active for 45 years. His taste and ability kept him fully abreast of his age. He wrote several sonatas and a method (1802), and taught many players of high rank, like Kalkbrenner and Hérold. For a time he was much interested in the harmonica as an instrument.
Daniel Steibelt (d. 1823), born in 1765 at Berlin, a precocious pupil of Kirnberger, about 1780 began extended wanderings as a virtuoso and opera-writer which lasted about 30 years. He was several times in Paris, where his opera Roméo et Juliette (1793) was successful, lived for a time at London in much popularity, competed disastrously with Beethoven at Vienna, and in 1811 became director of the opera at St. Petersburg. His ways were unbearably vain and rough, and he is often called a charlatan. Yet he had remarkable technique, though lacking in fine expressiveness, and was not altogether unworthy as a composer, though in later years indulging in cheap show-pieces. His works were numerous, in all the usual forms, including several operas and operettas.
163. Catholic Church Music.—The cultivation of music in its ecclesiastical applications necessarily goes on in every period. So in the later 18th century it proceeded steadily in all the principal countries side by side with the new styles of the period, but usually far in the background of general interest. To it many leading composers contributed, often industriously and ably, but the conditions of popular thought were not favorable to any great enthusiasm over it or even to eminent success in it. The distinctive qualities of sacred writing were widely obscured by the impulse to treat it after the fashion of the opera or the concert-hall. Against this general drift there were some conservatives who set themselves to preserve purity and dignity. But these were not numerous enough to give character to the time.
In the Catholic Church the cleavage became wide between the small circle of enthusiasts who sought either to keep alive a cappella traditions or at least to employ solid contrapuntal methods with instrumental support and with the admixture of pure harmonic material, and the many opera-writers whose idea of church music was simply to import into it all the sensuous and florid ways of the stage. Italy naturally presented this cleavage most conspicuously, but Austria and France illustrated it as well. From this time proceeded tendencies that have persisted ever since, those against which the authorities of the church have recently put forth protest.
