H. Sutherland Edwards

“ I will not speak to you of the music; you know it. But you can form no idea of the frightful cries, the long bellowings with which the theatre resounds daring the representation. One sees actresses nearly in convulsions, tearing yelps and howls violently out of their lungs, closed hands pressed on their breasts, heads thrown back, faces inflamed, veins swollen, and stomachs panting. I know not which of the two, the eye or the ear, is most agreeably affected by this ugly display; and, what is really inconceivable, it is these shriekings alone that the audience applaud. ”

“ NO composer has written more lively, more graceful comedy music than Rossini. But, except Il Figlio per Azzardo, with its high notes for low voices, its low voices for high notes, its ludicrous accompaniments, and its grotesque instruments of percussion in the shape of metal lamp-shades tapped with violin bows, Rossini never wrote music which, comic or serious, was not charming; and Il Figlio per Azzardo was nothing but a practical joke played for the benefit of an unreasonable and impolite manager. It may be interesting to consider in what the musical comic really consists. ”

“ If the gaze is now turned sharply towards Paris, it encounters, beyond Alfort and its schools, Charenton, celebrated for that mansion of which Sébastien Leblanc conceived the first idea in 1741, and, at the confluence of the Seine and the Marne, the château of Conflans, so long the residence of the Archbishop of Paris. In that immense space which lies beneath the eye there is scarcely a stone or a tree which does not recall some memory. All those roads, all those footpaths, have been trodden by men who were destined to leave a deep mark on the history of France. ”

“ Look along the Rue de la Paix; at the end you will see La Place Vendôme, with its column in memory of the Grand Army standing out in its dark bronze against the fresh green of the Tuileries Gardens. Here all that is most Parisian in Paris may be seen: the finest shops, the most brilliant equipages, with all the glitter of fashionable life. The expensive jeweller and the exorbitant milliner here have their establishments side by side with hotels, restaurants, cafés, and clubs. ”

“ The charming air of Mathilde, “Sombre forêt,” would be equally charming for Lucia, or any other sentimental light soprano, waiting for her lover in a wood, or elsewhere; the passionate duet for Mathilde and Arnold might be sung by any pair of lovers; the enchanting ballet music would make the fortune of any opera. But the pieces first named are of those which belong to “Guillaume Tell,” and “Guillaume Tell” alone, and which would, by comparison, fall flat if dissociated from the words, and above all, the dramatic situations to which the composer has attached them. ”

“ Paris is the only place where it can support any kind of dignity, though it is even there sorely badgered by the wits of the capital, who, expecting from it neither favour nor friendship, point all their epigrammatical batteries against its members. There is, in fact, but too much room for pleasantry and keen sarcasm. Is it not extremely ridiculous that forty men, two-thirds of whom owe their admission to intrigue or fawning, should be by patent created arbiters of taste in literature, and enjoy the exclusive privilege of judging for the rest of their countrymen? ”

“ If one of the actors makes a mistake, he seems grieved and shocked; if on the other hand the actor plays well, he gives him, by gestures and by word of mouth, the liveliest marks of approbation. He enters into the spirit of both situations with all the signs of genuine emotion, and even sheds tears with the effusiveness of a young girl assisting for the first time at the performance of a tragedy. ”

“ Up to this time the Opera had been constituted as it alone could be; for what better use, at the theatre, could be made of a kind of music which could paint nothing than by employing it in the representation of things which could not exist? But as soon as music learnt to paint and to speak the charms of sentiment, it brought into contempt those of the Wand; the theatre was purged of its garden of mythology, interest was substituted for astonishment; the machines of poets and of carpenters were destroyed; and the lyric drama assumed a more noble and less gigantic character. ”

“ The crescendo, a means not invented by Rossini, but employed by him more persistently and with more success, than by any other composer, produced an effect which was repeated again and again in subsequent works, and never once too often. In fact, the whole of the animated and rather joyous prelude to what, if not a very serious opera, is at least an opera on a very serious subject, was received with expressions of delight.
No operatic overture was at one time more popular than that of “Tancredi.” Perhaps it is our fault as much as that of the music, if it appears a little old-fashioned now. ”

“ Finally La Fayette ascended the staircase, radiant, but full of emotion, and placing the point of his sword on the Altar of the Country, pronounced in a loud firm voice this sacred oath: “We swear to be for ever faithful to the nation, to the law, and to the king; to maintain with all our power the Constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by the king; to protect the persons and property of all, and to remain united to all Frenchmen by the indissoluble bonds of fraternity.” ”

“ This ardour of propagandism has begun, however, to abate, and the English in general are by no means the last to take advantage of the Paris Sunday. Anyone who has seen the Sabbath of London must feel the difference. Every Frenchman who has just missed dying, not only of ennui, but of hunger and thirst, during the hours of service in England—hearing his footsteps resound in the desolate streets—will understand the solace experienced by an Englishman on finding that the coast is clear for him at Paris and Versailles. ”

“ Of this number a good many are forgotten, many too were never known out of Italy at all. The best, and not merely the best, but the most typical, have remained. Admirable works, which might have made the reputation of another composer, have been overshadowed by masterpieces from the same hand. Repetitions too have perished by the side of originals, and the time will no doubt come when people will judge of Rossini almost entirely by the “Barber of Seville”—the best proportioned, the most characteristic, and certainly the most fortunate in regard to a libretto, of all his works. ”

