Vergina era
D’ alta belta, ma sua belta non cura:
....
Di natura, d’ amor, de’ cieli amici
Le negligenze sue sono artifici.
“Gerusal. Lib.,” canto ii. xiv.-xviii.
(She was a virgin of a glorious beauty, but regarded not her
beauty...Negligence itself is art in those favoured by Nature, by
love, and by the heavens.)
At Naples, in the latter half of the last century, a worthy artist named
Gaetano Pisani lived and flourished. He was a musician of great genius,
but not of popular reputation; there was in all his compositions
something capricious and fantastic which did not please the taste of the
Dilettanti of Naples. He was fond of unfamiliar subjects into which he
introduced airs and symphonies that excited a kind of terror in those
who listened. The names of his pieces will probably suggest their
nature. I find, for instance, among his MSS., these titles: “The Feast
of the Harpies,” “The Witches at Benevento,” “The Descent of Orpheus
into Hades,” “The Evil Eye,” “The Eumenides,” and many others
that evince a powerful imagination delighting in the fearful and
supernatural, but often relieved by an airy and delicate fancy with
passages of exquisite grace and beauty. It is true that in the selection
of his subjects from ancient fable, Gaetano Pisani was much more
faithful than his contemporaries to the remote origin and the early
genius of Italian Opera.
That descendant, however effeminate, of the ancient union between Song
and Drama, when, after long obscurity and dethronement, it regained a
punier sceptre, though a gaudier purple, by the banks of the Etrurian
Arno, or amidst the lagunes of Venice, had chosen all its primary
inspirations from the unfamiliar and classic sources of heathen legend;
and Pisani’s “Descent of Orpheus” was but a bolder, darker, and more
scientific repetition of the “Euridice” which Jacopi Peri set to music
at the august nuptials of Henry of Navarre and Mary of Medicis.* Still,
as I have said, the style of the Neapolitan musician was not on the
whole pleasing to ears grown nice and euphuistic in the more dulcet
melodies of the day; and faults and extravagances easily discernible,
and often to appearance wilful, served the critics for an excuse for
their distaste. Fortunately, or the poor musician might have starved,
he was not only a composer, but also an excellent practical performer,
especially on the violin, and by that instrument he earned a decent
subsistence as one of the orchestra at the Great Theatre of San Carlo.
Here formal and appointed tasks necessarily kept his eccentric fancies
in tolerable check, though it is recorded that no less than five times
he had been deposed from his desk for having shocked the conoscenti,
and thrown the whole band into confusion, by impromptu variations of so
frantic and startling a nature that one might well have imagined that
the harpies or witches who inspired his compositions had clawed hold of
his instrument.
The impossibility, however, to find any one of equal excellence as a
performer (that is to say, in his more lucid and orderly moments) had
forced his reinstalment, and he had now, for the most part, reconciled
himself to the narrow sphere of his appointed adagios or allegros. The
audience, too, aware of his propensity, were quick to perceive the least
deviation from the text; and if he wandered for a moment, which
might also be detected by the eye as well as the ear, in some strange
contortion of visage, and some ominous flourish of his bow, a gentle and
admonitory murmur recalled the musician from his Elysium or his Tartarus
to the sober regions of his desk. Then he would start as if from a
dream, cast a hurried, frightened, apologetic glance around, and, with
a crestfallen, humbled air, draw his rebellious instrument back to the
beaten track of the glib monotony. But at home he would make himself
amends for this reluctant drudgery. And there, grasping the unhappy
violin with ferocious fingers, he would pour forth, often till the
morning rose, strange, wild measures that would startle the early
fisherman on the shore below with a superstitious awe, and make him
cross himself as if mermaid or sprite had wailed no earthly music in his
ear.
(*Orpheus was the favourite hero of early Italian Opera, or
Lyrical Drama. The Orfeo of Angelo Politiano was produced in
1475. The Orfeo of Monteverde was performed at Venice in
1667.)
