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What kind of music is this, without melody, in the ordinary sense; without themes, yet every acorn of a phrase contrapuntally developed by an adept; without a harmony that does not smite the ears, lacerate, figuratively speaking, the ear-drums; keys forced into hateful marriage that are miles asunder, or else too closely related for aural matrimony; no form, that is, in the scholastic formal sense, and rhythms that are so persistently varied as to become monotonous what kind of music, I repeat, is this that can paint a "crystal sigh," the blackness of prehistoric night, the abysm of a morbid soul, the man in the moon, the faint sweet odours of an impossible fairy-land, and the strut of the dandy from Bergamo?
Then the melody of Beckmesser's grotesque is brought in and treated contrapuntally, with what theorists call free imitation in the accompaniment. Fugue, real or tonal, there is none. This midsummer night's orgy over, we next have midsummer day. The curtain rises; the early morning sun shines through the windows of Sachs' house; Sachs sits there, a book on his knees, but dreaming, not reading.
His strongest points are a clever knack of treating the voices contrapuntally in concerted pieces, and a humorous trick of orchestration, two features with which English audiences have become pleasantly familiar in Sir Arthur Sullivan's operettas, which works indeed owe not a little to the influence of Lortzing and Kreutzer.
It was not a subject to be worked out contrapuntally; it was not sufficiently striking harmonically to tempt Haydn, as themes of an allied sort had constantly tempted Emanuel Bach, to make music and gain effects by repeating it at intervals above or below.
There is nothing perfunctory, and the work is full of art and appeal. Gilchrist is one of our most polished composers contrapuntally, but has been here in a very lyric mood.
Permit me to introduce Mr. Adrian Willes, by vocation a composer and singer of songs, and "contrapuntally," as he would explain Anthony Craford's housemate, monitor, land-agent, and man of business. Anthony sighed. "I 'll tell you what I admire," he answered drily. "I admire the transports of delight with which you hail my unexpected home-coming.
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