"Lady Macbeth!" went on Mr. Bischoff, "of course, it is Goethe who made the great, fatal mistake when he called her a superwitch. Our actresses make a monster of her. I did not feel seduced by our Lady Macbeth this evening. She ought to flatter, to cajole me. She ought to be a beautiful, flexible cat, she ought to be trembling with love and to shudder herself before her awful thoughts and words. And at the end, when she walks in her sleep, I don't want her to come and to declaim. I want her to be ill and feverish and weak, weak as a child, yes, as a child. I want her to say in a childish, soft voice:
'Yet here's a spot.'
and I want her to weep when she says:
'Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?'
I want her to be a broken, ruined woman, and I want you, the spectator, to pity her."
I listened surprised, for what he said seemed true to me.
"Look here, sir," he went on. "You are a composer, or will be one. There has never been a more splendid task for a musician than to write a musical drama on Macbeth, to express all that the poet left untold, to show this couple of criminals as poor human beings, to change their poison into tears."
The next day I was quite full of these ideas: they satiated my brain. Macbeth—Macbeth, an opera—an opera by Patrick Cooper, an opera with original Scotch tunes, perhaps with bagpipes, an opera with a Lady Macbeth full of charm instead of full of hideousness, an opera with strange mysterious sounds.... For the first time I thought that I was understanding Hammer's extraordinary theory, that there were no harmonies, but only voices....
I think I was a ridiculous youth then. Anyhow, I like myself better in khaki. And, strange to say, the music I hear now, the roar of the guns, has its fearful beauty, too.