The tears rose to Gambara’s eyes, and it was only upon controlling his emotion that he went on.
“Act II. The religion is now established. The Arabs are guarding the Prophet’s tent while he speaks with God (chorus in A minor). Mahomet appears (a prayer in F). What a majestic and noble strain is this that forms the bass of the voices, in which I have perhaps enlarged the borders of melody. It was needful to express the wonderful energy of this great human movement which created an architecture, a music, a poetry of its own, a costume and manners. As you listen, you are walking under the arcades of the Generalife, the carved vaults of the Alhambra. The runs and trills depict that delicate mauresque decoration, and the gallant and valorous religion which was destined to wage war against the gallant and valorous chivalry of Christendom. A few brass instruments awake in the orchestra, announcing the Prophet’s first triumph (in a broken cadenza). The Arabs adore the Prophet (E flat major), and the Khaled, Amru, and Ali arrive (tempo di marcia). The armies of the faithful have taken many towns and subjugated the three Arabias. Such a grand recitative! – Mahomet rewards his generals by presenting them with maidens.
“And here,” said Gambara, sadly, “there is one of those wretched ballets, which interrupt the thread of the finest musical tragedies! But Mahomet elevates it once more by his great prophetic scene, which poor Monsieur Voltaire begins with these words:
“Arabia’s time at last has come!
“He is interrupted by a chorus of triumphant Arabs (twelve-eight time, accelerando). The tribes arrive in crowds; the horns and brass reappear in the orchestra. General rejoicings ensue, all the voices joining in by degrees, and Mahomet announces polygamy. In the midst of all this triumph, the woman who has been of such faithful service to Mahomet sings a magnificent air (in B major). ‘And I,’ says she, ‘am I no longer loved?’ ‘We must part. Thou art but a woman, and I am a Prophet; I may still have slaves but no equal.’ Just listen to this duet (G sharp minor). What anguish! The woman understands the greatness her hands have built up; she loves Mahomet well enough to sacrifice herself to his glory; she worships him as a god, without criticising him, – without murmuring. Poor woman! His first dupe and his first victim!
“What a subject for the finale (in B major) is her grief, brought out in such sombre hues against the acclamations of the chorus, and mingling with Mahomet’s tones as he throws his wife aside as a tool of no further use, still showing her that he can never forget her! What fireworks of triumph! what a rush of glad and rippling song go up from the two young voices (first and second soprano) of Ayesha and Hafsa, supported by Ali and his wife, by Omar and Abubekir! Weep! – rejoice! – Triumph and tears! Such is life.”
Marianna could not control her tears, and Andrea was so deeply moved that his eyes were moist. The Neapolitan cook was startled by the magnetic influence of the ideas expressed by Gambara’s convulsive accents.
The composer looked round, saw the group, and smiled.
“At last you understand me!” said he.
No conqueror, led in pomp to the Capitol under the purple beams of glory, as the crown was placed on his head amid the acclamations of a nation, ever wore such an expression. The composer’s face was radiant, like that of a holy martyr. No one dispelled the error. A terrible smile parted Marianna’s lips. The Count was appalled by the guilelessness of this mania.
“Act III,” said the enchanted musician, reseating himself at the piano. “(Andantino, solo.) Mahomet in his seraglio, surrounded by women, but not happy. Quartette of Houris (A major). What pompous harmony, what trills as of ecstatic nightingales! Modulation (into F sharp minor). The theme is stated (on the dominant E and repeated in F major). Here every delight is grouped and expressed to give effect to the contrast of the gloomy finale of the first act. After the dancing, Mahomet rises and sings a grand bravura air (in F minor), repelling the perfect and devoted love of his first wife, but confessing himself conquered by polygamy. Never has a musician had so fine a subject! The orchestra and the chorus of female voices express the joys of the Houris, while Mahomet reverts to the melancholy strain of the opening. Where is Beethoven,” cried Gambara, “to appreciate this prodigious reaction of my opera on itself? How completely it all rests on the bass.
