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Here and there, a composer such as Bizet and M. Saint-Saëns, or M. d'Indy and his disciples will build up symphonies and rhapsodies and very difficult pieces for the piano on the popular airs of Auvergne, Provence, or the Cevennes; but that is only a whim of theirs, a little ingenious pastime for clever artists, such as the Flemish masters of the fifteenth century indulged in when they decorated popular airs with polyphonic elaborations.
People were more sober and inward and realistic than they had been. There was an unusual activity in all the arts. Painting, fiction, poetry, sculpture had or were having new births. A single creative spark was sure to set the very recalcitrant musicians ablaze. Vast talents such as those of Bizet and Chabrier were making themselves felt.
It is, what Lorenzo's masterpiece necessarily must be, in the highest degree a modern performance; as modern as a picture by Bastien Lepage; as an opera, founded upon local music, by Bizet.
Oftentimes there were real riots. But we heard there for the first time the overture of Manfred, Mendelssohn's Symphony in A minor, and the overture to Tannhauser. The modern French school found the doors in the Rue Bergère closed to them, but they were welcomed with open arms at the Chaussée d'Antin. Among them were Reber, Gounod, and Gouvy, and even beginners like Georges Bizet and myself.
There have been the home-keeping breeders of children, and contentment, such as Willaert, Orlando di Lasso, Palestrina, the Bachs, Gluck, Piccinni, Weber, Mendelssohn, and Schumann; and Bizet, whose wife said after his death, that there was not a moment of their six years' honeymoon she could regret or would not re-live.
He would take all the skin off my knuckles if I played a Bach gigue the least bit like that Arlésienne Minuet. He doesn't approve of Bizet very much, anyhow. He's a tremendous classicist." "Isn't it," inquired Morrison, phrasing his question carefully, "isn't it, with no disrespect to La Chance intended, isn't it rather unusually good fortune for a smallish Western city to own a real musician?"
It is a tuneful and effective work, but cannot be called an advance on 'Les Pêcheurs de Perles, In 'Djamileh' , we find the real Bizet for the first time. The story tells of the salvation of a world-wearied youth, who is won back to life by the love and devotion of his slave.
Burlingame's diamond stomacher was not then based on envy of its possession, but merely upon the twofold nuisance which it created at the opera-house, as the lady who wore it sat and listened to the strains of Wagner, Bizet, or Gounod, mixed in with the small-talk of Reggie Stockson, Tommie de Coupon, and other lights of the social firmament.
My friends and companions in arms were Bizet, Guiraud and Delibes; Massenet was a rival. His high opinion of me, therefore, was the more valuable when he did me the honor of recommending his pupils to study my works.
His talks with Francoise had brought him back to his idea, sketched out long ago with Corinne, of a form of musical drama, somewhere between recitative opera and the spoken drama, the art of the free word united with free music, an art of which hardly any artist of to-day has a glimmering, an art also which the routine critics, imbued with the Wagnerian tradition, deny, as they deny every really new work: for it is not a matter of following in the footsteps of Beethoven, Weber, Schumann, Bizet, although they used the melodramatic form with genius: it is not a matter of yoking any sort of speaking voice to any sort of music, and producing, at all costs, with absurd tremolos, coarse effects upon coarse audiences: it is a matter of creating a new form, in which musical voices will be wedded to instruments attuned to those voices, discreetly mingling with their harmonious periods the echo of dreams and the plaintive murmur of music.
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