Part 16

A thunder of clapping and bravos hailed the song, followed by deep and cautious silence; nothing could be more significant or more thoroughly Venetian than the outbreak and its sudden suppression.

“I need say nothing of the coronation march announcing the enthronement of Osiride, intended by the King as a challenge to Moses; to hear it is enough. Their famous Beethoven has written nothing grander. And this march, full of earthly pomp, contrasts finely with the march of the Israelites. Compare them, and you will see that the music is full of purpose.

“Elcia declares her love in the presence of the two Hebrew leaders, and then renounces it in the fine aria, Porge la destra amata. (Place your beloved hand.) Ah! What anguish! Only look at the house!”

The pit was shouting bravo, when Genovese left the stage.

“Now, free from her deplorable lover, we shall hear Tinti sing, O desolata Elcia--the tremendous cavatina expressive of love disapproved by God.”

“Where art thou, Rossini?” cried Cataneo. “If he could but hear the music created by his genius so magnificently performed,” he went on. “Is not Clarina worthy of him?” he asked Capraja. “To give life to those notes by such gusts of flame, starting from the lungs and feeding in the air on some unknown matter which our ears inhale, and which bears us heavenwards in a rapture of love, she must be divine!”

“She is like the gorgeous Indian plant, which deserting the earth absorbs invisible nourishment from the atmosphere, and sheds from its spiral white blossom such fragrant vapors as fill the brain with dreams,” replied Capraja.

On being recalled, la Tinti appeared alone. She was received with a storm of applause; a thousand kisses were blown to her from finger-tips; she was pelted with roses, and a wreath was made of the flowers snatched from the ladies’ caps, almost all sent out from Paris.

The cavatina was encored.

“How eagerly Capraja, with his passion for embellishments, must have looked forward to this air, which derives all its value from execution,” remarked Massimilla. “Here Rossini has, so to speak, given the reins over to the singer’s fancy. Her cadenzas and her feeling are everything. With a poor voice or inferior execution, it would be nothing--the throat is responsible for the effects of this aria.

“The singer has to express the most intense anguish,--that of a woman who sees her lover dying before her very eyes. La Tinti makes the house ring with her highest notes; and Rossini, to leave pure singing free to do its utmost, has written it in the simplest, clearest style. Then, as a crowning effort, he has composed those heartrending musical cries: Tormenti! Affanni! Smanie! What grief, what anguish, in those runs. And la Tinti, you see, has quite carried the house off its feet.”

The Frenchman, bewildered by this adoring admiration throughout a vast theatre for the source of its delight, here had a glimpse of genuine Italian nature. But neither the Duchess nor the two young men paid any attention to the ovation. Clarina began again.

The Duchess feared that she was seeing her Emilio for the last time. As to the Prince: in the presence of the Duchess, the sovereign divinity who lifted him to the skies, he had forgotten where he was, he no longer heard the voice of the woman who had initiated him into the mysteries of earthly pleasure, for deep dejection made his ears tingle with a chorus of plaintive voices, half-drowned in a rushing noise as of pouring rain.

Vendramin saw himself in an ancient Venetian costume, looking on at the ceremony of the Bucentaur. The Frenchman, who plainly discerned that some strange and painful mystery stood between the Prince and the Duchess, was racking his brain with shrewd conjecture to discover what it could be.

The scene had changed. In front of a fine picture, representing the Desert and the Red Sea, the Egyptians and Hebrews marched and countermarched without any effect on the feelings of the four persons in the Duchess’ box. But when the first chords on the harps preluded the hymn of the delivered Israelites, the Prince and Vendramin rose and stood leaning against the opposite sides of the box, and the Duchess, resting her elbow on the velvet ledge, supported her head on her left hand.

The Frenchman, understanding from this little stir, how important this justly famous chorus was in the opinion of the house, listened with devout attention.

The audience, with one accord, shouted for its repetition.

“I feel as if I were celebrating the liberation of Italy,” thought a Milanese.

“Such music lifts up bowed heads, and revives hope in the most torpid,” said a man from the Romagna.

