“Ha! ha! ha!” cried Ricco; “you would have me swear to what I have proved! My good Heissenheimer, I will read you the riddle. We Italians are more candid than you. We know well what is wanting in our operas, and have judgment enough to understand that it cannot be otherwise. Where two make a work, the whole cannot be cast in one great mould. If we thus discover disproportion betwixt the music and the text, it disturbs not our enjoyment. But the German will smoothe it all away; he rests not till the faults growing out of the nature of the thing are changed into beauties by some jugglery of the understanding; and after he has in this way deceived himself, he begins to enjoy. If I loved Don Giovanni ever so much, the part of Elvira would not disturb me. I would easily help myself out of the difficulty; I would have Elvira fall senseless on the discovery of her error, and a friend of Anna’s supply the sixth voice. What have you against that?”
“In this manner,” replied Louis, “you may banish reason from art altogether. I cannot conceive of a work of art, which shall not proceed from the full consciousness of the artist, and contain only beauties designed by himself. Therefore do I detest Rossini’s works, void of meaning——”
“Void of meaning? Young man, do not depreciate our master. Think you, he was unconscious of that for which you reproach him, and that he could not have bettered it if he had chosen? But he wished to lead music back to her own natural place; to make her again a science for the ear, and deliver her from your massive philosophical smoke-cells and pedantic fetters. Turn nothing but counterpoint; screw only fugues and canons; write only dissonances, like your Mozart and Beethoven; drive your anarchy ever so far, nature will still be victorious. And then delight yourself in the conceit—that your masters look to the whole! Truly, they may have the will, but the vision fails them, and they see no further than a mole on the top of Mont Blanc. Your beloved Don Giovanni, of which you believe that it came forth fully armed from the composer’s fancy, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, is an automaton, whose limbs are fastened together with thongs, and secured with hammer strokes; a thing that has more rents and seams than a clown’s jacket; which you can cut up like an eel, without touching its heart;—in short, as I have proved, a thing that can neither live nor stand, if more is expected than that it should be the scaffold on which the musician builds his illumination of tones.”
“But,” cried Louis, “the splendor of that illumination shall light up the gloom of the most distant future! It shall remain a Sirius, the central sun of stars of the first magnitude, so long as art itself shall exist.”
“Ay, and your torchlight, your will-o’-the-wisp, Rossini, shall be blown out by the first breath of time!” said Heissenheimer.
“Friends,” replied Ricco, “were it not better that we broke up our conference? Our discourse grows somewhat warm.”
“You have chilled me completely, at least, towards yourself,” returned the merchant. “But I cannot believe you in earnest with your talk, so I will drink a glass with you. If I did not think you have joked with us, I would have had the wine poisoned for me in which I pledge an enemy of Mozart.”
“Have I called myself his enemy?” said the chapel-master. “Who would deny the man genius? I charge him only with a wrong use of it—and of music, which should bring us joy and happiness, not gloom and melancholy. What should I do with wine that did not make me merry like your champagne?”
“So merry,” grumbled the merchant, “that, truly, you have made yourself merry with us. But, Louis, why so thoughtful?”
“Pardon me,” answered the young man; “I am troubled by what I cannot yet make clear to myself. I would reply to the chapel-master’s accusation against the part of Elvira. His opinion is plausible, but he is wrong in reference to the work. I believe I can see a way to lead to a right understanding.”