O Waves!—O Earth!
O Earth and Oak!
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, February, 1884.
Dear K.,—Charley Johnson’s coming down to spend a week with me. I shall be soon enjoying his Rabelaisian mirth, and his Gargantuesque laughter. He is going to Havana, and I shall ask him to get, if possible, the music of the erotic mime-dance,—the Zamacueca of the Creoles.
I see they are offering prizes for a good opera. Why don’t you compose an opera? I can suggest the most tremendous, colossal, Ragnarockian subject imaginable—knocks Wagner endwise and all the trilogies: “The Wooing of the Virgin of Poja,” from the “Kalewala.” The “Kalewala” is the only essentially musical epopea I know of. Orpheus is a mere clumsy charlatan to Wainamoinen and the wooers. The incidents are more charmingly enormous than anything in the Talmud, Ramayana, or Mahabharata. O! the old woman who talks to the Moon!—and the wicked singer who turns all that hear him to stone!—and the phantoms created by magical chant!—and the songs that make the stars totter in the frosty sky!—and the melodies that melt the gates of iron! And then, too, the episode of the Eternal Smith, by whose art the blue vault of heaven was wrought into shape; and the weird sleigh-ride over the Frozen Sea; and the words at whose utterance “the waters of the great deep lifted a thousand heads to listen!” And the story of the Earth-giant, aroused by magical force from his slumber of innumerable years, to teach to the Magician the runes by which all things are created,—the enchanted songs by which the Beginning was made to Begin. If you have not read it, try to get a prose translation: no poetical version can preserve the delightful goblinry and elfishness of the original, whereof the metre rings even as the ringing of a mighty harp.
I have also a delightful Malay poem which would make a much finer operatic subject or dramatic subject than the European féeries modelled upon the Hindoo drama of Sakuntala, or, as my French translator writes it, Sacountala. I have an inexhaustible quarry of monstrous and diabolical inspiration.
Yours truly, etc.
I spend whole days in vocal efforts—vain ones—to imitate those delicious arabesques about the Name of Allah in the Muezzin’s Song,—and do suddenly awake by night with a Voice in my ears, as of a Summons to Prayer. Bismillah!—enormous is God!