The Unknown Masterpiece

by Honoré de Balzac

  “Would you be so kind,” asked the count, “as to play for me that prayer you said was so fine—the one which concludes your opera?”

  To Marianna’s amazement as well as the count’s, Gambara began with several chords which disclosed a great master; their amazement gave way to an initial admiration mixed with surprise, then to complete ecstasy during which they forgot both the place and the man. The orchestral effects would not have been so overwhelming had it not been for the sounds of wind instruments which recalled the organ and united wonderfully with the harmonic riches of the string instruments; but the imperfect state of this singular machine hindered the composer’s performance, though his intentions seemed all the greater for that. Frequently perfection in works of art keeps the soul from raising them to greater heights. Is this not the victory of the sketch over the finished picture, in the judgment of those capable of completing the work by taking thought, instead of accepting it readymade? The purest and sweetest music the count had ever heard rose from Gambara’s fingers like a cloud of incense above an altar. The composer’s voice grew young again; and, far from spoiling this rich melody, it explained and strengthened and guided it, as the dull and quavering voice of a skillful reader such as Andrieux extends the meaning of a sublime scene of Racine or Corneille by adding its own intimate poetry. This music, worthy of angels, revealed the treasures hidden in this vast opera, which could never be understood so long as its composer persisted in explaining the work in his current state of mind. Equally divided between the music and their surprise at this hundred-voiced instrument in which a stranger might have supposed a choir of invisible maidens was concealed, so close were the sounds to those made by the human voice, Marianna and the count dared not share their notions by word or expression. Marianna’s face was illuminated by a magnificent glow of hope which restored the splendors of her youth. This rebirth of her beauty, united with the luminous apparition of her husband’s genius, tinged the delights this mysterious hour afforded the count with a certain bitterness.

  “You are our good angel,” Marianna said to Andrea. “I am tempted to believe you inspire him, for I, who am always with him, have never heard anything like this.”

  “And Khadijah’s farewell!” exclaimed Gambara, now singing the cavatina to which he had earlier given the epithet “sublime” and which made the two lovers in the room with him weep, so well did it express the loftiest realms of feeling.

  “Who could inspire you with such music?” asked the count.

  “The Spirit!” Gambara replied. “When it comes, everything around me seems to be on fire. I see melodies face-to-face, lovely and fresh, brilliant as flowers; they are radiant, they reverberate in my ears, but it takes an endless amount of time to reproduce them.”

  “Encore!” breathed Marianna.

  Gambara, who felt no fatigue, played with neither grimaces nor strain. He performed his overture with such mastery and revealed musical qualities so original that the dazzled count finished by believing in an enchantment like that of Paganini or of Liszt, an execution which of course changes all the conditions of music, transforming it into a poetry beyond any musical creation.

  “Well, eccellenza, can you cure him?” asked the chef when Andrea came downstairs.

  “I shall soon know,” replied the count. “This man’s intellect has two windows, one closed to the world, the other open to heaven: the first is music, the second is poetry; to this day he has persisted in remaining at the sealed window, we must lead him to the other one. You put me on the right track, Giardini, when you told me your guest reasons better after a few glasses of wine.”

  “Yes,” exclaimed the chef, “and I can guess your plan, eccellenza.”

  “If there’s still time to make poetry ring in his ears, amid the chords of a splendid music, he must be put in a state to hear and to judge. As he is now, intoxication alone can come to my aid. Will you help me to manage this, my dear fellow—if it won’t do any harm to yourself?”

  “By which vossignoria means...?”

  Andrea left without a reply, but smiling at the perspicacity the mad Neapolitan still possessed. The following day he came to call for Marianna, who had spent the morning preparing a simple but suitable dress which had consumed all her savings. This transformation might have dispelled the illusions of a worldly person, but the count’s caprice had become a passion. Stripped of her poetic poverty and transformed into an ordinary bourgeoise, Marianna inspired him with thoughts of marriage; he gave her his hand as she stepped into a fiacre and told her his plan. She approved of everything, delighted to find her lover even more generous, nobler, more disinterested than she had ever dared to hope. They arrived at an apartment where Andrea had taken pains to remind her of his presence by some of those elegant touches which beguile the most virtuous women.

  “I shall not mention love to you until you despair of your Paolo,” the count said to Marianna as they returned to the rue Froidmanteau. “You shall be witness to the sincerity of my efforts; if they are effective, I may not be able to resign myself to being merely your friend, but in that case I shall leave you, Marianna. I feel I have the courage to work for your happiness, but I may not have the strength to contemplate it.”

  “Do not say such things. Generosity has its dangers, too,” she replied, on the verge of tears. “What—are you leaving so soon?”

