Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Love Affairs of great Musicians, Vol 1 by Rupert Hughes
CHAPTER I. THE OVERTURE
Musicians as lovers! The very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of "the inexpressive She;" the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous waltzes; the duets; the trills and trinkets of flirtatious scherzi; the laughing roulades; the discords melted into concord as solitude into the arms of reunion--these are
music's very own.
So capable of love and its expression is music, indeed, that you almost wonder if any but musicians have ever truly loved, or loving have expressed. And yet--! Round every corner there lurks an "and yet." And if you only continue your march, or your reading, you always reach that corner.
Your first thought would be, that a good musician must be a good lover; that a broken heart alone can add the Master's degree to the usual conservatory diploma of Bachelor of Music; that all musicians must be sentimental, if musicians at all; and finally that only musicians can
know how to announce and embellish that primeval theme to which all existence is but variations, more or less brilliant, more or less in tune.
But go a little further, and closer study will prove that some of the world's greatest virtuosos in love could neither make nor carry a tune; and that, by corollary, some of the greatest tunesters in the world were tyros, ignoramuses, or heretics in that old lovers' arithmetic which begins: 1 plus 1 equals 1.
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