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Don Perosi sat down to the piano and played me the Te Deum of The Nativity, which he had written the day before. He played very sweetly, with youthful gaiety, and sang the choral parts in an undertone. Every now and then he would look at me, not for praise, but to see if we were sharing the same thoughts.
But this does not pass without admitting a dispute: for many are of opinion that we cannot quit this garrison of the world without the express command of Him who has placed us in it; and that it appertains to God who has placed us here, not for ourselves only but for His Glory and the service of others, to dismiss us when it shall best please Him, and not for us to depart without His licence: that we are not born for ourselves only, but for our country also, the laws of which require an account from us upon the score of their own interest, and have an action of manslaughter good against us; and if these fail to take cognisance of the fact, we are punished in the other world as deserters of our duty: "Proxima deinde tenent maesti loca, qui sibi letum Insontes peperere manu, lucemque perosi Proiecere animas."
Her fish-nets became works of art. Work of a high order is always based on high ideals and on great thoughts. It implies a vast amount of toil. The Capellmeister of the Vatican choir to-day is that wonderful young genius, Perosi, who is stirring all Europe by the beauty of his musical work, and by the spirituality and fervor of his musical imagination.
On Hospital Sundays the total sums collected from his flock were by far the largest that came from the pockets of any congregation in London. The music in St. Joseph's was allowed by connoisseurs, who knew their Elgar as well as their Goss, their Perosi as well as their Bach, and their Wesley, to be remarkable.
The handsomely abused Perosi, for instance, writes many a page, which, if held at arm's length, you would swear was one of Palestrina's. Some of Mr. Whiting's music has a decidedly Brahmsic picture effect. This feeling is emphasized when one remembers the enthusiasm shown for Brahms in Whiting's concerts, where the works of the Ursus Minor of Vienna hold the place of honor.
When he is conducting the orchestra his striking silhouette, his slow and awkward gestures in expressive passages, and his naïve movements of passion at dramatic moments, bring to mind one of Fra Angelico's monks. For the last eighteen months Don Perosi has been working at a cycle of twelve oratorios descriptive of the life of Christ.
Each of the oratorios is really a descriptive mass, which from beginning to end traces out one dominating thought. Don Perosi said to me: "The mistake of artists to-day is that they attach themselves too much to details and neglect the whole. They begin by carving ornaments, and forget that the most important thing is the unity of their work, its plan and general outline.
As I was reading the oratorios of this young priest of Piedmont, I thought I heard, far away, the song of the children of old Greece: "The swallow has come, has come, bringing the gay seasons and glad years. Ear êdê." I welcome the coming of Don Lorenzo Perosi with great hope. The abbé Perosi, the precentor of St.
So Don Perosi, in his compositions, welds together the Gregorian chant, the musical style of the contrapuntists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Palestrina, Roland, Gabrieli, Carissimi, Schütz, Bach, Händel, Gounod, Wagner I was going to say César Franck, but Don Perosi told me that he hardly knew this composer at all, though his style bears some resemblance to Franck's.
However Utopian that hope may sound now, let us think of it as a symptom of new directions of thought, and let us hope that Don Perosi may be one of those who will bring into music that divine peace, that peace which Beethoven craved for in despair at the end of his Missa Solemnis, that joy that he sang about but never knew.
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