“You are mistaken, caro Capraja,” said the duke. “There is a power in music more magical in its effects than that of the roulade.” “What is it?” queried Capraja. “The perfect accord of two voices, or of one voice and a violin, which is the instrument whose tone approaches the human voice most nearly.” Then follows a rhapsodic word duel between the old amateurs, each contending for his favorite form. And is it not, though purposely exaggerated, the same battle that is being fought to this very day between the formalists and sensationalists? Some of us adore absolute music and decry the sensualities of the music-drama. The war between the roulade and the accord will never end. “Genovese’s voice seizes the very fibres,” cries Capraja. “And La Tinti’s attacks the blood,” rejoins the duke. Then follows a remarkable descriptive analysis of Rossini’s Moses in Egypt, by the wealthy and beautiful Duchess Cataneo, otherwise Massimilla Doni. It is cleverly done. The picture of the rising sun in the score in the key of C proves Balzac a poet as well as a musician. The prayer, so famous because of Thalberg’s piano transcription, is also described, and at the end this opera—better known to us as an oratorio—is pronounced superior to Don Giovanni!! Balzac, Balzac!
There is a realistic account of a small riot in the opera house because Genovese, the tenor, sings out of tune. The Duke Cataneo rages monstrously, Capraja is furious. Both tone-voluptuaries are deprived of their accords and roulades. It turns out that the tenor is in love with the soprano, and once away from her presence proves his art by singing the air, Ombra adorata, by Crescentini. This he does at midnight on the Piazzetta, Venice. The Venetian scene setting is lovely. Genovese sings his sweetest. His listeners are rapt to paradise, but are tumbled earthwards when he asks in injured accents, “Am I a poor singer?” Listen to Balzac’s comments upon that phenomenon called a tenor singer: “One and all regretted that the instrument was not a celestial thing. Was that angelic music attributable solely to a feeling of wounded self-esteem? The singer felt nothing, he was no more thinking of the religious sentiments, the divine images which he created in their hearts, than the violin knows what Paganini makes it say. They had all fancied that they saw Venice raising her shroud and singing herself, yet it was simply a matter of a tenor’s fiasco.” Most operatic music is.
The theory of the roulade is further explained:—
Capraja is intimate with a musician from Cremona who lives in the Capello palace; this musician believes that sound encounters within us a substance analogous to that which is engendered by the phenomena of light, and which produces ideas in us. According to him man has keys within, which sounds affect, and which correspond to our nerve centres from which our sensations and ideas spring. Capraja, who looks upon the arts as a collection of the means whereby man can bring external nature into harmony with a mysterious internal nature, which he calls an inward life, has adopted the idea of this instrument maker, who is at this moment composing an opera. Imagine a sublime creation in which the marvels of visible creation are reproduced with immeasurable grandeur, lightness, rapidity, and breadth, in which the sensations are infinite, and to which certain privileged natures, endowed with a divine power, can penetrate—then you will have an idea of the ecstatic delights of which Cataneo and Capraja, poets in their own eyes only, discoursed so earnestly. But it is true also that as soon as a man, in the sphere of moral nature, oversteps the limits within which plastic works are produced by the process of imitation, to enter into the kingdom, wholly spiritual, of abstractions, where everything is viewed in its essence and in the omnipotence of results, that man is no longer understood by ordinary intellects.
