Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/81

And how can I fail to dwell upon that marvel of marvels, the love scene in the fifth act between Castor and Telaïre? A love scene treated throughout in recitative, what a change both from the impotence of the recitative secco and from the romantic eloquence to which we are accustomed! Rameau employed this method because truth required it. The two lovers are re-united only for a day. The hour that brings them together bids them also take their last farewell. How could they yield themselves to happy embraces, surrenders, or songs of passionate despair? Their souls are divided between ecstasy and utter heaviness. Other musicians, in some cases great ones, dealing with an analogous situation, have expressed successively and separately the two contrary feelings, giving free play in either direction to their eloquence, but they are false to Nature. Rameau follows Nature. He keeps to the true note of this state of mixed feelings, he represents the double current. Is his music thereby less moving? On the contrary it is more so, and in style far more lofty and appealing. Read and re-read those four immortal pages beginning at the words: "So heaven is touched at tenderest alarms" and on to these: "Alas, can I believe it? Faithless one, thine only boast to keep thy tryst with death!" Read those lines again: you will not weary of them. What rhythm, what stateliness, what judgment, what feeling, and what music! In modern music I know of long love duets, that have gained well-deserved fame, that fill the orchestra with music, the theatre with sound, and the audience with delirium. But how much would I prefer to have written just those four pages, that melodious murmur divinely touched with tenderness and grief!