“Bah! I am all right. Joy, hang it! I will have joy!”
“Sunday morning.
“Dear Friend,—Do not worry over my aberrations—the crisis is past. I cannot explain in a letter, which might go astray; but I beg you will not breathe a word of my state of mind to anyone, it might get round to my father and distress him. All that I can do is suffer in silence until time changes my fate.
“Yesterday’s wild excursion did for me entirely. I can hardly move.—Adieu.”
In an artist’s life sometimes wild tempests succeed each other with bewildering rapidity, and so it was with me about this time.
Hardly had I recovered from the successive shocks of Weber and Shakespeare, when above my horizon burst the sun of glorious Beethoven to melt for me that misty inmost veil of the holiest shrine in music, as Shakespeare had lifted that of poetry.
To Habeneck, with all his shortcomings, is due the credit of introducing the master he adored to Paris. In order to found the Conservatoire concerts, now of world-wide fame, he had to face opposition, abuse and irony, and to inspire with his own ardour a set of men who, not being Beethoven enthusiasts, did not see the force of slaving for poor pay at music that, to them, appeared simply eccentric.
Oh! the nonsense I have heard them airing on those miracles of inspiration and learning—the symphonies!
Even Lesueur—honest, but devoted to antiquated dogmas—stood aside with Cherubini, Päer, Kreutzer and Catel, until, one day, I swept him off to hear the great C minor symphony.
I told him it was his duty to know and appreciate personally such a notable fact as this revelation of a new and glorious style to us, the children of the old classicism.