This man’s appearance was in keeping with the characteristics of his
art. The features were noble and striking, but worn and haggard,
with black, careless locks tangled into a maze of curls, and a fixed,
speculative, dreamy stare in his large and hollow eyes. All his
movements were peculiar, sudden, and abrupt, as the impulse seized him;
and in gliding through the streets, or along the beach, he was heard
laughing and talking to himself. Withal, he was a harmless, guileless,
gentle creature, and would share his mite with any idle lazzaroni, whom
he often paused to contemplate as they lay lazily basking in the sun.
Yet was he thoroughly unsocial. He formed no friends, flattered no
patrons, resorted to none of the merry-makings so dear to the children
of music and the South. He and his art seemed alone suited to each
other,--both quaint, primitive, unworldly, irregular. You could not
separate the man from his music; it was himself. Without it he was
nothing, a mere machine! WITH it, he was king over worlds of his own.
Poor man, he had little enough in this! At a manufacturing town in
England there is a gravestone on which the epitaph records “one Claudius
Phillips, whose absolute contempt for riches, and inimitable performance
on the violin, made him the admiration of all that knew him!” Logical
conjunction of opposite eulogies! In proportion, O Genius, to thy
contempt for riches will be thy performance on thy violin!
Gaetano Pisani’s talents as a composer had been chiefly exhibited
in music appropriate to this his favourite instrument, of all
unquestionably the most various and royal in its resources and power
over the passions. As Shakespeare among poets is the Cremona among
instruments. Nevertheless, he had composed other pieces of larger
ambition and wider accomplishment, and chief of these, his precious, his
unpurchased, his unpublished, his unpublishable and imperishable opera
of the “Siren.” This great work had been the dream of his boyhood, the
mistress of his manhood; in advancing age “it stood beside him like
his youth.” Vainly had he struggled to place it before the world. Even
bland, unjealous Paisiello, Maestro di Capella, shook his gentle head
when the musician favoured him with a specimen of one of his most
thrilling scenas. And yet, Paisiello, though that music differs from all
Durante taught thee to emulate, there may--but patience, Gaetano Pisani!
bide thy time, and keep thy violin in tune!
Strange as it may appear to the fairer reader, this grotesque personage
had yet formed those ties which ordinary mortals are apt to consider
their especial monopoly,--he was married, and had one child. What is
more strange yet, his wife was a daughter of quiet, sober, unfantastic
England: she was much younger than himself; she was fair and gentle,
with a sweet English face; she had married him from choice, and (will
you believe it?) she yet loved him. How she came to marry him, or how
this shy, unsocial, wayward creature ever ventured to propose, I can
only explain by asking you to look round and explain first to ME how
half the husbands and half the wives you meet ever found a mate! Yet, on
reflection, this union was not so extraordinary after all. The girl was
a natural child of parents too noble ever to own and claim her. She was
brought into Italy to learn the art by which she was to live, for she
had taste and voice; she was a dependant and harshly treated, and poor
Pisani was her master, and his voice the only one she had heard from
her cradle that seemed without one tone that could scorn or chide. And
so--well, is the rest natural? Natural or not, they married. This young
wife loved her husband; and young and gentle as she was, she might
almost be said to be the protector of the two. From how many disgraces
with the despots of San Carlo and the Conservatorio had her unknown
officious mediation saved him! In how many ailments--for his frame was
weak--had she nursed and tended him! Often, in the dark nights, she
would wait at the theatre with her lantern to light him and her steady
arm to lean on; otherwise, in his abstract reveries, who knows but the
musician would have walked after his “Siren” into the sea! And then she
would so patiently, perhaps (for in true love there is not always the
finest taste) so DELIGHTEDLY, listen to those storms of eccentric and
fitful melody, and steal him--whispering praises all the way--from the
unwholesome night-watch to rest and sleep!