“It is thus that Beethoven composed his E minor symphony. But his heroic work is purely instrumental, whereas here, my heroic phrase is worked out on a sextette of the finest human voices, and a chorus of the faithful on guard at the door of the sacred dwelling. I have every resource of melody and harmony at my command, an orchestra and voices. Listen to the utterance of all these phases of human life, rich and poor; – battle, triumph, and exhaustion!
“Ali arrives, the Koran prevails in every province (duet in D minor). Mahomet places himself in the hands of his two fathers-in-law; he will abdicate his rule and die in retirement to consolidate his work. A magnificent sextette (B flat major). He takes leave of all (solo in F natural). His two fathers-in-law, constituted his vicars or Khalifs, appeal to the people. A great triumphal march, and a prayer by all the Arabs kneeling before the sacred house, the Kasbah, from which a pigeon is seen to fly away (the same key). This prayer, sung by sixty voices and led by the women (in B flat), crowns the stupendous work expressive of the life of nations and of man. Here you have every emotion, human and divine.”
Andrea gazed at Gambara in blank amazement. Though at first he had been struck by the terrible irony of the situation, – this man expressing the feelings of Mahomet’s wife without discovering them in Marianna, – the husband’s hallucination was as nothing compared with the composer’s. There was no hint even of a poetical or musical idea in the hideous cacophony with which he had deluged their ears; the first principles of harmony, the most elementary rules of composition, were absolutely alien to this chaotic structure. Instead of the scientifically compacted music which Gambara described, his fingers produced sequences of fifths, sevenths, and octaves, of major thirds, progressions of fourths with no supporting bass, – a medley of discordant sounds struck out haphazard in such a way as to be excruciating to the least sensitive ear. It is difficult to give any idea of the grotesque performance. New words would be needed to describe this impossible music.
Andrea, painfully affected by this worthy man’s madness, colored, and stole a glance at Marianna; while she, turning pale and looking down, could not restrain her tears. In the midst of this chaos of notes, Gambara had every now and then given vent to his rapture in exclamations of delight. He had closed his eyes in ecstasy; had smiled at his piano; had looked at it with a frown; put out his tongue at it after the fashion of the inspired performer, – in short, was quite intoxicated with the poetry that filled his brain, and that he had vainly striven to utter. The strange discords that clashed under his fingers had obviously sounded in his ears like celestial harmonies.
A deaf man, seeing the inspired gaze of his blue eyes open on another world, the rosy glow that tinged his cheeks, and, above all, the heavenly serenity which ecstasy stamped on his proud and noble countenance, would have supposed that he was looking on at the improvisation of a really great artist. The illusion would have been all the more natural because the performance of this mad music required immense executive skill to achieve such fingering. Gambara must have worked at it for years.
Nor were his hands alone employed; his feet were constantly at work with complicated pedaling; his body swayed to and fro; the perspiration poured down his face while he toiled to produce a great crescendo with the feeble means the thankless instrument placed at his command. He stamped, puffed, shouted; his fingers were as swift as the serpent’s double tongue; and finally, at the last crash on the keys, he fell back in his chair, resting his head on the top of it.
“Per Bacco! I am quite stunned,” said the Count as he left the house. “A child dancing on the keyboard would make better music.”
“Certainly mere chance could not more successfully avoid hitting two notes in concord than that possessed creature has done during the past hour,” said Giardini.
“How is it that the regular beauty of Marianna’s features is not spoiled by incessantly hearing such a hideous medley?” said the Count to himself. “Marianna will certainly grow ugly.”
“Signor, she must be saved from that,” cried Giardini.
“Yes,” said Andrea. “I have thought of that. Still, to be sure that my plans are not based on error, I must confirm my doubts by another experiment. I will return and examine the instruments he has invented. To-morrow, after dinner, we will have a little supper. I will send in some wine and little dishes.”
