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Even Rubinstein failed to divine the extent of the strain under which he labored. Ivan had begun the barcarolle trembling. The first page successfully accomplished, however, he lost himself a little, and began to feel the old, musical, sixth sense creeping through him, and emerging, gloriously, at his fingertips. Confidence increased. He had turned the page. Ah! Here, truly, was need of it.
Monsieur Homais toward liqueur-time began singing "Le Dieu des bonnes gens." Monsieur Léon sang a barcarolle, and Madame Bovary, senior, who was godmother, a romance of the time of the Empire; finally, M. Bovary, senior, insisted on having the child brought down, and began baptizing it with a glass of champagne that he poured over its head.
There was a murmur of voices, a strumming on the piano, a passing of shadows to and fro; and then from the doorway there came gay and spritely music and at last a song that he knew. Denver listened intently, trying to remember the record which had contained this lilting air. He had it the "Barcarolle," the boat-song from the "Tales of Hoffmann!" And she was singing the words in English.
Monsieur Homais towards liqueur-time began singing "Le Dieu des bonnes gens." Monsieur Leon sang a barcarolle, and Madame Bovary, senior, who was godmother, a romance of the time of the Empire; finally, M. Bovary, senior, insisted on having the child brought down, and began baptizing it with a glass of champagne that he poured over its head.
The two nocturnes, Op. 62, seem to owe their existence rather to the sweet habit of activity than to inspiration. I love the piece, but take it up only rarely." Lenz, who did not know the barcarolle, thereupon went to a music-shop and read it through attentively.
It was the "Barcarolle" from "Les Contes D' Hoffmann," sung by Farrar and Scotti, and he put on instead a tenor solo that had cost him three dollars in Globe. Then a violin solo, "Tambourin Chinois," by some man with a foreign name; and at last the record that he liked the best, the "Cradle Song," by Schumann-Heink.
For these musicians recognized their kind: and, since that long-past evening of the barcarolle, had marked Ivan for a future, according to their lights. As for the events of the past May what was the army, what was a pretty woman, to them?
Notwithstanding such later creations as the fourth "Ballade," Op. 52, the "Barcarolle," Op. 60, and the "Polonaise," Op. 53, it can hardly be said that the composer surpassed in his subsequent works those which he had published in recent years, works among which were the first three ballades, the preludes, and a number of stirring polonaises and charming nocturnes, mazurkas, and other pieces.
But as I drank my coffee and listened to that exquisitely mournful barcarolle from the Tales of Hoffmann, the whole episode took on a different aspect. I perceived, as Schopenhauer had perceived a hundred years before me, that our first judgment upon a man or principle is probably the most correct. I saw that I had been carried away by logic and numbers and had discounted my first impression.
This latter Polonaise is preceded by an andante spianato in G in six-eight time, and unaccompanied. It is a charming, liquid-toned, nocturne-like composition, Chopin in his most suave, his most placid mood: a barcarolle, scarcely a ripple of emotion, disturbs the mirrored calm of this lake.
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