| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: "Might I ask, since we are really talking things over,
what you and she live on?"
"On some money that comes from America, from a lawyer.
He sends it every quarter. It isn't much!"
"And won't she have disposed of that?"
My companion hesitated--I saw she was blushing.
"I believe it's mine," she said; and the look and tone which
accompanied these words betrayed so the absence of the habit
of thinking of herself that I almost thought her charming.
The next instant she added, "But she had a lawyer once,
ever so long ago. And some people came and signed something."
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: 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."
"Silence, my friend!" cried Gambara. "I am still under the spell of
that glorious chorus of hell, made still more terrible by the long
trumpets,--a new method of instrumentation. The broken /cadenzas/
which give such force to Robert's scene, the /cavatina/ in the fourth
Gambara |
