Of what difference is it whether, like Keats, he perpetuates his
personal magnetism in a stanza, or, like Paderewski, sheds it, like a
perfume, for that passing moment which is all the eternity ever given to
the creator of beautiful sounds?
A REFLECTION AT A DOLMETSCH CONCERT
The interpreter of ancient music, Arnold Dolmetsch, is one of those rare
magicians who are able to make roses blossom in mid-winter. While music
has been modernising itself until the piano becomes an orchestra, and
Berlioz requires four orchestras to obtain a pianissimo, this strange
man of genius has quietly gone back a few centuries and discovered for
himself an exquisite lost world, which was disappearing like a fresco
peeling off a wall. He has burrowed in libraries and found unknown
manuscripts like a savant, he has worked at misunderstood notations and
found out a way of reading them like a cryptogrammatist, he has first
found out how to restore and then how to make over again harpsichord,
and virginals, and clavichord, and all those instruments which had
become silent curiosities in museums.
It is only beginning to be realised, even by musical people, that the
clavecin music of, for instance, Bach, loses at least half its charm,
almost its identity, when played on the modern grand piano; that the
exquisite music of Rameau and Couperin, the brilliant and beautiful
music of Scarlatti, is almost inaudible on everything but the
harpsichord and the viols; and that there exists, far earlier than these
writers, a mass of English and Italian music of extreme beauty, which
has never been spoiled on the piano because it has never been played on
it.
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