| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: 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
Gambara |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Finished by H. Rider Haggard: and let there be peace. It is nought to me, nought to the
Thing-that-should-never-have-been-born."
Thus he rambled on, as it occurred to me who watched and
listened, talking against time. For I observed that while he
spoke a cloud was passing over the face of the moon, and that
when he ceased speaking it was quite obscured by this cloud, so
that the Vale of Bones was plunged in a deep twilight that was
almost darkness. Further, in a nervous kind of way, he did
something more to his wizard's fire which again caused it to
throw out a fan of smoke that hid him and the execution rock in
front of which he sat.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: disappointment that an exploration, so far successfully
conducted, should come to a stop in the most promising view
of fresh successes. And though unprovided either with
compass or cutlass, it was determined to push some way along
the plateau, marking our direction by the laborious process
of bending down, sitting upon, and thus breaking the wild
cocoanut trees. This was the less regretted by all from a
delightful discovery made of a huge banyan growing here in
the bush, with flying-buttressed flying buttresses, and huge
arcs of trunk hanging high overhead and trailing down new
complications of root. I climbed some way up what seemed the
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