The cook bowed.
Andrea spent the following day in superintending the arrangement of the rooms where he meant to install the artist in a humble home.
In the evening the Count made his appearance, and found the wine, according to his instructions, set out with some care by Marianna and Giardini. Gambara proudly exhibited the little drums, on which lay the powder by means of which he made his observations on the pitch and quality of the sounds emitted by his instruments.
“You see,” said he, “by what simple means I can prove the most important propositions. Acoustics thus can show me the analogous effects of sound on every object of its impact. All harmonies start from a common centre and preserve the closest relations among themselves; or rather, harmony, like light, is decomposable by our art as a ray is by a prism.”
He then displayed the instruments constructed in accordance with his laws, explaining the changes he had introduced into their constitution. And finally he announced that to conclude this preliminary inspection, which could only satisfy a superficial curiosity, he would perform on an instrument that contained all the elements of a complete orchestra, and which he called a Panharmonicon.
“If it is the machine in that huge case, which brings down on us the complaints of the neighborhood whenever you work at it, you will not play on it long,” said Giardini. “The police will interfere. Remember that!”
“If that poor idiot stays in the room,” said Gambara in a whisper to the Count, “I cannot possibly play.”
Andrea dismissed the cook, promising a handsome reward if he would keep watch outside and hinder the neighbors or the police from interfering. Giardini, who had not stinted himself while helping Gambara to wine, was quite willing.
Gambara, without being drunk, was in the condition when every power of the brain is over-wrought; when the walls of the room are transparent; when the garret has no roof, and the soul soars in the empyrean of spirits.
Marianna, with some little difficulty, removed the covers from an instrument as large as a grand piano, but with an upper case added. This strange-looking instrument, besides this second body and its keyboard, supported the openings or bells of various wind instruments and the closed funnels of a few organ pipes.
“Will you play me the prayer you say is so fine at the end of your opera?” said the Count.
To the great surprise of both Marianna and the Count, Gambara began with a succession of chords that proclaimed him a master; and their astonishment gave way first to amazed admiration and then to perfect rapture, effacing all thought of the place and the performer. The effects of a real orchestra could not have been finer than the voices of the wind instruments, which were like those of an organ and combined wonderfully with the harmonies of the strings. But the unfinished condition of the machine set limits to the composer’s execution, and his idea seemed all the greater; for, often, the very perfection of a work of art limits its suggestiveness to the recipient soul. Is not this proved by the preference accorded to a sketch rather than a finished picture when on their trial before those who interpret a work in their own mind rather than accept it rounded off and complete?
The purest and serenest music that Andrea had ever listened to rose up from under Gambara’s fingers like the vapor of incense from an altar. The composer’s voice grew young again, and, far from marring the noble melody, it elucidated it, supported it, guided it, – just as the feeble and quavering voice of an accomplished reader, such as Andrieux, for instance, can expand the meaning of some great scene by Corneille or Racine by lending personal and poetical feeling.
This really angelic strain showed what treasures lay hidden in that stupendous opera, which, however, would never find comprehension so long as the musician persisted in trying to explain it in his present demented state. His wife and the Count were equally divided between the music and their surprise at this hundred-voiced instrument, inside which a stranger might have fancied an invisible chorus of girls were hidden, so closely did some of the tones resemble the human voice; and they dared not express their ideas by a look or a word. Marianna’s face was lighted up by a radiant beam of hope which revived the glories of her youth. This renascence of beauty, co-existent with the luminous glow of her husband’s genius, cast a shade of regret on the Count’s exquisite pleasure in this mysterious hour.
“You are our good genius!” whispered Marianna. “I am tempted to believe that you actually inspire him; for I, who never am away from him, have never heard anything like this.”
“And Kadijah’s farewell!” cried Gambara, who sang the cavatina which he had described the day before as sublime, and which now brought tears to the eyes of the lovers, so perfectly did it express the loftiest devotion of love.
