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I can still see my wife sit down, with a false air of indifference, under which it was plain that she hid a great timidity, a timidity that was especially due to her comparative lack of musical knowledge. She sat down with that false air in front of the piano, and then began the usual preliminaries, the pizzicati of the violin and the arrangement of the scores.
I felt O'Keefe grip my arm; Yolara threw her white arms out in a welcoming gesture; I heard from the tier a sigh of rapture and in it a poignant, wailing under-tone of agony! Over the waters, down the light stream, to the end of the ivory pier, flew the Shining One. Through its crystal pizzicati drifted inarticulate murmurings deadly sweet, stilling the heart and setting it leaping madly.
Now Lakla and O'Keefe heard it, life ebbing from lips and cheeks. Nearer, nearer a music as of myriads of tiny crystal bells, tinkling, tinkling a storm of pizzicati upon violins of glass! Nearer, nearer not sweetly now, nor luring; no raging, wrathful, sinister beyond words; sweeping on; nearer The Dweller! The Shining One! We leaped to the narrow window; peered out, aghast.
The religious ceremony in the fourth act and the Brahmin recitative accompanied by the pizzicati of the bass may be mentioned as an indication of this. The latter passage is not in favor, however; they play it down without conviction and so deprive it of all its strength and majesty.
The student advances gradually and naturally, but surely, from the beginnings I have indicated, to the trill, the pizzicati, to more rapid scales, to learning the attack, and so on. Of course diction plays a large part in the singer's development.
Closer it drew and now there came to me sweet, insistent tinklings like pizzicati on violins of glass; crystal clear; diamonds melting into sounds! Now the Thing was close to the end of the white path; close up to the barrier of darkness still between the ship and the sparkling head of the moon stream. Now it beat up against that barrier as a bird against the bars of its cage.
Gounod had conducted the Funeral March of a Marionnette; Reyer, his beautiful overture to Siguar; Saint Saens, the Danse Macabre and a Reverie Orientale; Massenet, an unpublished Hungarian march; Guiraud, his Carnaval; Delibes, the Valse Lente from Sylvia and the Pizzicati from Coppelia. Mlle. Krauss had sung the bolero in the Vespri Siciliani; and Mlle.
In the most glimmering, floating of poems, "L'Après-midi d'un faune," there is caught magically by the climbing, chromatic flute, the drowsy pizzicati of the strings, and the languorous sighing of the horns, the atmosphere of the daydream, the sleepy warmth of the sunshot herbage, the divine apparition, the white wonder of arms and breasts and thighs.
Not that they are hard in a modern way: Bach knew nothing of harmonics, pizzicati, scales in octaves and tenths. But his counterpoint, his fugues to play them well when the principal theme is sometimes in the outer voices, sometimes in the inner voices, or moving from one to the other is supremely difficult!
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