to imagine as coming from his own lips the really fine phrase of Vasco, "Wonderful land"; the horizons he is contemplating are the boards, furnished with astonishing landscapes of gilded cardboard, sumptuous processions, dazzling costumes and other magnificent effects; the boards where fright and terror come suddenly to interrupt the joyous feast, where the intoxicated guests see a spectre rise, where the soul of dark conspiracies is revealed merely at the bidding of a minor seventh chord crashed out by the orchestra at the right moment.
To test the correctness of my judgnemt (it is one that brings me into agreement with a great many musicians) you have only to look through Meyerbeer's scores in the best passages, that is in the scenes that are reputed to be the most happily contrived, and find out whether or no a perpetual solution of continuity in the style may be observed in them; whether or no the three or four developments which follow one another in them are written in three or four different languages; a sort of arbitrary selection or instantaneous decision seems to have presided over their choice, as though at each phase of his composition the musician had relapsed into a state of absolute mental confusion, and an uncertainty of musical control, from which he has only been able to extricate himself by making an entirely fresh start. Drawing at random on my memory, I will offer a few examples.
VII
In the Africaine, Act I., Scene I, compare these three passages: "I hope … My hand shall be … The farewell song …”—taken from a space of
