Scan 29
Musical Courier 1892-12-21: Vol 25 Iss 668, 1892
24 lines. Read by computer on 23 September 2026. Printed page 22. See the scan on archive.org.
1Mephisto Among the Manuscripts
3IS the heading of Chapter V. of "The Chatelaine of La Trinité," now appearing in the "Century." Mr. Henry B. Fuller's art talk is very good, and the taste we now give of the clever author's quality should induce our readers to further peruse the novel.
5Aurelia was not long in discovering that in leaving the Lake of Uri for the valley of the Salzach they had simply exchanged one hero for another. Patriotism gave way to melody; Tell was supplanted by Mozart. The fanatical frenzy of the musical amateur appeared early and in all its virulence both in Zeitgeist and the Governor, and it became evident that as long as they remained in Salzburg—most exquisitely lovely of all German towns though it be—nature was to take a place secondary to art. They visited in rapid and regular course the house where Mozart was born, the house in which he subsequently lived, that other house (removed hither all the way from Vienna and set up on the Kapuzinerberg across the river) in which he composed certain of his works, and also that other house where manuscripts, portraits and piano combine to make a veritable little Mozart museum. Zeitgeist caressed with a shining eye the faded physiognomy of that meagre little clavier, and the young women gave forth a sympathetic sigh as they scanned the painted lineaments of its one time owner, but the Governor's attention was almost completely concentrated on the manuscripts; a thousand musical bees were already buzzing in his bonnet, and he was coming to feel that to leave Salzburg without a leaf or two of copy from the master's own hand would be to confess their visit pitifully resultless indeed.
7But he was prepared to be very reasonable in his demands; he would make a point of keeping his expectations quite within the bounds of moderation. To hope for a loose page from the "Zauberflöte" or the "Entführung" would be unwise; to look for a bit of scoring out of one of the great symphonies would be absurd. But something—any little thing at all, however small, however simple—should be, must be found; a scrap from some one of all those numberless masses, a trifling set of exercises for the piano; though truly the thing he most desired was some little sonatina or other arranged for 'cello, piano and the flauto transverso—an unlikely combination indeed, but still among the possibilities. Included in their lodgings on the quay there was a dimmed old rococo salon of the last years of the last century, and it had struck him that an evening of chamber music there—a kind of memorial service, read, as it were, from the master's original manuscript—would not be inappropriate. He seated the Chatelaine at the passé piano, dressed her in brocade, powdered her hair, canopied her with loves and graces and illumined her with clusters of wax lights. Zeitgeist and he completed the group, "but they were both indeterminate in costume and not too plainly in view;" while Fin de Siècle and Aurelia West merely existed negatively, and quite outside the frame as audience. To provide the proper pabulum for such a feast he would use any fair means, and if fair means were found to fail, then he would use—
9Chamber music was Zeitgeist's besetting dissipation. His apprehension of music was mainly intellectual; he delighted in the tough, the abstruse, the over technical. He trudged on in the treadmill of a fugue with a light footed alacrity and could follow a subject in double counterpoint from the score with absolute avidity. A lady had once told him that the playing of his quartet was tiresome. To whom, he had asked. To her, she had replied. And then he had quieted her by saying that chamber music was meant to interest, not the listeners, but the performers. As for the Governor, his delight was wholly in his own work; he played quite indifferently, but he took more pleasure in the uncertain pipings of his own flute than in any sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies in which he had no share. I doubt if even the very harmony of the spheres would have seemed quite to his taste, unless resulting in part from the puckering of his own lips.
11But it was idle to stand on the panoramic height of the Kapuzinerberg in expectation that some chance breeze from below might waft them up a page of manuscript; so during the course of the day the Governor repaired to a certain small shop in an obscure part of the town where, as a friend had advised him, he might be able to satisfy his requirements. It was in a street close to the base of the Mochsberg, against whose steep rise the houses were attached, and in whose side they were partly excavated. The place was in charge of a substantial matron, who drew her hand across her mouth with a kind of anticipatory relish, and who jostled aside a collection of dusty and dented curios to make space for the spreading out of her musical merchandise. She had something to show, and she knew it; she opened up in a way that more than redeemed the promise of the place, and that made the Governor's wish seem not so very difficult of gratification, after all. She had not only Mozart—that was merely the beginning. She had Gluck, Haydn, Mendelssohn; Rossini, hotchpotchy, an omelet in notes; Liszt, bizarre, erratic, a playing to and fro of chain lightning; a letter of Beethoven's, a sad jumble; a page of Rousseau, the slow, painstaking momentumlessness of the half amateur; and bits of the local master à discretion. One of these last Zeitgeist held in his hand, studying it long and carefully. Then he handed it over to the Governor and asked him if it were possible to detect in such pen work any peculiarity of character or temperament that could properly, even possibly, explain the life and death that the composer was made to live and die.
