him: "To succeed in music in England, one must be either a great genius like _you_, or a great charlatan like _me_." Now Jullien had been a failure as a student at the Paris Conservatoire--but so had Verdi at Milan. But there is no warrant whatever for Punch's statement that he was "a _ci-devant_ waiter of a _quarante-sous traiteur_." Of the charlatan side of Jullien, the love of noise and, again to quote Carlyle, of the "explosion of all the upholsteries," _Punch_ gives a graphic if severe picture in the verses which appear in his first number:--