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Updated: May 8, 2025
I was, moreover, confused by the fact that a second Dresden prima donna, Mme. Gentiluomo Spatzer, who had once enraptured Marschner with Donizetti's dithyrambics, kept hovering perpetually before my mind as a possible substitute for Johanna. At last, in a rage, I sprang up from the piano, and swore that I would write nothing more for these silly fastidious schoolgirls.
As though in a frenzy of insanity, the silhouettes hopped about out there, sprang into the air, fell, and rolled over each other, as though the war dance had only just reached the climax of its paroxysm. Then Captain Marschner observed the man next to him let his rifle sink for a moment and with hasty, shaking hands insert the bayonet into the smoking barrel.
"They're throwing heavy mines at us now, Captain," the old corporal announced, and looked at Marschner in despair. But Marschner went by unmoved. All that no longer mattered to him. The lieutenant would take over the command. That was what he was going to tell him. He could hardly await the moment to relieve himself of the responsibility.
When Wagner wrote his essay on "The Music of the Future" for the Parisians he remembered his obligations to the Dresden idol of his boyhood by calling attention to "the still very noticeable connection" of his early work, "Tannhäuser," with "the operas of my predecessors, among whom I name especially Weber," He might have mentioned others, Gluck, for instance, who curbed the vanity of the singers, and taught them that they were not "the whole show;" Marschner, whose grewsome "Hans Heiling" Wagner had in mind when he wrote his "Flying Dutchman;" Auber, whose "Masaniello," with its dumb heroine, taught Wagner the importance and expressiveness of pantomimic music, of which there are such eloquent examples in all his operas.
Bitterly, Marschner clenched his fist at this insatiableness. At that moment the pale sergeant stepped in front of the place where the dead had been piled and frightened Marschner out of his thoughts. "Captain, I beg to announce that beside the fourteen dead there are three seriously wounded men who can't walk Italians. I have no bearers left for them."
And then then there would be no reason any more for longer delay, no further possibility of putting off the fatal decision. Captain Marschner took a deep breath and looked up at the sky with wide- open eyes that had a peculiarly intent look in them.
The art of Mozart had been forgotten; Weber scored cumbrously as was inevitable; Spontini and Marschner scored cumbrously also, partly because they could not help it, partly because they wanted to fill the theatre with sound. Wagner naturally followed them.
Captain Marschner walked back to the woods deliberately, doubly glad of the lesson he had just given Weixler because it also meant a brief respite for his old boys. Perhaps a shell would hurtle down into the earth before their noses, and so these few minutes would save the lives of twenty men. Perhaps? It might turn out just the other way, too.
But he seemed not to be noticing the shrapnels in the least. He was stretching his neck to inspect the left wing. "There!" he cried indignantly. "D'you see, Captain? The miserable cur is down on his face again. I'll go for him!" Before Marschner could hold him back, he had dashed off. But half-way he stopped, stood still, and then turned back in annoyance.
Of the operas of Marschner much the same must be said; in them we find the tricks of the Romantics without the best Romantics' sense of beauty, all the horrors of Weber without Weber's passion.
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