“Who can have taught you such strains?” cried the Count.
“The Spirit,” said Gambara. “When he appears, all is fire. I see the melodies there before me; lovely, fresh in vivid hues like flowers. They beam on me, they ring out, – and I listen. But it takes a long, long time to reproduce them.”
“Some more!” said Marianna.
Gambara, who could not tire, played on without effort or antics. He performed his overture with such skill, bringing out such rich and original musical effects, that the Count was quite dazzled, and at last believed in some magic like that commanded by Paganini and Liszt, – a style of execution which changes every aspect of music as an art, by giving it a poetic quality far above musical inventions.
“Well, Excellenza, and can you cure him?” asked Giardini, as Andrea came out.
“I shall soon find out,” replied the Count. “This man’s intellect has two windows; one is closed to the world, the other is open to the heavens. The first is music, the second is poetry. Till now he has insisted on sitting in front of the shuttered window; he must be got to the other. It was you, Giardini, who first started me on the right track, by telling me that your client’s mind was clearer after drinking a few glasses of wine.”
“Yes,” cried the cook, “and I can see what your plan is.”
“If it is not too late to make the thunder of poetry audible to his ears, in the midst of the harmonies of some noble music, we must put him into a condition to receive it and appreciate it. Will you help me to intoxicate Gambara, my good fellow? Will you be none the worse for it?”
“What do you mean, Excellenza?”
Andrea went off without answering him, laughing at the acumen still left to this cracked wit.
On the following day he called for Marianna, who had spent the morning in arranging her dress, – a simple but decent outfit, on which she had spent all her little savings. The transformation would have destroyed the illusions of a mere dangler; but Andrea’s caprice had become a passion. Marianna, diverted of her picturesque poverty, and looking like any ordinary woman of modest rank, inspired dreams of wedded life.
He handed her into a hackney coach, and told her of the plans he had in his head; and she approved of everything, happy in finding her admirer more lofty, more generous, more disinterested than she had dared to hope. He took her to a little apartment, where he had allowed himself to remind her of his good offices by some of the elegant trifles which have a charm for the most virtuous women.
“I will never speak to you of love till you give up all hope of your Paolo,” said the Count to Marianna, as he bid her good-bye at the Rue Froid-Manteau. “You will be witness to the sincerity of my attempts. If they succeed. I may find myself unequal to keeping up my part as a friend; but in that case I shall go far away, Marianna. Though I have firmness enough to work for your happiness, I shall not have so much as will enable me to look on at it.”
“Do not say such things. Generosity, too, has its dangers,” said she, swallowing down her tears. “But are you going now?”
“Yes,” said Andrea; “be happy, without any drawbacks.”
If Giardini might be believed, the new treatment was beneficial to both husband and wife. Every evening after his wine, Gambara seemed less self-centered, talked more, and with great lucidity; he even spoke at last of reading the papers. Andrea could not help quaking at his unexpectedly rapid success; but though his distress made him aware of the strength of his passion, it did not make him waver in his virtuous resolve.
One day he called to note the progress of this singular cure. Though the state of the patient at first gave him satisfaction, his joy was dashed by Marianna’s beauty, for an easy life had restored its brilliancy. He called now every evening to enjoy calm and serious conversation, to which he contributed lucid and well considered arguments controverting Gambara’s singular theories. He took advantage of the remarkable acumen of the composer’s mind as to every point not too directly bearing on his manias, to obtain his assent to principles in various branches of art, and apply them subsequently to music. All was well so long as the patient’s brain was heated with the fumes of wine; but as soon as he had recovered – or, rather, lost – his reason, he was a monomaniac once more.
However, Paolo was already more easily diverted by the impression of outside things; his mind was more capable of addressing itself to several points at a time.
