In this, after the Bacchanal, I made the wind carry on the motif of Orpheus’ love-song to a strange rushing undertone accompaniment by the rest of the players, while the dying wail of a far-off voice cries:
“Eurydice! Eurydice! hapless Eurydice!”
The wild sadness of my music-picture affected the whole orchestra, and they hailed it with wild enthusiasm. I am sorry now that I burnt it, it was worth keeping for those last pages alone.
With the exception of the Bacchanal—the famous piece in which the Conservatoire pianist got hung up—which was given with magnificent verve, nothing else in the cantata went very well and, thanks to Dupont’s illness, it was withdrawn. No doubt Cherubini preferred to say that it was because the orchestra could not play it.
In this cantata I first noticed how impossible conductors, unused to grand opera, find it to give way to the capricious and varied time of the recitative. Bloc, only accustomed to songs interspersed with spoken dialogue, was quite confused and, in some places, never got right at all, which made a learned periwigged amateur, who was at rehearsal, say, as he shook his head at me:
“Give me good old Italian cantatas! Now that’s the music that never bothers a conductor. It plays itself, it runs alone.”
“Yes,” I said dryly, “just as old donkeys plod round and round their treadmill.”
That is how I set about making friends.
Much against the grain I replaced Orpheus by the Resurrexit from my mass, and finally the concert came off.
Duprez, with his sweet, weak voice, did well in the aria; the overtures and Resurrexit were also a success, but the trio with chorus was a regular failure.