| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: numbers, and which might have been raised to considerable
dramatic and musical importance had it been incorporated into a
continuous musical fabric by thematic treatment. Finally,
Mozart's most dramatic finales and concerted numbers are more or
less in sonata form, like symphonic movements, and must therefore
be classed as musical prose. And sonata form dictates repetitions
and recapitulations from which the perfectly unconventional form
adopted by Wagner is free. On the whole, there is more scope for
both repetition and convention in the old form than in the new;
and the poorer a composer's musical gift is, the surer he is to
resort to the eighteenth century patterns to eke out his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: usually employed by the superior classes,
with the exception of the few who were still inclined
to boast their Saxon descent.
``What mean these fellows by their capricious
insolence?'' said the Templar to the Benedictine,
``and why did you prevent me from chastising it?''
``Marry, brother Brian,'' replied the Prior,
``touching the one of them, it were hard for me
to render a reason for a fool speaking according
to his folly; and the other churl is of that savage,
fierce, intractable race, some of whom, as I have
Ivanhoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions,
in his chapter on the "Duty of Submission to Civil
Government," resolves all civil obligation into expediency;
and he proceeds to say that "so long as the interest of the
whole society requires it, that it, so long as the established
government cannot be resisted or changed without public
inconveniencey, it is the will of God. . .that the
established government be obeyed--and no longer. This
principle being admitted, the justice of every particular
case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the
quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
