And, having
made with his own hands the materials of the music which he has
recovered from oblivion, he has taught himself and he has taught others
to play this music on these instruments and to sing it to their
accompaniment. In a music room, which is really the living room of a
house, with viols hanging on the walls, a chamber-organ in one corner,
a harpsichord in another, a clavichord laid across the arms of a chair,
this music seems to carry one out of the world, and shut one in upon a
house of dreams, full of intimate and ghostly voices. It is a house of
peace, where music is still that refreshment which it was before it took
fever, and became accomplice and not minister to the nerves, and brought
the clamour of the world into its seclusion.
Go from a concert at Dolmetsch's to a Tschaikowsky concert at the
Queen's Hall. Tschaikowsky is a debauch, not so much passionate as
feverish. The rushing of his violins, like the rushing of an army of
large winged birds; the thud, snap, and tingle of his strange orchestra;
the riotous image of Russian peasants leaping and hopping in their
country dances, which his dance measures call up before one; those sweet
solid harmonies in which (if I may quote the voluptuous phrase of a
woman) one sets one's teeth as into nougat; all this is like a very
material kind of pleasure, in which the senses for a moment forget the
soul.
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