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All the great composers from Handel to Wagner have attempted what is called descriptive music with more or less success, but never have musical genius and skill achieved a result so admirable in its relation to its purpose and by such strictly legitimate means as in this work.
While the elder Bach in his arias often chases the human voice in the most ruthless manner from one extreme to the other, his sons and pupils in their little German songs confine themselves to the most modest compass. Most of the later composers proceeded in the same way up to the time of the Romanticists; then the bonds were snapped, even in this respect.
Weber was fortunate in having gifted poets to write his dramas. As rich as he was in melodic affluence, his creative faculty seems to have had its tap-root in deep personal feelings and enthusiasms. One of the most poetic and picturesque of composers, he needed a powerful exterior suggestion to give his genius wings and fire.
The English composers have thus far been the best interpreters of his songs. His view of literature at that time, when he had made his fame and stood in the ripeness of the harvest, was expressed in the words of Fitz Greene Halleck, which he quoted: "A little well written is immortality."
'The Demon, a strange story of the love of a demon for a Russian princess, has some fine music in it, but the story is almost totally devoid of incident, and the opera as a whole is intolerably wearisome. Of the younger school of Russian operatic composers it is almost impossible to speak with any authority, since their works are rarely performed in Western Europe.
These seasons were marked by the performance of the fine operas of Winter, of some of the masterpieces of Cimarosa, and by the first introduction into England of the music of Mozart, the "Clemenza di Tito," in which Mrs. Billington and Braham appeared, having been the earliest acquaintance of the English public with the greatest of the German operatic composers.
That stupendous miracle of world-making which is dimly painted in the grand figures employed by the writers of Genesis, and the composers of other cosmogonic legends, is here actually going on before our eyes. The telescope shows us in the cloudy face of Jupiter the moving of the spirit upon the face of the great deep.
It is said that she was able to play no less than sixty concertos with the most absolute accuracy, besides knowing any number of smaller piano works. Her power of concentration is also made evident by the fact that she would dictate her own compositions, note by note, without the slightest alteration. Very few, even among the great composers, have possessed this faculty.
Rashevitch stood still, combing his beard with both hands; his shadow, too, stood still on the wall, looking like a pair of scissors. "Take Mother-Russia now," he went on, thrusting his hands in his pockets and standing first on his heels and then on his toes. "Who are her best people? Take our first-rate painters, writers, composers . . . . Who are they? They were all of aristocratic origin.
Now at last their long-belated apogee is here; their decline is at hand. I am told that in this present generation in Europe the Jews are producing a great lot of young painters and sculptors and actors, just as for a century they have been producing famous composers and musicians. That means the end of the Jews!"
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