It is sad to think how some of our distinguished musical composers have
had to struggle with poverty, when with a proper attention to business
matters they might easily have been men of independent means. True, to
be what is called a practical man requires a talent very different from
that required by an artist; and an inferior artist may be,--nay, often
is a far more practical man than a superior artist. But a superior
artist is not necessarily devoid of the qualifications which constitute
a clever man of business. To maintain that a highly gifted musical
composer must needs be deficient in common sense as regards money
transactions would be as unwarrantable as to assert that a musician who
understands how to use the art as a milch-cow must necessarily be a bad
musician. His love for the art, and his desire to achieve something
great, not unfrequently animates the true artist to disregard, or even
to sacrifice for its sake, his property, health, and other advantages
which the practical man regards as the real happiness of life.
Whatever the composer produces less as a labour of love than for gain,
by command, according to a plan prescribed to him, and under similar
circumstances, is generally not the best he is capable of accomplishing.
An artist must be allowed to create unfettered the work with which he
feels the greatest inclination to occupy himself. But, if he possesses
no property, he may starve before his work is finished. There are some
painful instances on record of starving musical composers, who, with
their admirable talents, might have saved themselves and others much
trouble, if only they had thought it worth their while to be a little
more practical.
Composers generally receive their worst pay for their best works. Their
best works are generally those which made them celebrated; and when they
have become celebrated, they are often well paid for insignificant or
mediocre productions.
Composers sometimes appear to be much more unpractical than they really
are. This may, for instance, easily be the case with those who strike
out a new path in the art, or who aim at a reform, the disirableness of
which seems questionable to all but themselves. However, occasionally it
happens that an innovation, which is at first unpopular, comes by some
unexpected cause rather suddenly in vogue, or at least finds many
advocates; and in this case the originator of the innovation, who was
regarded as an unpractical man, may attain the reputation of being of a
remarkably practical turn of mind. When Richard Wagner, about thirty
years ago, as a poor and obscure musician in Paris, was arranging
operatic melodies for the cornet-a-piston to save himself from
starvation, his notions about the opera of the future appeared to those
few musicians to whom he communicated them, as a dream which to realize
would be as impossible as it would be undesirable. At the present day he
has many estimable musicians among his ardent admirers; he is honoured
by kings, leads the life of a prince, and probably there are but few
persons who would deny that he deserves to be called a practical man.
Several of our classical composers have shown that they could be shrewd
men of business at periods when the pressure of want, or the desire for
independence, urgently incited them to acquire property. Beethoven on
one or two occasions formed the resolution of making it his special
object to accumulate a sum of money, the possession of which would
enable him to compose without regard to publishers and mercantile
speculations. But the endeavour to carry out this resolution seems to
have been generally of but short duration. In the year 1821, the
music-seller Tobias Haslinger, in Vienna, compiled a tariff in which he
enumerated the different kinds of compositions with the prices he was
willing to pay for them, if Beethoven by signing the tariff would bind
himself to give all his new compositions to Haslinger for publication.
This tariff is so interesting that it shall be inserted here, although
Beethoven, who at first expected from it a golden future, was soon
dissuaded by his friends from entering into any contract of the kind.