aries of any singing theatre and transported us to Amiens or Chartres.
But Papa Franck never could have managed the hell scenes of Faust.[1] He would have made of Abaddon a truly epicene kingdom, frequented by bardashes and catamites. No, for hell we should turn to Stravinsky, and what a dashing, erratic, spontaneous, discordant devil we might expect from him! A devil in quintuple and sextuple rhythms, a devil decked cap-à-pie with triplets in sixteenths, and figurations after the worst manner of sheol, a delightful, insinuating, firefly, marvellous fellow of a fiend, with piccolos, flutes, clarinets, hautboys, bassoons, French horns, and celestas at his beck and call, a Zamiel with nerve-wracking glissandos on the violins and deep, passionate, long-bowed, mocking viola notes at his command, a Beelzebub with a shower of shuddering octaves and a flood of discordant tenths, an Apollyon who could sing bass and tenor and a little falsetto, in fact, a regular bing-bang-boom hell of a devil in the best Russian Ballet manner!
Now a Stravinsky devil played against a César Franck heaven would create a Faust warranted to keep the oldest subscriber to the Opera awake.
- ↑ When I wrote this I must have forgotten Le Chasseur Maudit.
