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Updated: June 26, 2025
A thousand times, amongst the phantoms of sleep, has he shown thee to me, standing before the golden dawn, and ready to enter its gates with the dreadful word going before thee with the armies of the grave behind thee; shown thee to me, sinking, rising, fluttering, fainting, but then suddenly reconciled, adoring: a thousand times has he followed thee in the worlds of sleep through storms; through desert seas; through the darkness of quicksands; through fugues and the persecution of fugues; through dreams, and the dreadful resurrections that are in dreams only that at the last, with one motion of his victorious arm, he might record and emblazon the endless resurrections of his love!
As Hewet had no knowledge of music, Rachel took his stick and drew figures in the thin white dust to explain how Bach wrote his fugues. "My musical gift was ruined," he explained, as they walked on after one of these demonstrations, "by the village organist at home, who had invented a system of notation which he tried to teach me, with the result that I never got to the tune-playing at all.
By the same token, the playing of the F minor Sonata, the Appassionata of Beethoven, in the key of F sharp minor, might produce good results. This was another crotchet of Wagner's friend and probably was born of the story that Beethoven transposed the Bach fugues in all keys. The same is said of Saint- Saens.
Every day, from two till three o'clock, he was at Master Gyles's private singing-room at the old cathedral school, learning to read music at first sight, and to sing offhand the second, third, and fourth parts of queer intermingled fugues or wonderfully constructed canons.
What was the charm that enchanted the old marbles, charm untold and inconceivable to one who had never seen even the slightest approach to a work of art? Then those glaciers of Switzerland, that grand, unapproachable mixture of beauty and sublimity in her mountains! what would it be to one who could see it? Then what were all those harmonies of which she read, masses, fugues, symphonies?
Rotten Row, in the Bois, at Brighton or at Baden-Baden, the sinuous fugues of his pencil reveal to succeeding generations how the great world once enjoyed itself or bored itself to death. No wonder Thackeray admired Guys. They were kindred spirits; both recognised and portrayed the snob mundane. As he grew older Guys became an apparition in the life of Paris.
Before, however, I had come to this conclusion, I had thought that Ernest might be able to help me to the right thing, and had written to him upon the subject. The following is the answer I received "Dear Godpapa, I send you the best bit I can think of; it is the subject of the last of Handel's six grand fugues and goes thus:
Her changing moods, as it were, ran riot. She was like a woman excited and happy over her lover's return. But at length, after the swaying fugues of delirium, after the marvellous rendering of a vision of the past, a revulsion swept over the soul that thus found utterance for itself. With a swift transition from the major to the minor, the organist told her hearer of her present lot.
One was Victor Massé, a composer of simple light operas and a man with no understanding of a symphony, who was very frequently ill and had to entrust his teaching to one of his pupils; another was Henri Reber, an oldish musician with narrow and dogmatic ideas; and the third was François Bazin, who was not capable of distinguishing in his pupil's fugues a false answer from a true one, and whose highest title to glory is derived from a composition called Le Voyage en Chine.
One close thundery morning about a week later, Michael was sitting at his piano in his shirtsleeves, busy practising. He was aware that at the other end of the room the telephone was calling for him, but it seemed to be of far greater importance at the minute to finish the last page of one of the Bach fugues, than to attend to what anybody else might have to say to him.
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