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Our musical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the glees, madrigals, rounds, and catches, requiring considerable skill, and familiarly performed formerly in the country houses and home circles of our gentry, and the noble church music of our cathedral choirs, bear witness to a high musical inspiration, and thorough musical training in their composers and executants.
Naturally, from a canine chorus of such executants it might reasonably be inferred that the establishment was one of the utmost respectability. To that, however, our damp, cold hero gave not a thought, for all his mind was fixed upon bed. Indeed, the britchka had hardly come to a standstill before he leapt out upon the doorstep, missed his footing, and came within an ace of falling.
The glory of a surgeon is like that of an actor: they live only so long as they are alive, and their talent leaves no trace when they are gone. Actors and surgeons, like great singers too, like the executants who by their performance increase the power of music tenfold, are all the heroes of a moment. Desplein is a case in proof of this resemblance in the destinies of such transient genius.
When the service commenced the drapery was partially withdrawn and exposed the male executants to view, concealing the women, whose presence, being uncanonical, was being felt, not seen.
In the quick time of that music, in the varied, piercing clamour of the strings, in the movements of the bare arms, in the low dresses, the coarse faces, the stony eyes of the executants, there was a suggestion of brutality something cruel, sensual and repulsive. "This is awful!" Heyst murmured to himself. But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise.
It is obviously the delicate duty of the executants to indicate the character of the new movement with an appropriate modification of tempo i.e., to take the notes which immediately succeed the Adagio for a link, and so unobtrusively to connect them with the following that a change in the movement is hardly perceptible, and moreover so to manage the ritardando, that the crescendo, which comes after it, will introduce the master's quick tempo, in such wise that the molto vivace now appears as the rhythmical consequence of the increase of tone during the crescendo.
I know a little something about music, having studied the art with considerable diligence for a number of years. Impossible to enumerate all the composers and executants on various instruments, the conductors and opera-singers and ballet-girls with whom I was on terms of familiarity during that incarnation.
Apropos of the great sonata above mentioned, with which the Clementi furore began in London, it is said that John Christian Bach, son of Sebastian, one of the greatest executants of the time, confessed his inability to do it justice, and Schrôter, one of those sharing the honor of the invention of the piano-forte, and a leading musician of his age, said, "Only the devil and Clementi could play it."
After each demonstration the young women took a turn and practised with such assiduity that an hour slipped pleasantly away. The bandages were applied, the spirals neatly stitched, and the stitches promptly snipped for the next pupil to begin. An occasional prick with the needle evoked no more than a playful remonstrance from the boy and a ripple of laughter from the fair executants.
Embroidery has become a dependence and a business for thousands of women, and it is this which secures its permanence. We may trust skillful executants who live by its practice to keep ahead of the changing fancies of society and invent for it new wants and new fashions. And this, because their chance of living depends upon it, and it promises to be a permanent and growing art.
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