The Unknown Masterpiece

by Honoré de Balzac

  The other guests, a famished crew whose wit awakened at the prospect of any meal, good or bad, betrayed a distinct hostility to poor Gambara, only waiting for the second course to give free rein to their abuse. One refugee, whose ogling betrayed a particular intention with regard to Marianna and who supposed he would make his way into her favors by intensifying the general mockery of her husband, opened fire by familiarizing the newcomer with the procedures of the table d’hôte.

  “How long it’s been since we’ve heard anything about that Mohammed opera of yours!” he exclaimed, grinning at Marianna. “Could it be that Paolo Gambara, caught up in the toils of domestic life and absorbed by the charms of the hearth, is neglecting that superhuman gift of his, while his genius grows cold and his imagination lukewarm?”

  Gambara knew all the guests, and believed he dwelt in a sphere so superior to theirs that he no longer bothered to repel their attacks; he made no answer.

  “Not everyone,” continued the journalist, “possesses sufficient intelligence to understand monsieur’s musical lucubrations, which is doubtless what keeps our divine maestro from presenting his works to our good Parisians.”

  “However,” observed the composer of ballads, who previously had opened his mouth only to gulp down whatever was put into it, “I know men of talent who actually commend the judgment of ‘our good Parisians.’ I myself have some reputation as a musician,” he added modestly, “which at present I owe to no more than my little vaudeville tunes and the success of my quadrilles in the salons; but I fully expect to complete, in the near future, a requiem mass composed for the anniversary of Beethoven’s death, which I believe will be better understood in Paris than anywhere else. Will monsieur do me the honor of coming to hear it?” he inquired of Andrea.

  “Thank you,” the count replied. “I am not endowed with organs requisite for the appreciation of French vocal music. But if you were dead, monsieur, and Beethoven had written the requiem, I should not fail to come and hear it.”

  This observation put an end to the skirmishes of those attempting to rouse Gambara to the defense of his obsessions for the newcomer’s amusement. Already Andrea was feeling some reluctance to expose so noble and so touching a mania to such vulgar judgments. He pursued without any ulterior motive a rambling discussion with the composer, in the course of which Signor Giardini’s nose was frequently interposed between their remarks. Each time Gambara uttered some lively witticism or some paradoxical notion, the chef would thrust his head forward, dart a pitying glance at the composer, then one of connivance at the count, whispering in the latter’s ear: “È matto!” A moment came when the chef interrupted these judicious observations in order to attend to the second course, to which he attached great importance.

  During his brief absence, Gambara murmured to Andrea: “Our good Giardini threatens us today with a dish of his own concoction which I advise you to respect, though it is his wife who has overseen its preparation. The poor fellow has an obsession with culinary innovations. He has ruined himself in gastronomic experiments, the last of which obliged him to quit Rome without a passport, a circumstance he never mentions. After buying a famous restaurant there, he was engaged to prepare a dinner to be given by a newly installed cardinal whose household was not yet complete. Giardini regarded this as an occasion to distinguish himself, and succeeded: that very evening, accused of having attempted to poison the entire conclave, he was obliged to leave Rome and Italy without packing his trunks. This misfortune cost him what remained of his wits, and now...”

  Gambara held a finger to the middle of his forehead and shook his head. “In every other respect,” he added, “he’s a fine fellow. My wife tells me we are under many obligations to him.”

  Giardini reappeared, carefully bearing a platter he placed in the center of the table, after which he came and seated himself, modestly enough, beside Andrea, who was served first. No sooner had the count tasted this dish than he found an impassable gulf yawned between the first mouthful and the second. He was greatly embarrassed, being anxious not to displease the chef, who was watching him closely. Indifferent though a French chef may be to the unfavorable reception of a dish certain to be paid for, the same reaction cannot be assumed on the part of an Italian trattore, who frequently finds mere praise insufficient. To gain time, Andrea complimented Giardini warmly, but at the same time leaned toward the chef’s ear, slipped him a gold piece under the table, and requested him to go buy several bottles of champagne, leaving him free to take credit for this generosity.