The foregoing paragraph, rather inflated and tortuous in style, was thoroughly disliked by the great critic Sainte-Beuve, who never would recognize the great genius of Balzac, the romantic rather than the realist in this book. The composer referred to must be Gambara, for Massimilla Doni, after the death of the Duke of Cataneo, weds young Varese and assists the unfortunate Gambara in Paris. Massimilla Doni was finished May 25, 1839. Its concluding paragraph is a masterpiece of irony. After the love of Varese and Massimilla came the usual anti-climax. Balzac writes, in a passage of unexampled splendor: “The peris, nymphs, fairies, sylphs of the olden time, the muses of Greece, the marble Virgins of the Certosa of Pavia, the Day and Night of Michael Angelo, the little angels that Bellini first drew at the foot of church paintings, and to whom Raphael gave such divine form at the foot of the Vierge au donataire, and of the Madonna freezing at Dresden; Orcagna’s captivating maidens in the Church of Or San Michele at Florence, the heavenly choirs on the tomb of St. Sebald at Nuremberg, several Virgins in the Duomo at Milan, the hordes of a hundred Gothic cathedrals, the whole nation of figures who ruin their shapes to come to you, O all-embracing artists—all these angelic incorporeal maidens rushed to Massimilla’s bed and wept there.”
Richard Wagner might have been a Gambara; and mark how Balzac treats the vibratory theory of sound, when it was practically unknown. Where did he gather his wisdom? Another story of his, hitherto untranslated, Sarrasin, will not bear recounting. Its psychology is morbid; yet it is stamped with probability. The great male soprano Farinelli could have been the hero. Nevertheless, the tale is not a pleasant one. George Moore eloquently describes how, in chase of the exotic, he pursued certain books, like a pike after minnows, along the quays of Paris. And like a pike he rudely knocked his nose one day against the bottom. The real lover of Balzac, pike-like, accepts Sarrasin, just as he accepts Seraphita. They are many octaves apart, yet both sound a distinct note in the scale of this great human symphony. However, Sarrasin is but semi-musical, so need not be discussed here.
“O mighty poet! Thy works are not as other men’s, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun, the sea, the stars, and the flowers; like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert; that the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!”
Thomas De Quincey, master of the sonorous singing word, wrote this—he meant Shakespeare. It will also fit Balzac. And I know of no other name except Balzac’s, that I dare bracket with Shakespeare’s except Beethoven’s.
ALPHONSE DAUDET
“The entire work of Balzac pulsates with a fever of discovery and of impromptu.” It was Alphonse Daudet, the little David of the south, with “the head of an Arabian Christ,” who wrote that sentence, a sentence that might be aptly fitted to his own case. Daudet loved Balzac, loved Beethoven, and—this may be a surprise for some—loved Wagner, knew Wagner. Why not? Style for him was a question of intensity, and what is Wagner if not intense? And Daudet was no mean critic. He could recognize the unchanging moi of Hugo, and the miraculous gift of transforming himself that gave to Balzac the power of multitudinous creation. He could speak of Georges Rodenbach as “the most exquisite and refined of poets and prose writers, moist and dripping with his Flemish fogs, a writer whose sentence has the tender effect of belfries against the sky and the soft golden hue of reliquaries and stained glass windows.” Friedrich Nietzsche was “that admirable writer with a surprising power for destruction”; while in Ibsen’s Wild Duck he found “the india-rubber laugh, the laugh of Voltaire congealed by Pomeranian sleet.” The reading of Dostoïevsky’s Crime and Punishment was a “crisis of his mind”; and for Tolstoy he always entertained a warm admiration. After Turgénieff died some alleged souvenirs of his were published and gave Daudet exquisite unhappiness, for he had loved the man and extolled the artist. M. Halperine-Kaminsky cleared up the mystery by proving that Turgénieff had never written the offensive paragraphs. They were really not of serious import, consisting of several free criticisms about the realistic group to which Daudet belonged. As I remember, Turgénieff is reported to have said that much of the work of Daudet, the de Goncourts, Zola, and a few others smelt of the lamp. Yet this simple phrase caused Daudet pain, for he prided himself on his spontaneity of style, his freedom from use of the file. Possibly, Turgénieff—and this is pure conjecture on my part—knew of Daudet’s opinions touching upon what he called “Russian pity, which is limited to criminals and low women.” He named it a “sentimental monstrosity,” and for that reason depreciated the “rousing fanaticism and actual hallucinations of the Russian Dickens”—Dostoïevsky.