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His mood was akin to the mood of the rich man, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The music, he knew, must presently fail. The tarantella must come to an end. Well, then he would dance with his whole soul. He would not husband his breath nor save his strength.
Broach this subject of love to a circle after dinner, round a good fire. Everybody laughs! The young men and maidens look conscious. What they feel is as real to them as pleasure in music they hear; in the taste of wine. Yes, and far more while it lasts.
Graun had composed a piece of music in honor of this occasion, and not only the Italian singer, Laura Farinelli, but a scholar of Graun and Quantz, a German singer, Anna Prickerin, would then be heard for the first time. This would be for Anna an eventful and decisive day; she stood on the brink of a new existence an existence made glorious by renown, honor, and distinction.
But two days ago at dawn I heard a child playing the tarantella, and it seemed to me as if my Sicilian had been taken away by the blue, by the blue of Sicily. I shall often come back to the blue. I shall often sit here again. For it was here that I heard the beating of the heart of youth. And there's no other music like that. Is there, Emile?" "No," he said. Had the music been wild?
But if it were, the only principle at work, there would be no music more beautiful than the tone of a tuning-fork. Such sounds, although delightful perhaps to a child, are soon tedious. The principle of purity must make some compromise with another principle, which we may call that of interest.
There was another boat far across the harbour, and the people in it were singing. The music drifted over the water to us, so sad and sweet and beguiling that I could have cried for very pleasure. One of Mrs. Braddon's guests said to me: "That is the soul of music with all its sense and earthliness refined away."
Sclavonic music figures so constantly upon every concert programme in these days that we are probably most of us accustomed to its vagaries of rhythm, or what may be styled irregularity of metre. This is a direct heritage from the folk-song, which Glinka and his successors have borrowed largely. The leading musical spirits of his day were quick to accredit him a kindred genius.
Therefore, although each art has its incommunicable element, its untranslatable order of impressions, its unique mode of reaching the "imaginative reason," yet the arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely realises; and one of the chief functions of aesthetic criticism, dealing with the products of art, new or old, is to estimate the degree in which each of those products approaches, in this sense, to musical law.
Last night the elevating force of a strong passion, such as that which you have confided to me, combined with the power of fine music, so exalted your mind that you became endowed, as it were, with a sixth sense, and suddenly were enabled to see that which had previously been invisible. To this sixth sense music gives, I believe, the key.
Rich as she was in the gifts of nature, her voice was the chief, thrilling, flexible, with a sympathetic quality that in singing pathetic music brought tears, though the hearer understood not a word of the language in which she sang. In the old time he had never wearied listening, and now he besought her to repeat for him some of the dear, familiar songs.
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