One day we took the train and went down to Mannheim to see King Lear
played in German. It was a mistake. We sat in our seats three whole
hours and never understood anything but the thunder and lightning; and
even that was reversed to suit German ideas, for the thunder came first
and the lightning followed after.... Another time we went to Mannheim
and attended a shivaree—otherwise an opera—the one called Lohengrin. The
banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond
belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my
memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed. There
were circumstances which made it necessary for me to stay through the
four hours to the end, and I stayed; but the recollection of that long,
dragging, relentless season of suffering is indestructible. To have to
endure it in silence, and sitting still, made it all the harder. I was
in a railed compartment with eight or ten strangers, of the two sexes,
and this compelled repression; yet at times the pain was so exquisite
that I could hardly keep the tears back. At those times, as the howlings
and wailings and shriekings of the singers, and the ragings and roarings
and explosions of the vast orchestra rose higher and higher, and wilder
and wilder, and fiercer and fiercer, I could have cried if I had been
alone. Those strangers would not have been surprised to see a man do
such things who was being gradually skinned, but they would have
marveled at it here, and made remarks about it, no doubt, whereas there
was nothing in the present case which was an advantage over being
skinned. There was a wait of half an hour at the end of the first act,
and I could have gone out and rested during that time, but I could not
trust myself to do it, for I felt that I should desert and stay out.
There was another wait of half an hour toward nine o’clock, but I had
gone through so much by that time that I had no spirit left, and so had
no desire but to be let alone.
I do not wish to suggest that the rest of the people there were like me,
for, indeed, they were not. Whether it was that they naturally liked
that noise, or whether it was that they had learned to like it by
getting used to it, I did not at that time know; but they did like
it—this was plain enough. While it was going on they sat and looked rapt
and grateful as cats do when one strokes their backs; and whenever the
curtain fell they rose to their feet, in one solid mighty multitude, and
the air was snowed thick with waving handkerchiefs, and hurricanes of
applause swept the place. This was not comprehensible to me. Of course,
there were many people there who were not under compulsion to stay; yet
the tiers were as full at the close as they had been at the beginning.
This showed that the people liked it....
I suppose there are two kinds of music—one kind which one feels, just as
an oyster might, and another sort which requires a higher faculty, a
faculty which must be assisted and developed by teaching. Yet if base
music gives certain of us wings, why should we want any other? But we
do. We want it because the higher and better like it. But we want it
without giving it the necessary time and trouble; so we climb into that
upper tier, that dress circle, by a lie; we _pretend_ we like it. I know
several of that sort of people—and I propose to be one of them myself
when I get home with my fine European education.