Massimilla Doni by Honoré de Balzac
page 66 of 113 (58%)
page 66 of 113 (58%)
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intellectual not to learn to love it and cultivate it, and to succeed
in that as in everything else. Also, it must be acknowledged that music, as created by Lulli, Rameau, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Cimarosa, Paisiello, and Rossini, and as it will be carried on by the great geniuses of the future, is a new art, unknown to former generations; they had indeed no such variety of instruments on which the flowers of melody now blossom as on some rich soil. "So novel an art demands study in the public, study of a kind that may develop the feelings to which music appeals. That sentiment hardly exists as yet among you--a nation given up to philosophical theories, to analysis and discussion, and always torn by civil disturbances. Modern music demands perfect peace; it is the language of loving and sentimental souls, inclined to lofty emotional aspiration. "That language, a thousand times fuller than the language of words, is to speech and ideas what the thought is to its utterance; it arouses sensations and ideas in their primitive form, in that part of us where sensations and ideas have their birth, but leaves them as they are in each of us. That power over our inmost being is one of the grandest facts in music. All other arts present to the mind a definite creation; those of music are indefinite--infinite. We are compelled to accept the ideas of the poet, the painter's picture, the sculptor's statue; but music each one can interpret at the will of his sorrow or his gladness, his hope or his despair. While other arts restrict our mind by fixing it on a predestined object, music frees it to roam over all nature which it alone has the power of expressing. You shall hear how I interpret Rossini's _Mose_." She leaned across to the Frenchman to speak to him, without being |
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