His Masterpiece, Émile Zola [essential reading txt] 📗

of a great-grandmother in powdered hair. Mozart, he’s the precursory genius⁠—the first who endowed an orchestra with an individual voice; and those two will live mostly because they created Beethoven. Ah, Beethoven! power and strength amidst serene suffering, Michaelangelo at the tomb of the Medici! A heroic logician, a kneader of human brains; for the symphony, with choral accompaniments, was the starting-point of all the great ones of today!”

The waiter, tired of waiting, began to turn off the gas, wearily dragging his feet along as he did so. Mournfulness pervaded the deserted room, dirty with saliva and cigar ends, and reeking of spilt drink; while from the hushed boulevard the only sound that came was the distant blubbering of some drunkard.

Gagnière, still in the clouds, however, continued to ride his hobbyhorse.

“Weber passes by us amid a romantic landscape, conducting the ballads of the dead amidst weeping willows and oaks with twisted branches. Schumann follows him, beneath the pale moonlight, along the shores of silvery lakes. And behold, here comes Rossini, incarnation of the musical gift, so gay, so natural, without the least concern for expression, caring nothing for the public, and who isn’t my man by a long way⁠—ah! certainly not⁠—but then, all the same, he astonishes one by his wealth of production, and the huge effects he derives from an accumulation of voices and an ever-swelling repetition of the same strain. These three led to Meyerbeer, a cunning fellow who profited by everything, introducing symphony into opera after Weber, and giving dramatic expression to the unconscious formulas of Rossini. Oh! the superb bursts of sound, the feudal pomp, the martial mysticism, the quivering of fantastic legends, the cry of passion ringing out through history! And such finds!⁠—each instrument endowed with a personality, the dramatic recitatives accompanied symphoniously by the orchestra⁠—the typical musical phrase on which an entire work is built! Ah! he was a great fellow⁠—a very great fellow indeed!”

“I am going to shut up, sir,” said the waiter, drawing near.

And, seeing that Gagnière did not as much as look round, he went to awaken the petty retired tradesman, who was still dozing in front of his saucer.

“I am going to shut up, sir.”

The belated customer rose up, shivering, fumbled in the dark corner where he was seated for his walking-stick, and when the waiter had picked it up for him from under the seats he went away.

And Gagnière rambled on:

“Berlioz has mingled literature with his work. He is the musical illustrator of Shakespeare, Virgil, and Goethe. But what a painter!⁠—the Delacroix of music, who makes sound blaze forth amidst effulgent contrasts of colour. And withal he has romanticism in his brain, a religious mysticism that carries him away, an ecstasy that soars higher than mountain summits. A bad builder of operas, but marvellous in detached pieces, asking too much at times of the orchestra which he tortures, having pushed the personality of instruments to its furthest limits; for each instrument represents a character to him. Ah! that remark of his about clarinets: ‘They typify beloved women.’ Ah! it has always made a shiver run down my back. And Chopin, so dandified in his Byronism; the dreamy poet of those who suffer from neurosis! And Mendelssohn, that faultless chiseller! a Shakespeare in dancing pumps, whose ‘songs without words’ are gems for women of intellect! And after that⁠—after that⁠—a man should go down on his knees.”

There was now only one gas-lamp alight just above his head, and the waiter standing behind him stood waiting amid the gloomy, chilly void of the room. Gagnière’s voice had come to a reverential tremolo. He was reaching devotional fervour as he approached the inner tabernacle, the holy of holies.

“Oh! Schumann, typical of despair, the voluptuousness of despair! Yes, the end of everything, the last song of saddened purity hovering above the ruins of the world! Oh! Wagner, the god in whom centuries of music are incarnated! His work is the immense ark, all the arts blended in one; the real humanity of the personages at last expressed, the orchestra itself living apart the life of the drama. And what a massacre of conventionality, of inept formulas! what a revolutionary emancipation amid the infinite! The overture of Tannhäuser, ah! that’s the sublime hallelujah of the new era. First of all comes the chant of the pilgrims, the religious strain, calm, deep and slowly throbbing; then the voices of the sirens gradually drown it; the voluptuous pleasures of Venus, full of enervating delight and languor, grow more and more imperious and disorderly; and soon the sacred air gradually returns, like the aspiring voice of space, and seizes hold of all other strains and blends them in one supreme harmony, to waft them away on the wings of a triumphal hymn!”

“I am going to shut up, sir,” repeated the waiter.

Claude, who no longer listened, he also being absorbed in his own passion, emptied his glass of beer and cried: “Eh, old man, they are going to shut up.”

Then Gagnière trembled. A painful twitch came over his ecstatic face, and he shivered as if he had dropped from the stars. He gulped down his beer, and once on the pavement outside, after pressing his companion’s hand in silence, he walked off into the gloom.

It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when Claude returned to the Rue de Douai. During the week that he had been scouring Paris anew, he had each time brought back with him the feverish excitement of the day. But he had never before returned so late, with his brain so hot and smoky. Christine, overcome with fatigue, was asleep under the lamp, which had gone out, her brow resting on the edge of the table.

VIII

At last Christine gave a final stroke with her feather-broom, and they were settled. The studio in the Rue de Douai, small and inconvenient, had only one little room, and a kitchen, as big as a cupboard, attached to it. They were