“In this scene,” said Massimilla, whose emotion was evident, “science is set aside. Inspiration, alone, dictated this masterpiece; it rose from the composer’s soul like a cry of love! As to the accompaniment, it consists of the harps; the orchestra appears only at the last repetition of that heavenly strain. Rossini can never rise higher than in this prayer; he will do as good work, no doubt, but never better: the sublime is always equal to itself; but this hymn is one of the things that will always be sublime. The only match for such a conception might be found in the psalms of the great Marcello, a noble Venetian, who was to music what Giotto was to painting. The majesty of the phrase, unfolding itself with episodes of inexhaustible melody, is comparable with the finest things ever invented by religious writers.

“How simple is the structure! Moses opens the attack in G minor, ending in a cadenza in B flat which allows the chorus to come in, pianissimo at first, in B flat, returning by modulations to G minor. This splendid treatment of the voices, recurring three times, ends in the last strophe with a stretto in G major of absolutely overpowering effect. We feel as though this hymn of a nation released from slavery, as it mounts to heaven, were met by kindred strains falling from the higher spheres. The stars respond with joy to the ecstasy of liberated mortals. The rounded fulness of the rhythm, the deliberate dignity of the graduations leading up to the outbursts of thanksgiving, and its slow return raise heavenly images in the soul. Could you not fancy that you saw heaven open, angels holding sistrums of gold, prostrate seraphs swinging their fragrant censers, and the archangels leaning on the flaming swords with which they have vanquished the heathen?

“The secret of this music and its refreshing effect on the soul is, I believe, that of a very few works of human genius: it carries us for the moment into the infinite; we feel it within us; we see it, in those melodies as boundless as the hymns sung round the throne of God. Rossini’s genius carries us up to prodigious heights, whence we look down on a promised land, and our eyes, charmed by heavenly light, gaze into limitless space. Elcia’s last strain, having almost recovered from her grief, brings a feeling of earth-born passions into this hymn of thanksgiving. This, again, is a touch of genius.

“Ay, sing!” exclaimed the Duchess, as she listened to the last stanza with the same gloomy enthusiasm as the singers threw into it. “Sing! You are free!”

The words were spoken in a voice that startled the physician. To divert Massimilla from her bitter reflections, while the excitement of recalling la Tinti was at its height, he engaged her in one of the arguments in which the French excel.

“Madame,” said he, “in explaining this grand work--which I shall come to hear again to-morrow with a fuller comprehension, thanks to you, of its structure and its effect--you have frequently spoken of the color of the music, and of the ideas it depicts; now I, as an analyst, a materialist, must confess that I have always rebelled against the affectation of certain enthusiasts, who try to make us believe that music paints with tones. Would it not be the same thing if Raphael’s admirers spoke of his singing with colors?”

“In the language of musicians,” replied the Duchess, “painting is arousing certain associations in our souls, or certain images in our brain; and these memories and images have a color of their own; they are sad or cheerful. You are battling for a word, that is all. According to Capraja, each instrument has its task, its mission, and appeals to certain feelings in our souls. Does a pattern in gold on a blue ground produce the same sensations in you as a red pattern on black or green? In these, as in music, there are no figures, no expression of feeling; they are purely artistic, and yet no one looks at them with indifference. Has not the oboe the peculiar tone that we associate with the open country, in common with most wind instruments? The brass suggests martial ideas, and rouses us to vehement or even somewhat furious feelings. The strings, for which the material is derived from the organic world, seem to appeal to the subtlest fibres of our nature; they go to the very depths of the heart. When I spoke of the gloomy hue, and the coldness of the tones in the introduction to Mose, was I not fully as much justified as your critics are when they speak of the ‘color’ in a writer’s language? Do you not acknowledge that there is a nervous style, a pallid style, a lively, and a highly-colored style? Art can paint with words, sounds, colors, lines, form; the means are many; the result is one.

“An Italian architect might give us the same sensation that is produced in us by the introduction to Mose, by constructing a walk through dark, damp avenues of tall, thick trees, and bringing us out suddenly in a valley full of streams, flowers, and mills, and basking in the sunshine. In their greatest moments the arts are but the expression of the grand scenes of nature.

“I am not learned enough to enlarge on the philosophy of music; go and talk to Capraja; you will be amazed at what he can tell you. He will say that every instrument that depends on the touch or breath of man for its expression and length of note, is superior as a vehicle of expression to color, which remains fixed, or speech, which has its limits. The language of music is infinite; it includes everything; it can express all things.