“It is a grievous thing that the populace should have compelled musicians to adapt their expression to words, to factitious emotions; but then they were not otherwise intelligible to the vulgar. Thus the cadenza is the only thing left to the lovers of pure music, the devotees of unfettered art. To-night, as I listened to that last cavatina, I felt as if I were beckoned by a fair creature whose look alone had made me young again. The enchantress placed a crown on my brow, and led me to the ivory door through which we pass to the mysterious land of day-dreams. I owe it to Genovese that I escaped for a few minutes from this old husk — minutes, short no doubt by the clock, but very long by the record of sensation. For a brief spring-time, scented with roses, I was young again — and beloved!”
“But you are mistaken, caro Capraja,” said the Duke. “There is in music an effect yet more magical than that of the cadenza.”
“What is that?” asked Capraja.
“The unison of two voices, or of a voice and a violin, — the instrument which has tones most nearly resembling those of the human voice,” replied Cataneo. “This perfect concord bears us on to the very heart of life, on the tide of elements which can resuscitate rapture and carry man up to the centre of the luminous sphere where his mind can command the whole universe. You still need a thema, Capraja, but the pure element is enough for me. You need that the current should flow through the myriad canals of the machine to fall in dazzling cascades, while I am content with the pure tranquil pool. My eye gazes across a lake without a ripple. I can embrace the infinite.”
“Speak no more, Cataneo,” said Capraja, haughtily. “What! Do you fail to see the fairy, who, in her swift rush through the sparkling atmosphere, collects and binds with the golden thread of harmony, the gems of melody she smilingly sheds on us? Have you ever felt the touch of her wand, as she says to Curiosity, ‘Awake!’ The divinity rises up radiant from the depths of the brain; she flies to her store of wonders and fingers them lightly as an organist touches the keys. Suddenly, up starts Memory, bringing us the roses of the past, divinely preserved and still fresh. The mistress of our youth revives, and strokes the young man’s hair. Our heart, too full, overflows; we see the flowery banks of the torrent of love. Every burning bush we ever knew blazes afresh, and repeats the heavenly words we once heard and understood. The voice rolls on; it embraces in its rapid turns those fugitive horizons, and they shrink away; they vanish, eclipsed by newer and deeper joys — those of an unrevealed future, to which the fairy points as she returns to the blue heaven.”
“And you,” retorted Cataneo, “have you never seen the direct ray of a star opening the vistas above; have you never mounted on that beam which guides you to the sky, to the heart of the first causes which move the worlds?”
To their hearers, the Duke and Capraja were playing a game of which the premises were unknown.
“Genovese’s voice thrills through every fibre,” said Capraja.
“And la Tinti’s fires the blood,” replied the Duke.
“What a paraphrase of happy love is that cavatina!” Capraja went on. “Ah! Rossini was young when he wrote that interpretation of effervescent ecstasy. My heart filled with renewed blood, a thousand cravings tingled in my veins. Never have sounds more angelic delivered me more completely from my earthly bonds! Never did the fairy wave more beautiful arms, smile more invitingly, lift her tunic more cunningly to display an ankle, raising the curtain that hides my other life!”
“To-morrow, my old friend,” replied Cataneo, “you shall ride on the back of a dazzling, white swan, who will show you the loveliest land there is; you shall see the spring-time as children see it. Your heart shall open to the radiance of a new sun; you shall sleep on crimson silk, under the gaze of a Madonna; you shall feel like a happy lover gently kissed by a nymph whose bare feet you still may see, but who is about to vanish. That swan will be the voice of Genovese, if he can unite it to its Leda, the voice of Clarina. To-morrow night we are to hear Mose, the grandest opera produced by Italy’s greatest genius.”
All present left the conversation to the Duke and Capraja, not wishing to be the victims of mystification. Only Vendramin and the French doctor listened to them for a few minutes. The opium-smoker understood these poetic flights; he had the key of the palace where those two sensuous imaginations were wandering. The doctor, too, tried to understand, and he understood, for he was one of the Pleiades of genius belonging to the Paris school of medicine, from which a true physician comes out as much a metaphysician as an accomplished analyst.
“Do you understand them?” said Emilio to Vendramin as they left the cafe at two in the morning.
“Yes, my dear boy,” said Vendramin, taking Emilio home with him. “Those two men are of the legion of unearthly spirits to whom it is given here below to escape from the wrappings of the flesh, who can fly on the shoulders of the queen of witchcraft up to the blue empyrean where the sublime marvels are wrought of the intellectual life; they, by the power of art, can soar whither your immense love carries you, whither opium transports me. Then none can understand them but those who are like them.
“I, who can inspire my soul by such base means, who can pack a hundred years of life into a single night, I can understand those lofty spirits when they talk of that glorious land, deemed a realm of chimeras by some who think themselves wise; but the realm of reality to us whom they think mad. Well, the Duke and Capraja, who were acquainted at Naples, — where Cataneo was born, — are mad about music.”
“But what is that strange system that Capraja was eager to explain to the Duke? Did you understand?”