I said his music was a part of the man, and this gentle creature seemed
a part of the music; it was, in fact, when she sat beside him that
whatever was tender or fairy-like in his motley fantasia crept into the
harmony as by stealth. Doubtless her presence acted on the music, and
shaped and softened it; but, he, who never examined how or what his
inspiration, knew it not. All that he knew was, that he loved and
blessed her. He fancied he told her so twenty times a day; but he never
did, for he was not of many words, even to his wife. His language
was his music,--as hers, her cares! He was more communicative to his
barbiton, as the learned Mersennus teaches us to call all the varieties
of the great viol family. Certainly barbiton sounds better than
fiddle; and barbiton let it be. He would talk to THAT by the hour
together,--praise it, scold it, coax it, nay (for such is man, even the
most guileless), he had been known to swear at it; but for that excess
he was always penitentially remorseful. And the barbiton had a tongue of
his own, could take his own part, and when HE also scolded, had much
the best of it. He was a noble fellow, this Violin!--a Tyrolese, the
handiwork of the illustrious Steiner. There was something mysterious in
his great age. How many hands, now dust, had awakened his strings ere
he became the Robin Goodfellow and Familiar of Gaetano Pisani! His very
case was venerable,--beautifully painted, it was said, by Caracci. An
English collector had offered more for the case than Pisani had ever
made by the violin. But Pisani, who cared not if he had inhabited a
cabin himself, was proud of a palace for the barbiton. His barbiton, it
was his elder child! He had another child, and now we must turn to her.
How shall I describe thee, Viola? Certainly the music had something to
answer for in the advent of that young stranger. For both in her form
and her character you might have traced a family likeness to that
singular and spirit-like life of sound which night after night threw
itself in airy and goblin sport over the starry seas...Beautiful
she was, but of a very uncommon beauty,--a combination, a harmony of
opposite attributes. Her hair of a gold richer and purer than that
which is seen even in the North; but the eyes, of all the dark, tender,
subduing light of more than Italian--almost of Oriental--splendour. The
complexion exquisitely fair, but never the same,--vivid in one moment,
pale the next. And with the complexion, the expression also varied;
nothing now so sad, and nothing now so joyous.
I grieve to say that what we rightly entitle education was much
neglected for their daughter by this singular pair. To be sure, neither
of them had much knowledge to bestow; and knowledge was not then the
fashion, as it is now. But accident or nature favoured young Viola. She
learned, as of course, her mother’s language with her father’s. And she
contrived soon to read and to write; and her mother, who, by the
way, was a Roman Catholic, taught her betimes to pray. But then, to
counteract all these acquisitions, the strange habits of Pisani, and the
incessant watch and care which he required from his wife, often left the
child alone with an old nurse, who, to be sure, loved her dearly, but
who was in no way calculated to instruct her.
Dame Gionetta was every inch Italian and Neapolitan. Her youth had been
all love, and her age was all superstition. She was garrulous, fond,--a
gossip. Now she would prattle to the girl of cavaliers and princes at
her feet, and now she would freeze her blood with tales and legends,
perhaps as old as Greek or Etrurian fable, of demon and vampire,--of the
dances round the great walnut-tree at Benevento, and the haunting spell
of the Evil Eye. All this helped silently to weave charmed webs over
Viola’s imagination that afterthought and later years might labour
vainly to dispel. And all this especially fitted her to hang, with a
fearful joy, upon her father’s music. Those visionary strains, ever
struggling to translate into wild and broken sounds the language of
unearthly beings, breathed around her from her birth. Thus you might
have said that her whole mind was full of music; associations, memories,
sensations of pleasure or pain,--all were mixed up inexplicably with
those sounds that now delighted and now terrified; that greeted her when
her eyes opened to the sun, and woke her trembling on her lonely couch
in the darkness of the night. The legends and tales of Gionetta only
served to make the child better understand the signification of those
mysterious tones; they furnished her with words to the music. It was
natural that the daughter of such a parent should soon evince some taste
in his art. But this developed itself chiefly in the ear and the voice.
She was yet a child when she sang divinely. A great Cardinal--great
alike in the State and the Conservatorio--heard of her gifts, and sent
for her. From that moment her fate was decided: she was to be the future
glory of Naples, the prima donna of San Carlo.