  When Giardini reappeared, every plate was empty, and the room resounded with his praises. The champagne soon heated these Italian temperaments, and the conversation, hitherto restrained by a stranger’s presence, overflowed the barriers of suspicious reserve to cover the broad fields of political and artistic theory. Andrea, who was given to no other intoxications than those of love and poetry, soon made himself master of the table’s attention and skillfully diverted the discussion to musical questions.

  “Be so good as to tell me, monsieur,” he inquired of the composer of dance music, “how the Napoleon of ballroom tunes can deign to dethrone Palestrina, Pergolesi, and Mozart, those poor wretches who must retreat at the approach of this overwhelming requiem?”

  “Monsieur,” the composer replied, “a musician always finds it embarrassing to reply when his answer requires the cooperation of a hundred skillful performers. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven are nothing at all without an orchestra.”

  “Nothing at all?” the count repeated. “But all the world knows that the immortal creator of Don Giovanni and the Requiem was named Mozart, and I have the misfortune to be ignorant of what the fecund deviser of so many fashionable quadrilles calls himself.”

  “Music exists independently of its execution,” put in the orchestra leader, who despite his deafness had caught several words of the discussion. “When a musician opens Beethoven’s C-Minor Symphony, he is immediately transported into the world of fantasy on the golden wings of the theme in G-natural, repeated in E by the horns. He sees all nature illuminated by dazzling sheaves of fire, darkened by clouds of melancholy, animated by divine paeans.”

  “Beethoven is passé,” said the ballad composer disdainfully.

  “He has not yet been understood,” the count said, “so how could he be passé?” Here Gambara drank a full glass of champagne and accompanied the libation with an approving half smile. “Beethoven,” the count continued, “has transcended the limits of instrumental music, and no one has followed in his wake.”

  Gambara protested by a shake of his head.

  “His works are notable for the simplicity of their plan, and for the way that plan is followed,” the count continued. “In the works of most composers, the wild and disorderly orchestral parts blend to only momentary effect, and do not always unite with the whole of the piece by the regularity of their progress. In Beethoven, the effects are distributed, so to speak, in advance. Like the different regiments which contribute by regular movements to winning the battle, the orchestral parts of Beethoven symphonies follow the orders given in the general interest, and are subordinated to plans admirably conceived. There is a similarity, in this respect, with the works of a genius in another genre: in Walter Scott’s magnificent historical compositions, the character most external to the action arrives, at a given moment, by means of certain threads woven into the texture of the plot, to join in at the denouement.”

  “É vero!” observed Gambara, whose common sense appeared to return in inverse proportion to his sobriety.

  Seeking to make a further test of Gambara’s wisdom, Andrea momentarily forgot all his sympathies and began to attack Rossini’s European reputation, questioning the victory the Italian school has won nightly over the last thirty years in a hundred opera houses throughout Europe. He had his work cut out for him, certainly, for at his first words there rose around him a low murmur of disapproval; but neither interruptions nor exclamations nor scowls nor pitying glances could quell t
he fanatical admirer of Beethoven.

  “Just compare,” he argued, “this man’s sublime productions with the music, as it is called, of the Italian school: what inertia of thought, what flaccidity of style! Those uniform phrases, that banality of cadence, those eternal fioriture dashed off quite inconsequentially no matter what the situation, that monotonous crescendo which Rossini has made fashionable and which is today an integral part of any and every composition, and lastly those nightingale trills which constitute a sort of chattering, aromatic music which has no merit but the singer’s degree of vocal agility. The Italian school has lost sight of art’s lofty mission. Instead of raising the crowd to its level, it has lowered itself to the crowd’s, and achieved its popularity only by accepting the suffrage of universal applause, appealing to the vulgar intelligence which is of course in the majority. This vogue is no more than a street-corner sleight of hand. Indeed, Rossini’s compositions, which personify this music, like the works of all the composers who to some degree derive from him, strike me as worthy at best to collect an audience around an organ-grinder and to accompany the capers of a Punchinello. I even prefer French music to that—how could I say more? All hail the music of Germany... whenever it learns to sing,” he added in a low voice.

