Genoa, July, 1831.
At first I resolved not to answer your letter until I had fulfilled
your injunctions, and composed "Napoleon's Midnight Review;" and
now I have to ask your forgiveness for not having done so, but
there is a peculiarity in this matter. I take music in a very
serious light, and I consider it quite inadmissible to compose
anything that I do not thoroughly feel. It is just as if I were to
utter a falsehood; for notes have as distinct a meaning as words,
perhaps even a more definite sense. Now it appears to me almost
impossible to compose for a descriptive poem. The mass of
compositions of this nature do not militate against this opinion,
but rather prove its truth; for I am not acquainted with one single
work of the kind that has been successful. You are placed between a
dramatic conception or a mere narrative; the one, in the "Erl
Koenig," causes the willows to rustle, the child to shriek, and the
horse to gallop. The other imagines a ballad singer, calmly
narrating the horrible tale, as you would a ghost story, and this
is the most accurate view of the two; Reichardt almost invariably
adopted this reading, but it does not suit me; the music stands in
my way. I feel in a far more spectral spirit when I read such a
poem quietly to myself, and imagine the rest, than when it is
depicted, or related to me.
It does not answer to look on "Napoleon's Midnight Review" as a
narrative, inasmuch as no particular person speaks, and the poem is
not written in the style of a ballad. It seems to me more like a
clever conception than a poem; it strikes me that the poet himself
placed no great faith in his misty forms.
I could indeed have composed music for it in the same descriptive
style, as Neukomm and Fischhof, in Vienna. I might have introduced
a very novel rolling of drums in the bass, and blasts of trumpets
in the treble, and have brought in all sorts of hobgoblins. But I
love my serious elements of sound too well to do anything of the
sort; for this kind of thing always appears to me a joke; somewhat
like the painting's in juvenile spelling-books, where the roofs are
coloured bright red, to make the children aware they are intended
for roofs; and I should have been most reluctant to write out and
send you anything incomplete, or that did not entirely please
myself, because I always wish you to have the best I can
accomplish.