ACROSTIC — I think this is a very difficult solve! There are challenges in the clues, including two terms that are totally new to me, and an interesting sentence construction that threw me off — I mentally inserted some punctuation incorrectly and got led a bit astray. The passage is from an 1826 work called “Reminiscences” by Michael Kelly, a renowned opera tenor in England and Italy who wrote music and songs and befriended many artists of the classical era.
The excerpt concerns a wildly famous composer’s physical traits and extra-musical skills, namely, a popular parlor game. Because I did so poorly at the clues, I spent a lot of time deducing the passage and made some errors, starting with “— hair, hair —” instead of…