Scan 9
Musical Courier 1894-11-21: Vol 29 Iss 767, 1894
66 lines. Read by computer on 20 September 2026. Printed page 10. See the scan on archive.org.
1noticed in electric letters over a door, "All Hope Abandon, Ye who Enter Here."
3I followed my friend into a library, comfortable and warmed by a fireplace in which hissed and crumbled huge lumps of cannel coal. In all faith I had to confess that the place looked rather snug and homelike. Oswald's tragic expression recalled to me that I was about to discover the hidden secret of his life.
5"And what," said I sitting down and lighting a cigarette, "is the House of the Organ-Point, Oswald? and what in the name of all that is fantastic means Dante's fearsome motto over the door? Is this a suicide club or is it merely some new fangled aesthetic organization where intense young men may gather and say weird things to one another? Or is a German singing society, or—" and here the humor of the idea broke in on me, "mayhap it is a secret college of organists wherein pedal practice may be continued to late hours without the neighbors remonstrating."
7Oswald with his glance of anxious rectitude did not smile at my foolish speech.
9"The House of the Organ-Point is no one of these things you ask," said he softly. "True, we are a club and occasionally meet, but not for recreation nor yet for discussion. You have read Baudelaire, have you not, dear friend? Then you must remember those awful lines beginning:
11"J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un théâtre banal
12Qu'enflammait l'orchestre sonore
13Une fée allumer dans un ciel infernal
14Une miraculeuse aurore;
15J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un théâtre banal
16Un être qui n'était que lumière, or et gaze,
17Terrasser l'énorme Satan;
18Mais mon cœur que jamais ne visite l'extase,
19Est un théâtre où l'on attend.
20Toujours, toujours en vain l'être aux ailes gaze."
22"It sounds like Poe done into French," said I, wondering at Oswald's illy suppressed excitement. "Like a more infernal Poe, John Martin, the English mezzo-tinter, could translate such a poem of sombre bronze into his wondrous art of black and white." I felt that I was merely talking against time. Oswald's actions puzzled me. Why should he get excited over some verse of Baudelaire in a lonely house? Suddenly the murmur of voices roused me, and Oswald started up crying, "They've come!"
24Folding doors heavily draped in black were pushed open at the end of the room, and I found myself looking with eager eyes staring into a large, low ceilinged apartment. Scattered about were a lot of couches upon which many sorts and conditions of men were lounging. There were no pictures on the walls, but a bust stood in a recess and seemed to regard with malevolent expression the company. It was Arthur Schopenhauer's head.
26Conversation was going on, but in a languid style. We entered and I was handed a pipe by Oswald, and sat down in a corner. No one seemed to pay any attention to us and I studied curiously the faces about me. One and all they looked like men of culture. On a few dissipation had stamped its sodden seal. But the majority of the countenances were those of dreamers, men for whom the world had proved too strong, men who were striving to forget. I saw several musicians, one poet and half a dozen painters. The other people I knew not. I could see no evidences of opium and there was certainly no one drinking. Chopin's name was mentioned as I entered, and a big, lazy looking blond fellow near me said:
28"Oh, Chopin! Well, we have got beyond Chopin, I hope. Paul Verlaine is our music maker now."
29"Why?" said a pianist, who did not appear to recognize me, although I knew him well, "why have we got beyond Chopin? To me the Polish composer has an eternal charm."
30"Of course," said the other, "because you are a pianist."
31"You know very well I never play any more," was the sulky rejoinder.
32Then the conversation languished for a time.
33"What does it all mean?" I whispered to Oswald. He only shook his head.
34"The House of the Organ-Point, my friends," said a grave, measured voice, "is the last refuge for the soul that has resolved to abjure its own happiness. Schopenhauer, our illustrious master and founder, declared that only the artist and saint attain Nirvana in this life. Immobility, the state of non-existence, the supreme abnegation of the will, the absolute suppression of the passions, are they not states worth trying for? To live in the idea, ah, my friends, I fear that we are still too worldly; that we still stamp with too much vehemence upon our natures, when surely by this time we should have attained complete psychical freedom. Oh for a cenobite's life! oh for a crust and a hut in the wilderness! The passions bite too hotly in the cities; life thrusts its multi-colored grin on you there. You cannot escape it. To live on one tone; to be yourself the pedal point, while life's coarse, jangling harmonies pass above your soul suspension; to do this, to live music, and not to play it—that is the real life."
35In wonder I gazed at the speaker, not a hoary and bearded Pundit, but a youth of perhaps twenty-five summers. His sunken cheeks, his strained eyes, all gave him a fantastic, detached appearance. What company was I in? What were the aims of this strange crew? Men in the prime and heat of their youth talking of the renunciation of the will to live, of Schopenhauer, then of Chopin, of Verlaine, and all in strangely voluptuous accents, as if the last keen joy of life was this, this denial of self, a denial almost as licentious as sensual, vile indulgences. I was completely bewildered.
37Oswald's voice broke in "J'aime les nuages—les nuages que passent là-bas—les merveilleux nuages!"
38"There you go with your Baudelaire!" said a voice. "Oswald, I fear me greatly that you still love life. It is consuming you. You delight in reciting verses beginning 'J'aime.' You have no right to love anything—not even Baudelarian dream tipped clouds. I suspect that you still yearn after your fiddle." A low murmur went around the room. Oswald shuddered. So did I. The voice of the speaker sounded cheerful, yet its flat tone was infinitely depressing and sinister. It came from a man who wore a beard, and in whose cold gray eyes damnation literally lurked. His mouth was set in sneering fashion and he was the only one in the room who smiled, and when he did I thought of the Devil and Bernard Shaw.
