Page:Anecdotes of Great Musicians.djvu/314

302 Chopin died in 1849, after an illness of almost ten years. He was highly honored and greatly beloved for his sweet nature. He was of a retiring disposition and seldom appeared in public. Yet the public appreciated his work even during his lifetime.

Mendelssohn had an ideal career. Surrounded by wealth, position, education, his circumstances were all that could be asked. Honored by musicians and worshiped by the people, his life is the greatest possible contrast to that of Schubert or Mozart. He died in 1847, aged thirty-nine.

Meyerbeer also was a child of favorable circumstances. Though ranking lower than that of Mendelssohn, his music obtained much popular applause, and at his death, in 1864, his funeral was such as might have been given a monarch.

The life of Richard Wagner might be divided into three epochs: the first of poverty; the second, of musical controversy and political strife; the third of rewarded success and applauded pre-eminence in the musical world. At one time he lived in a garret in Paris and did musical hack-work to keep soul and body together; at another he lived in palaces, the pet of a monarch and one of the most successful composers of musical history. The latter part of his career, which ended in 1883 was passed amid lavish and princely surroundings.

Franz Liszt, although not attaining the great pre-eminence as a composer that fell to the lot of those we have mentioned, was one of the most prominent musical figures of our century. His life reads like a dream. It is a continual ascendancy, reaching to the greatest heights of virtuosity and popularity. He died in 1886.

Gounod, when twenty years of age (1838) carried off the Conservatoire prize which gave him some years in Italy, for music study. On return to France, his works did not achieve immediate popularity, and even his now popular opera, "Faust," was sneered at. But becoming