"Yes, yes!" he exclaimed, "that amazes them,
and makes them put their heads together, because they have not seen it
in any of their text-books."
Fortunately for their own peace of mind, the majority of the minor
composers never get beyond a mere rearrangement of remembered melodies
and modulations. Their minds are mere galleries of echoes. They write
for money or temporary notoriety, and not because their brains teem
with ideas that clamor for utterance. The pianist Hummel was one of
this class of composers. But whatever his short-comings, he had at
least, as Wagner admits, the virtue of frankness. For when he was
asked one day what thoughts or images he had in his mind when he
composed a certain concerto, he replied that he had been thinking of
the eighty ducats which his publisher had promised him!
Yet even the greatest composers cannot always command new thoughts at
will, and it is therefore of interest to note what devices some of
them resorted to rouse their dormant faculties. Weber's only pupil,
Sir Julius Benedict, relates that Weber spent many mornings in
"learning by heart the words of 'Euryanthe,' which he studied until he
made them a portion of himself, his own creation, as it were.
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