  “Yes,” Andrea said. “Be happy without being distracted by me.”

  If the chef was to be believed, the change in regimen favored both husband and wife. Every evening after drinking, Gambara seemed less obsessed, conversed more often and more calmly; he even spoke of reading the newspapers. Andrea could not help trembling at the unhoped-for immediacy of his success; but although his anguish proved to him the strength of his love, it did nothing to sway his virtuous resolve. One day he came to judge the progress of this singular cure. If his patient’s state initially caused him some joy, that same joy was troubled by Marianna’s beauty, which the comfort of her new situation had restored to its former luster. Thereafter he came every evening to hold gentle and serious conversations with Gambara, to which he contributed the illumination of a measured opposition to the composer’s singular theories. He took advantage of the marvelous lucidity of Gambara’s mind on every point not too close to his obsessions to make him acknowledge the principles in all the branches of art which must ultimately be applicable to music as well. Everything proceeded splendidly as long as the fumes of wine warmed the composer’s brain; but as soon as he was quite sober, or rather had again lost his reason, he relapsed into his manias. Nonetheless, Gambara was already allowing himself to be more easily distracted by impressions of the external world, and his intellect was becoming attached to a greater number of subjects at the same time. Andrea, who took an artist’s interest in this semimedical project, believed that the time had come for a major effort. He decided to give a dinner at his own house, to which Giardini would be admitted (according to his principle of not separating the sublime from the ridiculous), on the evening of the first public performance of the opera Robert le Diable, of which he had already attended rehearsals and which seemed likely to disabuse the composer of his obsessions. By the second course Gambara, already drunk, was cracking jokes about his own theories, while Giardini declared that his culinary inventions could go to the devil for all he cared. Andrea had neglected no detail to bring about this double miracle. Bottles of Orvieto and Montefiascone, brought with the infinite precautions their transportation requires, of Lacrima-Christi and Giro—all the precious wines of the cara patria—soon wrought these excitable brains to the double intoxication of the grape and of memory. By the dessert course, both composer and chef gaily renounced their errors: the former hummed a cavatina by Rossini, the latter piled pastry on his plate and sprinkled it with maraschino in honor of la cuisine française. The count took advantage of Gambara’s happy mood to invite him to the Opéra, to which he let himself be led as meekly as a lamb. At the first notes of the overture, Gambara
’s intoxication seemed to give way to that feverish excitement which sometimes set his judgment and his imagination in harmony, their habitual discord no doubt being responsible for his madness; and the dominant thought of this great musical drama struck him, in its dazzling simplicity, as a lightningflash piercing the darkness in which he lived. To his receptive ears, this music created the vast horizons of a world where he found himself cast adrift for the first time, while recognizing accidents there which he had already envisioned in his dreams. He believed himself transported to his native region, on the borders of la bella Italia, which Napoleon so astutely named the glacis of the Alps. Delivered by memory to the days when his young and lively intellect was not yet troubled by the ecstasies of his over-rich imagination, he listened with reverent attention, reluctant to utter a single word. The count respected the inner labors being performed within this soul. Until half past midnight, Gambara sat so profoundly motionless that the habitués of the Opéra took him for what he was, a man intoxicated. On the way home, Andrea proceeded to attack Meyerbeer’s work in order to awaken Gambara, who remained plunged in the torpor of inebriation.

  “What’s so magnetic about this incoherent score that it makes you behave like a sleepwalker?” Andrea asked when they reached the house. “The subject of Robert le Diable is interesting, I’ll admit. Holtei has treated it with rare felicity in a well-written play filled with strong and moving situations; yet the French authors have managed to turn it into the silliest story in the world. Never have the absurdities of Vesari’s or Schikaneder’s libretti equaled the preposterousness of Scribe’s poem for Robert le Diable, a real dramatic nightmare which oppresses the spectator without giving birth to any strong emotions. Meyerbeer has given his devil too fine a part. Bertram and Alice represent the struggle between good and evil, and this antagonism offered the composer the most attractive contrast. The sweetest melodies placed side by side with harsh and cruel arias were a natural consequence of the libretto’s form, but in Meyerbeer’s score the demons sing better than the saints. Heavenly inspirations frequently belie their origin, and if the composer leaves the infernal for a moment, he’s all the more eager to get back, quickly exhausted by his efforts to abandon it. Melody, that golden thread which in so vast a composition must never break, often vanishes in Meyerbeer’s work. Sentiment counts for nothing here, and the heart plays no part whatever; hence we never encounter those happy motifs, those naïve songs which waken our sympathies and leave a sweet impression deep within the soul. Here harmony reigns supreme instead of being the background against which the groups of the musical picture are to stand out. These dissonant chords, far from moving the listener, merely excite in his soul a sentiment analogous to what we might feel at the sight of an acrobat dangling from a rope and swaying between life and death. No charming songs ever calm these wearisome tensions. It is as if the composer had no other goal than to appear fantastic, bizarre; he eagerly seizes the occasion to produce eccentric effects, with no concern for truth or musical unity or the weakness of voices drowned out by the instrumental uproar.”