  This sally summed up an extended argument Andrea had sustained for over a quarter of an hour in the loftiest regions of metaphysics with the ease of a somnambulist walking on the rooftops. Intensely interested in such subtleties, Gambara had not missed a word of the entire discussion; he began speaking as soon as Andrea seemed to have left off, at which point the guests, several of whom had been about to leave the room, began to pay attention again.

  “You have much to say against the Italian school,” Gambara observed, considerably enlivened by champagne, “which means little enough to me, in any case. Thank God, I have nothing to do with these more or less melodic trivialities! But as a man of the world, you show scant gratitude to this classic land from which Germany and France learned their first lessons. While the compositions of Carissimi, Cavalli, Scarlatti, and Rossi were performed throughout Italy, the violinists of the Paris Opéra had the singular privilege of performing on their instruments wearing gloves! Lully, who expanded the realm of harmony and was the first to classify the various dissonances, managed to find, on his arrival in France, only a cook and a mason who had adequate voices and sufficient intelligence to perform his music; he made a tenor out of the former, and transformed the latter into a bass. At the time, Germany, with the exception of Sebastian Bach, knew nothing of music. But, monsieur,” added Gambara in the humble tone of a man who fears his words will be received with scorn or hostility, “though young, you must have given long study to these high questions of art, otherwise you could not have stated them so clearly.”

  This remark caused some of his audience to smile, for they had understood nothing of the distinctions Andrea had established; Giardini, convinced that the count had merely led Gambara on by chattering at random, nudged Andrea with a surreptitious grin at the hoax in which he was delighted to participate.

  “Much of what you’ve just told us seems to me quite reasonable,” continued Gambara, “but take care! The case you make against Italian sensuality strikes me as tending toward German idealism, which is a heresy no less deadly. If men of reason and imagination like yourself merely desert one camp for the other, if they cannot remain neutral between the two excesses, we shall eternally suffer the ironies of those sophists who deny all progress, and who might compare human genius to that cloth which, too short to spread over the whole of Signor Giardini’s dinner table, covers one end at the other’s expense.”

  Giardini started in his chair as if stung by a horse-fly, but a sudden reflection restored him to his hostly dignity, and he raised his eyes to heaven and again nudged the count, who was beginning to regard his host as madder than Gambara, whose grave and semireligious manner of discussing music fascinated the Milanese nobleman to the highest degree. Sitting between these two mad creatures, one so noble and the other so vulgar, so mutually contradictory, to the company’s great entertainment, the count momentarily felt tossed between the sublime and the ridiculous, those two masks of all human creation. Breaking then the chain of incredible developments which had led him into this smoky den, he found himself the victim of a strange hallucination, and began to consider Gambara and Giardini as no more than two abstractions.

  Yet after a final jeer from the orchestra leader in reply to Gambara, the guests had left the room amid roars of laughter. Giardini withdrew to prepare the coffee he wished to offer his distinguished visitor, and his wife cleared the table. The count, sitting near the stove between Marianna and Gambara, was in precisely the situation this madman had declared to be so desirable: on his left, sensuality, on his right, idealism. Gambara, encountering for the first time a man who did not laugh in his face, wasted no time in generalities but began speaking of himself, his life, his works, and the musical regeneration of which he believed himself to be the Messiah.

  “Hear me, you who have not scoffed so far! I should like to tell you something of my life, not to make a show of the perseverance for which I claim no credit, but for the greater glory of One who has instilled His strength within me. You seem a good and reverent man—if you have no faith in me, at least you will take pity on me: pity is human, faith divine.”

  Andrea, blushing, drew back under his chair the foot which had been endeavoring to touch Marianna’s, and focused all his attention on her while listening to Gambara.