The Cardinal insisted upon the accomplishment of his own predictions,
and provided her with the most renowned masters. To inspire her with
emulation, his Eminence took her one evening to his own box: it would
be something to see the performance, something more to hear the applause
lavished upon the glittering signoras she was hereafter to excel! Oh,
how gloriously that life of the stage, that fairy world of music and
song, dawned upon her! It was the only world that seemed to correspond
with her strange childish thoughts. It appeared to her as if, cast
hitherto on a foreign shore, she was brought at last to see the forms
and hear the language of her native land. Beautiful and true enthusiasm,
rich with the promise of genius! Boy or man, thou wilt never be a poet,
if thou hast not felt the ideal, the romance, the Calypso’s isle that
opened to thee when for the first time the magic curtain was drawn
aside, and let in the world of poetry on the world of prose!
And now the initiation was begun. She was to read, to study, to depict
by a gesture, a look, the passions she was to delineate on the boards;
lessons dangerous, in truth, to some, but not to the pure enthusiasm
that comes from art; for the mind that rightly conceives art is but
a mirror which gives back what is cast on its surface faithfully
only--while unsullied. She seized on nature and truth intuitively. Her
recitations became full of unconscious power; her voice moved the heart
to tears, or warmed it into generous rage. But this arose from that
sympathy which genius ever has, even in its earliest innocence, with
whatever feels, or aspires, or suffers.
It was no premature woman comprehending the love or the jealousy that
the words expressed; her art was one of those strange secrets which
the psychologists may unriddle to us if they please, and tell us why
children of the simplest minds and the purest hearts are often so acute
to distinguish, in the tales you tell them, or the songs you sing, the
difference between the true art and the false, passion and jargon, Homer
and Racine,--echoing back, from hearts that have not yet felt what they
repeat, the melodious accents of the natural pathos. Apart from
her studies, Viola was a simple, affectionate, but somewhat wayward
child,--wayward, not in temper, for that was sweet and docile; but in
her moods, which, as I before hinted, changed from sad to gay and gay to
sad without an apparent cause. If cause there were, it must be traced to
the early and mysterious influences I have referred to, when seeking to
explain the effect produced on her imagination by those restless streams
of sound that constantly played around it; for it is noticeable that to
those who are much alive to the effects of music, airs and tunes often
come back, in the commonest pursuits of life, to vex, as it were, and
haunt them. The music, once admitted to the soul, becomes also a sort
of spirit, and never dies. It wanders perturbedly through the halls and
galleries of the memory, and is often heard again, distinct and living
as when it first displaced the wavelets of the air. Now at times, then,
these phantoms of sound floated back upon her fancy; if gay, to call
a smile from every dimple; if mournful, to throw a shade upon her
brow,--to make her cease from her childishmirth, and sit apart and muse.
Rightly, then, in a typical sense, might this fair creature, so airy in
her shape, so harmonious in her beauty, so unfamiliar in her ways and
thoughts,--rightly might she be called a daughter, less of the musician
than the music, a being for whom you could imagine that some fate was
reserved, less of actual life than the romance which, to eyes that can
see, and hearts that can feel, glides ever along WITH the actual life,
stream by stream, to the Dark Ocean.
And therefore it seemed not strange that Viola herself, even in
childhood, and yet more as she bloomed into the sweet seriousness of
virgin youth, should fancy her life ordained for a lot, whether of bliss
or woe, that should accord with the romance and reverie which made the
atmosphere she breathed. Frequently she would climb through the thickets
that clothed the neighbouring grotto of Posilipo,--the mighty work of
the old Cimmerians,--and, seated by the haunted Tomb of Virgil, indulge
those visions, the subtle vagueness of which no poetry can render
palpable and defined; for the Poet that surpasses all who ever sang, is
the heart of dreaming youth! Frequently there, too, beside the threshold
over which the vine-leaves clung, and facing that dark-blue, waveless
sea, she would sit in the autumn noon or summer twilight, and build her
castles in the air. Who doth not do the same,--not in youth alone, but
with the dimmed hopes of age! It is man’s prerogative to dream, the
common royalty of peasant and of king. But those day-dreams of hers were
more habitual, distinct, and solemn than the greater part of us indulge.
They seemed like the Orama of the Greeks,--prophets while phantasma.