This sensuous devotion to music apart from inner meaning, this passion for poetic beauty, the Italians have not yet, even under Wagnerian influences, wholly forgotten. The victorious rule of absolute tone, while it constituted their greatness, carried with it the germ of their decay. Virtuosity is the mark of their art and of their life. We must take them as they are, in the whole light-hearted temperament of their existence. This Bohemian type of the Italian musician of the time may profitably be compared with the similar French type. What a seductive brilliancy there is in the adventurous career of a Bononcini! His operas are received at Vienna with unparalleled enthusiasm. Queen Sophia Charlotte is the clavier-player at the production of his “Polifemo” in Berlin. In London he enters upon a contest with Handel, in which social intrigues are involved with high political aims. Next, he appears in a lawsuit, and is unmasked as a common plagiary[47] of a madrigal of Lotti’s; shortly after he is away to Paris with an alchemist, who swindles him of all his property, and leaves him to make his living by the sweat of his brow to his ninetieth year. Stradella’s fate is well known--how he ran away with the mistress of a Venetian before the first performance of his own opera;[48] was more than once attacked with a dagger, and finally actually murdered.[49] What, compared with this, is the story of Rameau’s youthful love and its punishment, and of his tardy attainment of the haven of fortune, or what the anecdotes of Marchand, with his love affairs, his expulsion from Paris, and his smiling return? The dangerous glitter of this Italian Bohemianism is the fitting framework of that sensuous, lively, irresponsible music.