  “I was born in Cremona; my father was a violin maker, a considerable performer but a much better composer. So I was fortunate enough to learn in early youth the laws of musical construction in its double form, material and spiritual, and to make, as an inquisitive child, certain observations which were subsequently represented in the mind of the grown man. The French invasion drove us, father and son, from our home. We were ruined by the war. From the age of ten, I thus entered upon that wandering existence to which are doomed most men who have conceived innovations in art, science, or politics. Fate or the disposition of their minds, which fails to fit the pigeonholes of bourgeois existence, leads them providentially to the places where they must receive their instruction. Driven by my passion for music, I labored in theater after theater all over Italy, living on little or nothing, as one can there. Sometimes I played the bass in an orchestra, sometimes I found myself in the chorus, or under the boards with the stagehands. Thus I studied music in all its aspects, questioning each instrument and the human voice, learning how they differed and how they harmonized, listening to scores and applying the laws my father had taught me. Frequently I traveled through the country mending instruments. It was a life without bread, in a country where the sun always shines and art is omnipresent, but where there is no money for the artist, ever since Rome ceased to be—except in name only—queen of the Christian world. Sometimes welcomed, sometimes persecuted by my poverty, I never lost courage; I heeded the inner voices which foretold my fame! Music seemed to me in its infancy. That is still my opinion. All that remains to us of the world of music before the seventeenth century proves to me that the ancient composers knew nothing but melody; they were ignorant of harmony and its vast resources. Music is at once a science and an art. Its roots in physics and mathematics make it a science; it becomes an art by inspiration which unconsciously employs the theorems of science. It derives from physics by the very essence of the substance it employs: sound is air modified; air consists of elements, principles which doubtless find within us analogous principles that correspond to them, which sympathize and expand by the power of thought. Thus air must contain certain particles of various elasticity, capable of as many vibrations of diverse duration as there are tones in reverberating bodies, and these particles perceived by our ear, set working by the musician, correspond to certain ideas, depending on our various human organizations. To my mind, the nature of sound is identical with that of light. Sound is light in another form: b
oth proceed by vibrations which man transforms into thought within his nerve centers. Music, like painting, employs bodies which have the faculty of releasing one or another property of the mother-substance, out of which pictures are composed. In music, instruments do the work of the colors the painter employs. Since every sound produced by a reverberating body is always accompanied by its major third and fifth, and affects grains of sand spread out on a stretched piece of parchment so as to form figures of unvarying geometrical construction, according to the different volumes of sound—regular when a harmony is achieved, and without exact forms when dissonances are produced—I say that music is an art woven in the very bowels of Nature. Music obeys physical and mathematical laws. The physical laws are little known, the mathematical laws are better known; and, ever since we have begun studying their relations, we have created the harmony to which we owe Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Rossini, splendid geniuses who have certainly produced a music nearer perfection than that of their predecessors, those men of earlier times whose genius is nonetheless incontestable. The old masters sang instead of invoking art and science, that noble alliance which unites the beauty of melodies and the power of harmony. Now, if the discovery of the mathematical laws has produced these four great musicians, what heights could we not attain if we were to find the physical laws by virtue of which—consider this!—we collect in greater or lesser quantities, according to proportions still to be established, a certain ethereal substance, diffused within the air, which affords us music as well as light, the phenomena of vegetation as well as those of zoology! Do you understand? These new laws would arm the composer with new powers, offering him instruments superior to those he has now, and perhaps a more wondrous harmony compared to the one which governs music today. If each modulated tone corresponds to a power, we must know that power in order to conjugate all these forces according to their true laws. Composers are working on substances of which they are ignorant. Why do instruments made of wood and metal, the bassoon and the horn, for example, resemble each other so little while employing the same substances, that is: the constituent gases of the atmosphere? Their dissimilarities proceed from some decomposition of these gases, or from an apprehension of their particular principles which modulate by virtue of unknown faculties. If we knew those faculties, science and art would have much to gain! Well, I have traced such discoveries; I have actually made them! Yes!” exclaimed Gambara, becoming tremendously excited. “Hitherto man has merely noted effects rather than causes! If he were to penetrate the causes, music would become the greatest