Andrea, who took an artistic interest in his semi-medical treatment, thought at last that the time had come for a great experiment. He would give a dinner at his own house, to which he would invite Giardini for the sake of keeping the tragedy and the parody side by side, and afterwards take the party to the first performance of Robert le Diable. He had seen it in rehearsal, and he judged it well fitted to open his patient’s eyes.
By the end of the second course, Gambara was already tipsy, laughing at himself with a very good grace; while Giardini confessed that his culinary innovations were not worth a rush. Andrea had neglected nothing that could contribute to this twofold miracle. The wines of Orvieto and of Montefiascone, conveyed with the peculiar care needed in moving them, Lachrymachristi and Giro, – all the heady liqueurs of la cara Patria, – went to their brains with the intoxication alike of the grape and of fond memory. At dessert the musician and the cook both abjured every heresy; one was humming a cavatina by Rossini, and the other piling delicacies on his plate and washing them down with Maraschino from Zara, to the prosperity of the French cuisine.
The Count took advantage of this happy frame of mind, and Gambara allowed himself to be taken to the opera like a lamb.
At the first introductory notes Gambara’s intoxication appeared to clear away and make way for the feverish excitement which sometimes brought his judgment and his imagination into perfect harmony; for it was their habitual disagreement, no doubt, that caused his madness. The ruling idea of that great musical drama appeared to him, no doubt, in its noble simplicity, like a lightning flash, illuminating the utter darkness in which he lived. To his unsealed eyes this music revealed the immense horizons of a world in which he found himself for the first time, though recognizing it as that he had seen in his dreams. He fancied himself transported into the scenery of his native land, where that beautiful Italian landscape begins at what Napoleon so cleverly described as the glacis of the Alps. Carried back by memory to the time when his young and eager brain was as yet untroubled by the ecstasy of his too exuberant imagination he listened with religious awe and would not utter a single word. The Count respected the internal travail of his soul. Till half-past twelve Gambara sat so perfectly motionless that the frequenters of the opera house took him, no doubt, for what he was – a man drunk.
On their return, Andrea began to attack Meyerbeer’s work, in order to wake up Gambara, who sat sunk in the half-torpid state common in drunkards.
“What is there in that incoherent score to reduce you to a condition of somnambulism?” asked Andrea, when they got out at his house. “The story of Robert le Diable, to be sure, is not devoid of interest, and Holtei has worked it out with great skill in a drama that is very well written and full of strong and pathetic situations; but the French librettist has contrived to extract from it the most ridiculous farrago of nonsense. The absurdities of the libretti of Vesari and Schikander are not to compare with those of the words of Robert le Diable; it is a dramatic nightmare, which oppresses the hearer without deeply moving him.
“And Meyerbeer has given the devil a too prominent part. Bertram and Alice represent the contest between right and wrong, the spirits of good and evil. This antagonism offered a splendid opportunity to the composer. The sweetest melodies, in juxtaposition with harsh and crude strains, was the natural outcome of the form of the story; but in the German composer’s score the demons sing better than the saints. The heavenly airs belie their origin, and when the composer abandons the infernal motives he returns to them as soon as possible, fatigued with the effort of keeping aloof from them. Melody, the golden thread that ought never to be lost throughout so vast a plan, often vanishes from Meyerbeer’s work. Feeling counts for nothing, the heart has no part in it. Hence we never come upon those happy inventions, those artless scenes, which captivate all our sympathies and leave a blissful impression on the soul.
“Harmony reigns supreme, instead of being the foundation from which the melodic groups of the musical picture stand forth. These discordant combinations, far from moving the listener, arouse in him a feeling analogous to that which he would experience on seeing a rope-dancer hanging to a thread and swaying between life and death. Never does a soothing strain come in to mitigate the fatiguing suspense. It really is as though the composer had had no other object in view than to produce a baroque effect without troubling himself about musical truth or unity, or about the capabilities of human voices which are swamped by this flood of instrumental noise.”