| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: the estate, which, after her death, passed to a relative of her
husband's--one who knew not Felice, one whose purpose seemed to be
to blot out every vestige of her.
On a certain day in February--the cheerful day of St. Valentine,
in fact--a letter reached Mrs. Fitzpiers, which had been mentally
promised her for that particular day a long time before.
It announced that Fitzpiers was living at some midland town, where
he had obtained a temporary practice as assistant to some local
medical man, whose curative principles were all wrong, though he
dared not set them right. He had thought fit to communicate with
her on that day of tender traditions to inquire if, in the event
The Woodlanders |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: he is on the stage at the time or not.
In truth, dramatic characterization in music cannot be carried
very far by the use of representative themes. Mozart, the
greatest of all masters of this art, never dreamt of employing
them; and, extensively as they are used in The Ring, they do not
enable Wagner to dispense with the Mozartian method. Apart from
the themes, Siegfried and Mimmy are still as sharply
distinguished from one another by the character of their music as
Don Giovanni from Leporello, Wotan from Gutrune as Sarastro from
Papagena. It is true that the themes attached to the characters
have the same musical appropriateness as the rest of the music:
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: connect families scientifically far apart, filling up a fresh link
in the great chain, or rather the great network, of zoological
classification. For here we have a simple, and, as it were, crude
form; of which, if we dared to indulge in reveries, we might say
that the Creative Mind realized it before either Actiniae or
Holothurians, and then went on to perfect the idea contained in it
in two different directions; dividing it into two different
families, and making on its model, by adding new organs, and taking
away old ones, in one direction the whole family of Actiniae (sea-
anemones), and in a quite opposite one the Holothuriae, those
strange sea-cucumbers, with their mouth-fringe of feathery gills,
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