“Not even _Norma_? Or the _Barbiere_?”
I put on Battistini in “La ci darem” out of _Don Giovanni_. He agreed
that the singing was good; but I could see that he didn’t much like the
music. Why not? He found it difficult to explain.
“It’s not like _Pagliacci_,” he said at last.
“Not palpitating?” I suggested, using a word with which I was sure he
would be familiar; for it occurs in every Italian political speech and
patriotic leading article.
“Not palpitating,” he agreed.
And I reflected that it is precisely by the difference between
_Pagliacci_ and _Don Giovanni_, between the palpitating and the
non-palpitating, that modern musical taste is separated from the old.
The corruption of the best, I thought, is the worst. Beethoven taught
music to palpitate with his intellectual and spiritual passion. It
has gone on palpitating ever since, but with the passion of inferior
men. Indirectly, I thought, Beethoven is responsible for _Parsifal_,
_Pagliacci_, and the _Poem of Fire_; still more indirectly for
_Samson and Delilah_ and “Ivy, cling to me.” Mozart’s melodies may be
brilliant, memorable, infectious; but they don’t palpitate, don’t catch
you between wind and water, don’t send the listener off into erotic
ecstasies.
Carlo and his elder children found my gramophone, I am afraid, rather a
disappointment. They were too polite, however, to say so openly; they
merely ceased, after the first day or two, to take any interest in the
machine and the music it played. They preferred the guitar and their
own singing.
Guido, on the other hand, was immensely interested. And he liked, not
the cheerful dance tunes, to whose sharp rhythms our little Robin
loved to go stamping round and round the room, pretending that he was
a whole regiment of soldiers, but the genuine stuff. The first record
he heard, I remember, was that of the slow movement of Bach’s Concerto
in D Minor for two violins. That was the disk I put on the turntable
as soon as Carlo had left me. It seemed to me, so to speak, the most
musical piece of music with which I could refresh my long-parched
mind--the coolest and clearest of all draughts. The movement had just
got under way and was beginning to unfold its pure and melancholy
beauties in accordance with the laws of the most exacting intellectual
logic, when the two children, Guido in front and little Robin
breathlessly following, came clattering into the room from the loggia.
Guido came to a halt in front of the gramophone and stood there,
motionless, listening. His pale blue-grey eyes opened themselves
wide; making a little nervous gesture that I had often noticed in him
before, he plucked at his lower lip with his thumb and forefinger. He
must have taken a deep breath; for I noticed that, after listening
for a few seconds, he sharply expired and drew in a fresh gulp of air.
For an instant he looked at me--a questioning, astonished, rapturous
look--gave a little laugh that ended in a kind of nervous shudder, and
turned back towards the source of the incredible sounds. Slavishly
imitating his elder comrade, Robin had also taken up his stand in front
of the gramophone, and in exactly the same position, glancing at Guido
from time to time to make sure that he was doing everything, down to
plucking at his lip, in the correct way. But after a minute or so he
became bored.
“Soldiers,” he said, turning to me; “I want soldiers. Like in London.”
He remembered the rag-time and the jolly marches round and round the
room.