are at once triumphant
and charged with a pathos nearly unendurable in its intensity. The
scene ends with a strange hushed unison passage like some unearthly
chant: it is the lull before the breaking of the storm. The entry of
Pizarro and the pistol business are by no means done as Wagner or
Mozart would have done them. The music is always excellent and
sometimes great, but persistently symphonic and not dramatic in
character. However, it serves; and the strength of the situation
carries one on until the trumpet call is heard, and then we get a
wonderful tune such as neither Mozart nor Wagner could have written--a
tune that is sheer Beethoven. The finale of the scene is neither here
nor there; but in the duet between Leonora and Florestan we have again
pure Beethoven. There is one passage--it begins at bar 32--which is
the expression of the very soul of the composer; one feels that if it
had not come his heart must have burst. I have neither space nor
inclination to rehearse all the splendours of the opera, but may
remind the reader of Florestan's song in the dungeon, Leonora's
address to Hope, and the hundred other fine things spread over it. It
is symphonic, not dramatic, music; but it is at times unspeakably
pathetic, at times full of radiant strength, and always an absolutely
truthful utterance of sheer human emotion. Wagner hit exactly the word
when he spoke of the _truthful_ Beethoven: here is no pose, no mere
tone-weaving, but the precise and most poignant expression of the
logical course taken by the human passions.

SCHUBERT

Excepting during his lifetime and for a period of some thirty years
after his death, Schubert cannot be said to have been neglected; and
last year there was quite an epidemic of concerts to celebrate the
hundredth anniversary of his birth. Centenary celebrations are often a
little disconcerting. They remind one that a composer has been dead
either a much shorter or a much longer time than one supposed; and one
gets down Riemann's "Musical Dictionary" and realises with a sigh that
the human memory is treacherous. Who, for instance, that is familiar
with Schubert's music can easily believe that it is a hundred years
since the composer was born and seventy since he died? It is as
startling to find him, as one might say, one of the ancients as it is
to remember that Spohr lived until comparatively recent times; for
whereas Spohr's music is already older than Beethoven's, older than