But again there stalks forth, to confound all our theories, the superb figure of Gluck, who fell in love but once, and then for all time, with Maria Anna Pergin, who loved him, and whose mother approved of him, but whose purse-proud father despised him for a musician. The lovers accepted the rebuff as a temporary sorrow only, and Providence, like a playright, removed the stern parent in the next act. Gluck flew back from Italy to Vienna to his betrothed, "with whom to his death he dwelt in happiest wedlock." She went with him on his triumphal tours, and spent her wealth in charities. They had no children of their own, but adopted a niece. The devoted wife used to play his accompaniment as he sang his own music, and when he died he took especial pains that she should be his sole and exclusive heir, even leaving it to her pleasure whether or not his brothers and sisters should have anything at all. Plainly we should be thinking that music has a purifying, ennobling, and substantial effect upon society, if only Gluck's friend and partisan, the successful composer and immortal writer, Jean Jacques Rousseau, would not intrude upon the picture with his faun-like paganisms and magnificently shameless "Confessions." Jostling elbows with him comes Gluck's chiefest rival, Piccinni, one of the most beautiful characters in history, a man who could wage a mortal combat in art, without bitterness toward his bitter rivals. He could, when Gluck died, strive to organise a memorial festival in his honour, and when his other rival, Sacchini, was taken from the arena by death, he could deliver the funeral eulogy. This Sacchini, by the bye, was a reckless voluptuary, who seems never to have married. Piccinni was the very beau ideal of a father and a husband. He and his wife, who was a singer of exquisite skill and a teacher of ability, gave little home concerts, which were events. They and their many children went through more vicissitudes than have fallen to the lot of many musicians; but always they loved one another and their art, and there always remains that picture which the Prince of Brunswick stumbled upon, when he knocked at Piccinni's door, and found him rocking the cradle of one of his children, while another tugged at his coat in boisterous fun, and the mother beamed her enjoyment. Hardly less ideal, though far more picturesque and dramatic, was the romance of Mozart.