Page:Anecdotes of Great Musicians.djvu/216

204  and two styles so totally different; for, most assuredly, the persons who could fall into such a mistake are wholly unfit to appreciate the real beauties in his works."  

Jacob Stainer, of Absam, in the Tyrol, lives in the records of violin construction as the greatest of German makers, if not the only one worthy of more than passing mention. He worked in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and his violins came to be highly valued even in his own day. There is a record that at Dresden he sold a violin to a certain count in the suite of King Charles VI for a goodly sum of gold; and besides this the count undertook to supply him as long as he lived with a hundred florins every month, a good dinner each day, a new suit of clothes every year, as well as two casks of beer, his lodging, fire, and lights. As Stainer lived some sixteen years after this, the violin must have cost the count a goodly sum, all told.  

Bach is one of the most famous names in the history of musical art. There are records of 247 Bachs, who, in one way or another, distinguished themselves both by composition for, and performance on, the organ. John Sebastian Bach's last and in some respects greatest work, "The Art of Fugue," was left unfinished by the failure of his eyes. His friends urged him in his old age to write a treatise on fugue and fugue making. He started to do so, but, after writing a few pages, threw away the work in disgust, exclaiming, "I cannot teach by precept, only by example," and then recommenced the work on a different plan. He took one simple subject, and on it wrote sixteen fugues and four canons, in