13What other manuscripts of all those lying around them could compare with Mozart's in care, order, regularity, lucidity? A golden mean between the downright, bull headed vigor of Bach and Händel on the one hand, and the over delicate, too refined touch of Chopin, or the morbid and nebulous page of Schubert on the other; a pattern of arrangement, of moderation, of general reasonableness that almost indeed grazed the commonplace. The general course of his life, too, had exhibited the same effect of moderation, self possession and decorum that his manuscripts displayed. His father, a sober and exemplary Christian, had given his childhood instruction—if such extraordinary and mysterious precocity in all matters musical can be said to have received or required instruction—and had accompanied his youth and early manhood—an exceptionally filial one—with advice and watchful care. Accustomed from his earliest years to the most ungrudging, most unbounded recognition of his marvelous gifts, he had earnestly struggled on in a career which he felt his own qualification demanded and deserved. His was a nature foreign to excesses of whatever kind; in the main he was temperate, self controlled—he kept himself well in hand. His disposition was noticeably sunny and sanguine; his personality was peculiarly sympathetic and winning. His self respect, while an active quality, was not so bumptiously self assertive as to put him at an undue disadvantage in the society of the day, while his name and fame received an early and wide effusion through France, the academies, conservatories and theatres of Italy, and all the courts of Germany. But—
15The Governor could not escape the pitiful force of this but. He gave a faint sigh, and absent mindedly creased and re-creased the dingy leaflet in his hand, quite unconscious of the indignant impatience of the shopwoman. Yes, he declared, here, if anywhere, was reason for belief in the active interference of a malignant fate in human affairs; no career that he was at all acquainted with showed such a disheartening discrepancy between cause and effect—such a painful, inexplicable hitch between means and end. It was not enough to say that Mozart was naturally something of an innovator, and was too absorbedly bent on the free vent of his own copious fancyings to keep within academic bounds. Gluck had broken through the bars more completely, and had compelled recognition in a widened field. It would not do to say that the line between the musician and the servant was not drawn very clearly in that day, and that where all the great families—the Esterhazys, the Gallitzins, the Lichtensteins—maintained complete orchestras and ordered new symphonies and serenatas just as they ordered new coats or new tablecloths, the very number of musicians employed would work against the full recognition of the individual. Haydn, under these conditions, had made himself a permanent and respected place. It was not well to lay too great stress on the clouds of infinitesimal and multitudinous cabalists that swarmed and stung on every stage, to the desperation of the composer and his sympathizers; all the other composers of the day labored under the same disadvantages as well. It would not be greatly to the purpose to say that the astounding precocity of Mozart's childhood had prejudiced his subsequent career; for the boy who at four composed pieces for the clavier, at six astonished the monks of Wasserburg by his performance on the organ, at seven rebuked the slow appreciation of the Pompadour, and at fifteen conducted his own opera at Milan, to the wonder and admiration of all Italy, never received an iota of appreciation from his chief patron and most evil of all evil stars, the Archbishop of Salzburg, who fed him at table with valets and cooks, and who rewarded the complete dedication of his time and talent by an honorarium of two ducats a year.