“Yes,” replied Vendramin. “Capraja’s great friend is a musician from Cremona, lodging in the Capello palace, who has a theory that sounds meet with an element in man, analogous to that which produces ideas. According to him, man has within him keys acted on by sound, and corresponding to his nerve-centres, where ideas and sensations take their rise. Capraja, who regards the arts as an assemblage of means by which he can harmonize, in himself, all external nature with another mysterious nature that he calls the inner life, shares all ideas of this instrument-maker, who at this moment is composing an opera.
“Conceive of a sublime creation, wherein the marvels of the visible universe are reproduced with immeasurable grandeur, lightness, swiftness, and extension; wherein sensation is infinite, and whither certain privileged natures, possessed of divine powers, are able to penetrate, and you will have some notion of the ecstatic joys of which Cataneo and Capraja were speaking; both poets, each for himself alone. Only, in matters of the intellect, as soon as a man can rise above the sphere where plastic art is produced by a process of imitation, and enter into that transcendental sphere of abstractions where everything is understood as an elementary principle, and seen in the omnipotence of results, that man is no longer intelligible to ordinary minds.”
“You have thus explained my love for Massimilla,” said Emilio. “There is in me, my friend, a force which awakes under the fire of her look, at her lightest touch, and wafts me to a world of light where effects are produced of which I dare not speak. It has seemed to me often that the delicate tissue of her skin has stamped flowers on mine as her hand lies on my hand. Her words play on those inner keys in me, of which you spoke. Desire excites my brain, stirring that invisible world, instead of exciting my passive flesh; the air seems red and sparkling, unknown perfumes of indescribable strength relax my sinews, roses wreathe my temples, and I feel as though my blood were escaping through opened arteries, so complete is my inanition.”
“That is the effect on me of smoking opium,” replied Vendramin.
“Then do you wish to die?” cried Emilio, in alarm.
“With Venice!” said Vendramin, waving his hand in the direction of San Marco. “Can you see a single pinnacle or spire that stands straight? Do you not perceive that the sea is claiming its prey?”
The Prince bent his head; he dared no more speak to his friend of love.
To know what a free countr
y means, you must have traveled in a conquered land.
When they reached the Palazzo Vendramin, they saw a gondola moored at the water-gate. The Prince put his arm round Vendramin and clasped him affectionately, saying:
“Good-night to you, my dear fellow!”
“What! a woman? for me, whose only love is Venice?” exclaimed Marco.
At this instant the gondolier, who was leaning against a column, recognizing the man he was to look out for, murmured in Emilio’s ear:
“The Duchess, monseigneur.”
Emilio sprang into the gondola, where he was seized in a pair of soft arms — an embrace of iron — and dragged down on to the cushions, where he felt the heaving bosom of an ardent woman. And then he was no more Emilio, but Clarina’s lover; for his ideas and feelings were so bewildering that he yielded as if stupefied by her first kiss.
“Forgive this trick, my beloved,” said the Sicilian. “I shall die if you do not come with me.”
And the gondola flew over the secret water.
At half-past seven on the following evening, the spectators were again in their places in the theatre, excepting that those in the pit always took their chances of where they might sit. Old Capraja was in Cataneo’s box.
Before the overture the Duke paid a call on the Duchess; he made a point of standing behind her and leaving the front seat to Emilio next the Duchess. He made a few trivial remarks, without sarcasm or bitterness, and with as polite a manner as if he were visiting a stranger.
But in spite of his efforts to seem amiable and natural, the Prince could not control his expression, which was deeply anxious. Bystanders would have ascribed such a change in his usually placid features to jealousy. The Duchess no doubt shared Emilio’s feelings; she looked gloomy and was evidently depressed. The Duke, uncomfortable enough between two sulky people, took advantage of the French doctor’s entrance to slip away.
“Monsieur,” said Cataneo to his physician before dropping the curtain over the entrance to the box, “you will hear to-night a grand musical poem, not easy of comprehension at a first hearing. But in leaving you with the Duchess I know that you can have no more competent interpreter, for she is my pupil.”
The doctor, like the Duke, was struck by the expression stamped on the faces of the lovers, a look of pining despair.
“Then does an Italian opera need a guide to it?” he asked Massimilla, with a smile.
Recalled by this question to her duties as mistress of the box, the Duchess tried to chase away the clouds that darkened her brow, and replied, with eager haste, to open a conversation in which she might vent her irritation: —
“This is not so much an opera, monsieur,” said she, “as an oratorio — a work which is in fact not unlike a most magnificent edifice, and I shall with pleasure be your guide. Believe me, it will not be too much to give all your mind to our great Rossini, for you need to be at once a poet and a musician to appreciate the whole bearing of such a work.
“You belong to a race whose language and genius are too practical for it to enter into music without an effort; but France is too intellectual not to learn to love it and cultivate it, and to succeed in that as in everything else. Also, it must be acknowledged that music, as created by Lulli, Rameau, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Cimarosa, Paisiello, and Rossini, and as it will be carried on by the great geniuses of the future, is a new art, unknown to former generations; they had indeed no such variety of instruments on which the flowers of melody now blossom as on some rich soil.
