Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg: His Short Biography and Aesthetic Representation of His Works

Zumsteeg possessed fire, deep feeling, and pointed humor: all his best pieces bear this color. In many of his choruses and finales, there reigns a glow of enthusiasm that sweeps the listener away as if in a storm. With this, he combined a heartiness and an endurance of sentiment that rewarded many a feeling soul of the beautiful with tears. Few composers have delved so deeply into the spirit and sense of their poets, and have rendered them more purely: one hears the poet without needing his words, and the feelings and images shimmer through the tones, as it were, like the blossoms of the spring bank in the mirror-spring.

This height and maturity in his art had been reached by Zumsteeg without ever having stepped outside his fatherland—and the encouragements he found here were truly better suited to paralyze his flight than to inflame him toward bold progress. But what the stepmotherly homeland neglected, the grateful, impartial foreign lands replaced for him.

He was of a firm and strong build, and despite all exertion, always of a healthy and blooming appearance. Thus, hundreds saw him

The page ends mid-sentence; the next page describes him in the orchestra.