40Again I shuddered and felt mentally nauseated. What club of hopeless wretches had I encountered? Robert Louis Stevenson thought when he penned his "Suicide Club" that he had reached the bottom of depraved imaginings. But here was something more infernal, another and darker nuance of Pain, living yet dead, a club of moral suicides, self-slaughterers of their souls, men who deliberately withdrew from all commerce with the world, who were spiritual and moral perverts; men who abandoned their darling ambitions, their successes, their friends and families, to plunge beyond hope of redemption into a depraved mental condition, a satanic apathy and a slavery worse than that of drugs, yet an exquisite joy in the abstention from joys, an intellectual debasement, a slow strangling of the will, a delight which comes from dallying on the forbidden borders of pain and pleasure, which was all horrible, lascivious and revolting. Surely Buddhism in its home does not work such evils as I saw before me. These men had not the look of absorption and devoutness, which I have seen on the faces of the Oriental. Nor were they lotos eaters. Eastern ideas cannot be readily grafted upon Western civilization. Evil is sure to result. In the weary faces around me, in Oswald's agonized eyes, I saw the hopelessness of the fight.
42Strange, morbid, mental perversions must surely be born of this illegitimate marriage of moral ideas. Oswald was dying by infinitesimal degrees. His violin was his life. All his music was damned up in him, and I saw that the struggle was an unequal one. He must perish or else go mad. And these men, these monsters—what else were they?—mentally sipped with epicurean delight the spectacle of Oswald's ruin. His condition was to their jaded brains as absinthe to the drunkard, for most of them had joined the House, when every pleasure and pain of life had been exhausted. The keen pleasure of negation only was left. Like ruined gamblers, they were throwing their last die, and Oswald, with all his genius, his youth, his brilliant career, was sucked into this vile maelstrom of the worship of nothingness. "His life," I cried aloud in spirit, "his life has not yet been lived; he is not ruined in body, his soul is not a thing full of obscene dust, like the others. My God, my God, what a sacrifice! and for what?"
44My face must have thundered loudly as an index for the man with the voice said, in sardonic accents:
45"Oswald has a Philistine with him to-night, I fear. Oswald cannot break from earthly ties. My dear violinist, you had better go back to your Bohemia, with its silly laughter and wine and its four mewing strings. Such things are for boys, like the illusion of love, a woman's vile smile or the gross nudities of eating. Go back, Oswald, with your friend to his life, to your life. Make empty noises and call it art, and forget all about the lofty heights of pure speculation, the enervishing vision of a will subdued. Go, Oswald, and do not remember the House of the Organ-Point. Go join the mad, modulating crowd." His voice grew more silvery, but it menaced while it plead, and it seemed to come from a distance. In the quiet, hazy atmosphere of the chamber I saw with horror Oswald's altered expression. He looked absolutely dead. His eyes closed and his body became almost rigid. A living corpse, obeying only the will in that voice. With an effort he roused himself, and taking me by the arm said, "Come!" Silently we left the room and walked through the library and into the hall. The outside door was opened for us, but I alone went out into the mist and darkness.
47"The waters of the river have a saffron and a sickly hue, and they flow not onward to the sea, but palpitate forever beneath the red eye of the sun with a tumultuous and convulsive motion. For many miles on either side of the river's oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude, and stretch toward the heavens their long and ghastly necks, and nod to and fro their everlasting heads. And there is an indistinct murmur which cometh out from among them, like the rushing of subterrene water. And they sigh one unto the other."
49Edgar Allen Poe wrote that. It's name is "Silence." Poe, too, tarried in the house which is called Ineffeetual.
51ROSSINI ON THE COMPOSITION OF OVERTURES.
53THE following rules for composing overtures, written by Rossini in answer to a youthful composer who had asked him what to do in order to write an overture, have recently been published, for the first time, in France. From the sarcastic strain in which they are written it is to be inferred that the great composer was in anything but good humor, or that he wanted to choke off bores. Those who are classed in this category may learn something from these rules, even if they are not addicted to "composing" music:
55TO A YOUNG COMPOSER.
571. Wait until the evening before the day the representation is to take place. Nothing is so exciting for the heat of fancy as necessity, the presence of a copyist who is waiting for your work, and the importance of an embarrassed director, who is tearing his hair out in tufts.
58In my time all the directors in Italy were bald by the time they were thirty years of age.
592. I composed the overture to "Otello" in a small room in the Palais de Barbaja, where I had been forcibly incarcerated by the baldest and most ferocious of the directors, with nothing but a platter of macaroni and a menace not to quit the room until I had written the last note.
603. I wrote the overture to the "Gazza Ladra" the first day it was produced, under the roof of the Scala, where I had been imprisoned by the director and where I was watched by four machinists (stage hands), who had orders to throw my work through the window, sheet by sheet, to the copyists, who were waiting below to transcribe it. In default of music paper they were to throw me out of the window.
614. For the "Barber of Seville" I did better; I did not compose an overture, but took one I had destined for a semi-seria opera called "Elisabeth." The public was exceedingly pleased.
625. I composed the overture to "Comte Ory" while I was fishing, my feet in the water, in company with M. Aguado, who was speaking to me all the time of the Spanish finances.
636. That of "Guillaume Tell" was written under nearly similar circumstances.
647. As for "Moise," I did not write any at all.
65G. ROSSINI.
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.