of all the arts. Is it not the art which penetrates the soul most deeply? We see only what painting shows us, we hear only what the poet tells us, music goes far beyond that: Does it not form your very thoughts, does it not waken torpid memories? Here you have a thousand souls in a hall, a single phrase leaps from Pasta’s throat, her execution corresponding perfectly to the ideas flashing in Rossini’s soul when he wrote his aria, and Rossini’s phrase transmitted to those thousand souls develops into a thousand different poems: to one person it reveals itself as a woman long desired, to another some shore along which he has walked under trailing willows—the lapping waves and the hopes that danced under those leafy bowers; one woman remembers a thousand feelings which tormented her during an hour of jealousy; another summons up the unfulfilled longings of her heart and conceives in the rich colors of her dreams an ideal being to whom she surrenders with all the ardor of the figure caressing her fantasy in the Roman mosaic; another anticipates that this very night she will realize her desire, and plunges already into the torrent of pleasures, receiving their tide upon her fiery breast. Music alone has the power to make us return to our inmost selves, while the other arts give us only specific, only limited pleasures. But I am wandering far afield. These were my first ideas, quite vague at that, for an inventor merely glimpses a sort of dawn. Yet I carried these glorious ideas at the bottom of my wallet; they comforted me amply for having nothing to eat but dry crusts I dipped in the wayside fountains. I worked, I composed melodies, and after performing them on some instrument or other, I resumed my travels through Italy. Finally, at the age of twenty-two, I came to live in Venice, where for the first time I knew peace and found myself in a tolerable situation. Here I made the acquaintance of an old Venetian nobleman who enjoyed my ideas, who encouraged me in my pursuits, and who gave me employment at the Tetra la Fenice. Life was cheap, lodgings cost little—I occupied an apartment in that same Palazzo Capello from which, one night, the celebrated Bianca emerged to become the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. I imagined that my unknown glory would similarly emerge some day, to be similarly crowned. I spent my evenings at the theater and my days at work. I suffered a disaster: the performance of my first opera, The Martyrs, in which I had experimented with my new ideas, was a fiasco. None of my music was understood—give Beethoven to the Italians, and they won’t have a clue! No one in Venice had the patience to wait for an effect prepared by various motifs which each instrument played separately and which were to come together in an ultimate harmony. I had great expectations for that opera of mine, for we always believe success is within our grasp, we lovers of the blue goddess Hope! If you believe yourself destined to achieve great things, it is difficult not to feel they are coming your way; there are always chinks in the dark lantern, through which the light gleams. In that same palazzo lived a family, my wife’s family, and the hope of winning Marianna’s hand—for she had often smiled at me from her window—contributed not a little to my efforts. I sank into a deep depression as I measured the depth of the abyss into which I had fallen, for I clearly envisioned a life of poverty and constant struggle which would be the death of love. Marianna did as genius does: she leaped with both feet over all our difficulties. I shall not tell you of the meager happiness which gilded the beginning of my misfortunes. Terrified by my failure, I decided that Italy, dull of comprehension and slumbering in the folderol of routine, was hardly disposed to welcome such innovations as I was meditating; therefore my thoughts turned to Germany. In traveling to that country, to which I made my way through Hungary, I listened to the thousand voices of nature and strove to reproduce her sublime harmonies by means of instruments I invented or altered to that end. Such efforts involved vast expense which soon absorbed our modest savings. Yet these were our finest days: I was appreciated in Germany. Nothing in my life has been finer than this period. Incomparable indeed were the tumultuous sensations which overwhelmed me at Marianna’s side: her beauty at that time was in all its glory and its heavenly power. Need I say that I was happy? During these hours of weakness, more than once I made the language of earthly harmonies speak to my passion. I managed to compose several of those melodies which resemble geometrical figures and are greatly prized in the world you live in. As soon as I had attained some success, insuperable obstacles were put in my path by my colleagues, all of whom were envenomed by bad faith or ineptitude. I had heard France spoken of as a country where innovations were favorably received, and determined to proceed there; my wife mustered the resources and we came to Paris. Hitherto no one had ever laughed in my face; but in this dreadful city I have had to endure this new kind of torment, to which destitution soon added its anguish. Reduced to taking lodgings in this polluted neighborhood, we have lived for several months entirely by Marianna’s labor, for she has put her needle at the service of the miserable prostitutes who make this street their gallery. Marianna tells me she is treated with deference and generosity by these poor women, which I attribute to the influence of a virtue so pure that vice itself is obliged to respect it.”