“So novel an art demands study in the public, study of a kind that may develop the feelings to which music appeals. That sentiment hardly exists as yet among you — a nation given up to philosophical theories, to analysis and discussion, and always torn by civil disturbances. Modern music demands perfect peace; it is the language of loving and sentimental souls, inclined to lofty emotional aspiration.
“That language, a thousand times fuller than the language of words, is to speech and ideas what the thought is to its utterance; it arouses sensations and ideas in their primitive form, in that part of us where sensations and ideas have their birth, but leaves them as they are in each of us. That power over our inmost being is one of the grandest facts in music. All other arts present to the mind a definite creation; those of music are indefinite — infinite. We are compelled to accept the ideas of the poet, the painter’s picture, the sculptor’s statue; but music each one can interpret at the will of his sorrow or his gladness, his hope or his despair. While other arts restrict our mind by fixing it on a predestined object, music frees it to roam over all nature which it alone has the power of expressing. You shall hear how I interpret Rossini’s Mose.”
She leaned across to the Frenchman to speak to him, without being overheard.
“Moses is the liberator of an enslaved race!” said she. “Remember that, and you will see with what religious hope the whole house will listen to the prayer of the rescued Hebrews, with what a thunder of applause it will respond!”
As the leader raised his bow, Emilio flung himself into a back seat. The Duchess pointed out the place he had left, for the physician to take it. But the Frenchman was far more curious to know what had gone wrong between the lovers than to enter the halls of music built up by the man whom all Italy was applauding — for it was the day of Rossini’s triumph in his own country. He was watching the Duchess, and she was talking with a feverish excitement. She reminded him of the Niobe he had admired at Florence: the same dignity in woe, the same physical control; and yet her soul shone though, in the warm flush of her cheeks; and her eyes, where anxiety was disguised under a flash of pride, seemed to scorch the tears away by their fire. Her suppressed grief seemed calmer when she looked at Emilio, who never took his eyes off her; it was easy to see that she was trying to mollify some fierce despair. The state of her feelings gave a certain loftiness to her mind.
Like most women when under the stress of some unusual agitation, she overstepped her ordinary limitations and assumed something of the Pythoness, though still remaining calm and beautiful; for it was the form of her thoughts that was wrung with desperation, not the features of her face. And perhaps she wanted to shine with all her wit to lend some charm to life and detain her lover from death.
When the orchestra had given out the three chords in C major, placed at the opening by the composer to announce that the overture will be sung — for the real overture is the great movement beginning with this stern attack, and ending only when light appears at the command of Moses — the Duchess could not control a little spasmodic start, that showed how entirely the music was in accordance with her concealed distress.
“Those three chords freeze the blood,” said she. “They announce trouble. Listen attentively to this introduction; the terrible lament of a nation stricken by the hand of God. What wailing! The King, the Queen, their first-born son, all the dignitaries of the kingdom are sighing; they are wounded in their pride, in their conquests; checked in their avarice. Dear Rossini! you have done well to throw this bone to gnaw to the Tedeschi, who declared we had no harmony, no science!
“Now you will hear the ominous melody the maestro has engrafted on to this profound harmonic composition, worthy to compare with the most elaborate structures of the Germans, but never fatiguing or tiresome.
“You French, who carried through such a bloodthirsty revolution, who crushed your aristocracy under the paw of the lion mob, on the day when this oratorio is performed in your capital, you will understand this glorious dirge of the victims on whom God is avenging his chosen people. None but an Italian could have written this pregnant and inexhaustible theme — truly Dantesque. Do you think that it is nothing to have such a dream of vengeance, even for a moment? Handel, Sebastian Bach, all you old German masters, nay, even you, great Beethoven, on your knees! Here is the queen of arts, Italy triumphant!”
The Duchess had spoken while the curtain was being raised. And now the physician heard the sublime symphony with which the composer introduce
s the great Biblical drama. It is to express the sufferings of a whole nation. Suffering is uniform in its expression, especially physical suffering. Thus, having instinctively felt, like all men of genius, that here there must be no variety of idea, the musician, having hit on his leading phrase, has worked it out in various keys, grouping the masses and the dramatis personae to take up the theme through modulations and cadences of admirable structure. In such simplicity is power.
“The effect of this strain, depicting the sensations of night and cold in a people accustomed to live in the bright rays of the sun, and sung by the people and their princes, is most impressive. There is something relentless in that slow phrase of music; it is cold and sinister, like an iron bar wielded by some celestial executioner, and dropping in regular rhythm on the limbs of all his victims. As we hear it passing from C minor into G minor, returning to C and again to the dominant G, starting afresh and fortissimo on the tonic B flat, drifting into F major and back to C minor, and in each key in turn more ominously terrible, chill, and dark, we are compelled at last to enter into the impression intended by the composer.”
The Frenchman was, in fact, deeply moved when all this united sorrow exploded in the cry:
“O Nume d’Israel,
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1147