17Indeed the more one pondered the case the more one was tempted to escape from its meshes by recourse to reasons too puerile, too simple, to be accepted by many as reasons at all. Was it not probable that Mozart, with his enjoyment of familiar human intercourse, showed too great a facility in sliding down to meet non-genius on his own plain, common, everyday level; no pretension, no attention, no claims, no consideration? And was it not more than likely that most of Mozart's misfortunes came from his peculiarly insignificant physique, in a day when "presence" counted for so much? What chance had this poor little fellow of holding his own against the robust, overtopping prince bishop, the lordly Hieronymus von Colloredo, with his horses and hounds, his trains of swarming servants and retainers, and the bevy of magnificent women with whom he loved to surround himself? The same chance that a butterfly has amid the belchings of some soot blackened chimney; the same chance that a bubbling spring has against the associated spades of a crowd of clod heaving navvies. But that such a soul should have passed away singing, as we may say, and surrounded, in all literalness, by its mates, and that the body it left behind should have been carelessly hurried to the common trench—
19The exasperated shopkeeper snatched her maltreated manuscript from the Governor's unconscious hand and laid it on top of the others, which had already been placed back in their box. The Governor put his sympathies into one pocket and got his 'purse out of another, and came away with such purchases as Zeitgeist's taste and acumen, added to his own, could contrive. But all the Mozart manuscripts were not in the hands of the laity, as it presently came to be discovered. Salzburg is nothing if not ecclesiastical, and there is quite a round of churches and convents for those disposed to make the most of the place. Some of these places are inaccessible to ladies, and some of them are quite out of the question for gentlemen; but at such as were practicable for both the Chatelaine's friends were able to note how easy it was for her to slide from the secular into the devotional. The unconscious simplicity of these transitions was viewed by Aurelia West with a kind of awed embarrassment; her own devotions were of course performed only at stated intervals and under circumstances conventionally correct; she herself was more or less unable to feel the efficacy of weekday prayer, and really preferred to worship in the company of other ladies gowned and bonneted for that purpose. It surprised her a good deal to see with what an indulgent interest these extemporaneous devotions, briefly undertaken in dusky corners, were regarded by the young men, for she knew that the Chatelaine's unlifted eye found no counterpart in either of them. Fin de Siècle, far from looking up to religion, looked down upon it, while Zeitgeist looked aslant at it with a level gaze that claimed to see the good and the bad in every system, and to weigh them quite coolly and indifferently against each other. But they both appreciated the devotional as an element in the female character, the one feeling that to the ewigweibliche we must look more and more for faith and imagination, and the other holding that a serious, large eyed young woman, with a strong affinity for the prie dieu, made the most charming of frontispieces—what a pity that in the best made books of fiction a frontispiece was no longer chic. And neither of them, I fancy, would have resented a churchly wife.
21In one of these churches one morning, the Governor having inexplicably vanished, the young men were taking advantage of so appropriate a time and place to air their theological views. Zeitgeist had already upset the sacred chronology, to the scandal of Aurelia West, and Fin de Siècle was engaging in cracking a series of ornamental flourishes against the supernatural about the startled ears of the Chatelaine, when the Governor, emerging from nowhere in particular, as it seemed, came tripping toward them, to the great relief of the orthodox sex, with a twinkle in his eyes and a dusty document in his extended hand. He announced with great glee that he had just got hold of another Mozart manuscript, and he justified himself before the reproachful Chatelaine, who appeared to be suspecting some grave impropriety or worse, by a statement of the facts. He had burst unexpectedly at once into the sacristy and into a rehearsal. He had found a lank old man in a cassock seated before a music rest in the midst of a dozen little chaps dressed in red petticoats and white overthings, and every one of those blessed choristers was singing at the top of his lungs—had any of them heard it?—his own proper part in a Mozart mass from a real Mozart manuscript. They were being kept to the mark by a pair of lay brothers who played—incredible and irreverent combination!—a tuba and a bassoon; and the master had quieted his obstreperous aids and had come straight to him in the most civil manner, and—well, here was the manuscript; 20 florins well spent. It was not a mass—oh, dear, no; let nobody think it—it was a little trio—la-a-a, la la la, la-a-a, that was the way it went. These parts here were for two violins, probably, but they would go well enough on the flute and the upper strings of the 'cello. Really it was not so difficult after all, this finding of manuscripts, and he felt that he could soon leave Salzburg quite content.
23The Governor's content was raised a degree higher still a little later in the day, as he was strolling among the clipped hedges and marble statues of the old archiepiscopal pleasance behind the Schloss Mirabell, a garden cut after the old French mode, and as little expressive of sanctity as are the fatigued gaiety and worldly charm of a wearied beauty just home from a ball. The Governor was all the time conscious that his was not the only pair of lungs breathing in the world weary atmosphere of this sophisticated earth; and he presently perceived, modestly, hovering about behind a hedge of arbor vitae, a youth with a battered brown portfolio under his arm. The Governor was presently examining the contents of this portfolio (with an interest that did not quite rise to enthusiasm, however), and had soon committed himself to an appoint-
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