“ It was to be expected that a musician of equal genius, coming after Paisiello and his compeers, young and vigorous, when they were old and exhausted, would in time completely eclipse them, even in respect to those works which they had written in their best days; but the remarkable thing is, that Rossini so re-modelled Italian opera, and gave to the world so many admirable examples of his own new style, that to opera-goers of the last thirty years he may be said to be the most ancient of those Italian composers who are not absolutely forgotten. ”

“ The church soon became a temple of Renown—a place where the People gather to pronounce their judgment on the dead. This is why that colonnade bears its splendours so high aloft; why the cupola lifts itself up as though it were a crown on the head of Paris. Here occurs the apotheosis, not of a shepherdess—Sainte-Geneviève, that is to say—but of France, of the country, in the form of illustrious men who have gone to breathe the air of another shore. What had been blamed as superfluous luxury for the prophetess of Nanterre was assuredly necessary for the glorification of glorious men. ”

“ The composer always advances, visibly guided by this one aspiration—to be always truthful, and keep up the dramatic action without ceasing, instead of checking or fettering it in its rapid progress. Diverse and strongly marked as are the characters of the different personages, there is, nevertheless, something which surrounds them all; it is that fabulous life, full of phantoms, and those soft whisperings of terror, which belong so peculiarly to the fantastic. ”

“ We hear a great deal of the decay of singing as an art; but that art was thought so much of when Rossini began to write that more important things—dramatic propriety and music itself—were sacrificed to it. What would Italian singers of the year 1813 have thought of “William Tell?” and how would their highly-decorative style have suited that simple, energetic, thoroughly dramatic music? The development of Rossini’s dramatic faculty was, no doubt, delayed by his having often to write for singers so accomplished, that they could think of nothing but the exhibition of their own voice. ”

“ Whilst the public complain loudly of such encroachments on the liberty of the playhouses, hear the apology set up by our belles: ‘What! will you, then, to oblige the canaille, compel me to hear out a whole play, when I am rich enough to see only the last scene? This is a downright tyranny! I protest! There is no police in France nowadays. Since I cannot have the comedians come to my own house, I will have the liberty to come in my plain deshabille, enjoy my arm-chair, receive the homage of my humble suitors, and leave the place before I am tired. ”

“ Towards evening might be heard through Paris piteous complaints, piteous cries, piteous lamentations, and little children calling out, ‘I am dying of hunger,’ while on the dunghills of the city, in the year 1420, might be found, here ten, here twenty or thirty children, boys and girls, who were starving and perishing with cold, so that no heart could remain unmoved. But it was impossible to help them, for there was no bread, nor corn, nor wood, nor coal.”
“This epoch,” says M. Maxime Ducamp, “was the very saddest of all our history; never was a nation so near its end. ”

“ Almost every distinguished composer of the last fifty years has met with the same fate, not always at the hands of the ignorant public, for it is this ignorant public with its naïve, uncritical admiration, which has sometimes been the first to do justice to the critic-reviled poets and composers, but at those of musicians and of educated amateurs. Ignorance, prejudice, malice, are the causes too often assigned for the non-appreciation of the artist of to-day by the art-lover, partly of to-day, but above all of yesterday. ”

“ The present century has produced two generations of Paris Bohemians who have left their mark upon the history of arts and letters. The first had its cradle in a now demolished house of the Rue du Doyenné. Nothing could have been more sombre or depressing than this street, which was one of the ugliest in Paris. Yet the indomitable spirits who made it their haunt lived within sight of all that the most artistic and delicate imagination could desire. There were the remains of the Hôtel Rambouillet, in which French literature had, in its infancy, been nursed ”

“ Incessantly vary your studies, cultivate your mind in every direction; do not narrow yourself to one party, one school, or one idea; let it see the dawn break on every horizon; maintain your independence and your dignity; lend yourself for a time, if necessary, but do not give yourself away. Remain judicious and clear-sighted even in your weaker moments; and even if you do not say the whole truth, never utter what is false. ”

“ Music is evidently not didactic, and painting can only teach, in the ordinary sense of the word, what every one already knows; though, of course, a painter may depict certain aspects of nature and of the human face, previously unobserved and unimagined, just as the composer, in giving a musical expression to certain sentiments and passions, can rouse in us emotions previously dormant, or never experienced before with so much intensity. But the fine arts cannot communicate abstract truths—from which it chiefly follows that no right-minded artist ever uses them with such an aim ”

“ Heaven take pity on his soul! Many café waiters die without having fulfilled their dream of having an establishment of their own. The life of fatigue which they lead kills them, as a rule, towards their thirtieth year. It is thus that we have seen the greatest of them all vanish from our midst—that waiter of the Café de la Rotonde, whose ‘baoum!’ uttered in a far-resounding voice, has found so many imitators. We see him still, coffee-pot in hand, saying in a voice profound, ‘Pas de Crême?’ Alas, alas, he is dead. ”

“ But in this country the musical organ is extremely hard; voices have no softness, their inflections are sharp and strong, and their tones all reluctant and forced; and there is no cadence, no melodious accent in the airs of the people; their military instruments, their regimental fifes, their horns, and hautbois, their street singers, and guinguette violins, are all so false as to shock the least delicate ear. Talents are not given indiscriminately to all men, and the French seem to me of all people to have the least aptitude for music. ”