It was a hideous saturnalia, and deafened by the brass and percussion instruments I tried to get away, but my neighbors protested and I was forced to sit and suffer. What followed was incomprehensible. The crazy amazons, the Walk-your-horses, and the disagreeable Wotan kept things in a perfect uproar for half an hour. Then the stage cleared and the father, after lecturing his daughter, put her to sleep under a tree. He must have been a mesmerist. Red fire ran over the stage, steam hissed, the orchestra rattled, and the bass roared. Finally, to tinkling bells and fourth of July fireworks, the curtain fell on the silliest pantomime I ever saw.
The music? Ah, don't ask me now! Wait until my nerves get settled. It never stopped, and fast as it reeled off I recognized Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Weber—lots of Weber—Marschner, and Chopin. Yes, Chopin! The orchestration seemed overwrought and coarse and the form—well, formlessness is the only word to describe it. There was an infernal sort of skill in the instrumentation at times, a short-breathed juggling with other men's ideas, but no development, no final cadence. Everything in suspension until my ears fairly longed for one perfect resolution. Even in the Spring Song it does not occur. That tune is suspiciously Italian, for all Wagner's dislike of Italy.
And this is your operatic hero today! This is your maker of music dramas! Pooh! it is neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. Give me one page from the Marriage of Figaro or the finale to Don Giovanni and I will show you divine melody and great dramatic writing! But I'm old-fashioned, I suppose. I have since been told the real story of Die Walküre and am dumfounded. It is all worse than I expected. Give me my Dussek, give me Mozart, let me breathe pure, sweet air after this hot-house music with its debauch of color, sound, action, and morals. I must have the grip, because even now as I write my mind seems tainted with the awful music of Richard Wagner, the arch fiend of music. I shall send for the doctor in the morning.
XIV
A VISIT TO THE PARIS CONSERVATOIRE
I feel very much like the tutor of Prince Karl Heinrich in the pretty play Old Heidelberg. After a long absence he returned to Heidelberg where his student life had been happy—or at least had seemed so to him in the latter, lonesome years. Behold, he found the same reckless crowd, swaggering, carousing, flirting, dueling, debt-making, love-making, and occasionally studying. He liked it so well that, if I mistake not, the place killed him. I felt very much in the same position as the Doctor Jüttner of the play when I returned to Paris last summer. The Conservatoire is still in its old, crooked, narrow street; it is still a noisy sheol as one enters at the gate; and there is still the same old gang of callow youths and extremely pert misses going and coming. Only they all seem more sophisticated nowadays. They—naturally enough—know more than their daddies, and they show it. As they brushed past, literally elbowing me, they seemed contemptuously arrogant in their youthful exuberance. And yet, and yet—ego in Arcadia!
I stood in the quadrangle and dreamed. Forty years ago—or is it fifty?—I had stood there before; but it was in the chilly month of November. I was young then, and I was very ambitious. The little Ohio town whose obscurity I had hoped to transform into fame—ah! these mad dreams of egotistical boyhood—did not resent my leaving it. It still stands where it was—stands still. I seem to have gone on, and yet I return to that little, dull, dilapidated town in my thoughts, for it was there I enjoyed the purple visions of music, where I fondly believed that I, too, might go forth into the world and make harmony. I did; but my harmony exercises were always returned full of blue marks. Such is life—and its lead-pencil ironies!
To be precise as well as concise, I stood in the concierge's bureau some forty years ago and wondered if the secretary would see me. He did. After he had tortured me as to my age, parentage, nationality, qualifications, even personal habits, it occurred to him to ask me what I wanted in Paris. I told him, readily enough, that I had crossed the yeasty Atlantic in a sailing vessel—for motives of economy—that I might study the pianoforte in Paris. I remember that I also naïvely inquired the hours when M. François Liszt—he called him Litz!—gave his lessons. The secretary was too polite to laugh at my provincial ignorance, but he coughed violently several times. Then I was informed that M. Liszt never gave piano-lessons any time, any-where; that he was to be found in Weimar; but only by passed grand masters of the art of pianoforte-playing. Still undaunted, I insisted on entering my name amongst those who would compete at the forthcoming public examination. I was, as I said before, very young, very inexperienced, and I was alone, with just enough money to keep me for one year.