  “Say no more, my friend,” Gambara protested. “I am still under the charm of that wonderful song from the infernal regions which megaphones, a new instrumentation, make still more terrible! The broken cadences which give such energy to Robert’s aria, the cavatina in the fourth act, the finale of the first still keep me under the spell of a supernatural power! No, the declamation of Glück himself had no such prodigious effect, and I’m dazzled by so much scientific skill.”

  “Signor maestro,” said Andrea, smiling, “permit me to contradict you. Glück, before composing, reflected a great deal. He calculated every likelihood and established a plan which could later be modified by his inspirations of detail, but which never let him stray from his path. Hence that energetic accentuation, that declamation pulsing with truth. I agree with you that the scientific skill is great in Meyerbeer’s opera, but such science becomes a defect when it is separated from inspiration, and I believe I hear in this work the painful labor of a fine mind which has fashioned its music out of thousands of motifs from failed or forgotten operas, appropriating them by strengthening their weaknesses, by concentrating their strengths. But what has happened is what happens to all composers of a cento: too much of a good thing. This skillful gleaner of notes lavishes dissonances which, being too frequent, end by wounding the ear and habituating it to those great effects which the composer must apply very sparingly, in order to derive the greatest benefit from them when the situation requires them. Here the enharmonic transitions are repeated to satiety, and the abuse of the plagal cadence spoils a great part of the religious solemnity. I’m well aware that each composer has his particular forms to which he returns in spite of himself, but it is essential to be attentive to what one is doing and to avoid this defect. A picture in which the color scheme offered only blue or red would be far from the truth and would fatigue the eye. Thus the rhythm which is almost always the same throughout Robert le Diable makes the entire score rather monotonous. As for the effect of the megaphones you speak of, it was used long ago in Germany, and what Meyerbeer gives us as novelty was employed by Mozart, who made the chorus of devils in Don Giovanni sing in this fashion.”

  Andrea tried, while constantly proffering new libations, to make Gambara refute him and thus return to his true musical sentiments, proving that his authentic mission in this world consisted not in regenerating an art beyond his faculties but in seeking the expression of his thought in another form, which was none other than poetry.

  “My dear count, you have failed to understand this great musical drama,” Gambara said quite casually, as he went over to Andrea’s piano, tried the keys, listened to their tone, and sat pensively for a few seconds, as though to gather his thoughts.

  “First of all,” Gambara continued, “you must realize that an intelligence trained as mine has been recognizes at once the jeweler’s craft of which you speak. Yes, this music is a sort of loving anthology, but selected from the treasures of a fruitful imagination in which science has compressed ideas in order to extract a musical essence. I shall explain this undertaking to you.”

  He stood up to move the candles to the adjoining room, and before sitting back down, he drank a full glass of Giro, that Sardinian wine which contains as much fire as ever flared up in the old Tokays.

  “The fact of the matter is,” Gambara said, “that this music was written neither for unbelievers nor for those incapable of love. If you haven’t experienced in your own life the vigorous assaults of an evil spirit who wrecks the very thing you seek, who brings the fairest hopes to a sad conclusion—in a word, if you’ve never glimpsed the devil’s tail wriggling in this world of ours, this opera Robert le Diable will be for you what the Apocalypse is for those who believe the world comes to an end when they do. If on the other hand, in your misery and suffering, you understand something of the genius of evil, that great monkey which constantly destroys the works of God, if you conceive him as having not loved but violated a nearly divine woman, and from that as achieving the joys of fatherhood, to the point of loving his son in eternal misery with himself, rather than knowing him eternally blessed with God—if you conceive, finally, the mother’s soul soaring over her son’s head in order to wrest him from his father’s dreadful seductions, you’ll have merely a faint idea of this vast poem which ranks with Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni, I grant you, is superior in its perfection; Robert le Diable represents ideas, Don Giovanni excites sensations. Don Giovanni is still the only musical work in which harmony and melody are in exactly equal proportions; this is the sole secret of its superiority to Robert le Diable, for Meyerbeer’s work is the more abundant. But what use are such comparisons, if each of these two works possesses a beauty all its own? To me, groaning under the devil’s repeated assaults, Robert le Diable has spoken more energetically than it has to you, and I have found it to be both vast and concentrated. Truly, thanks to you, I have been, this evening, inhabiting the world
of dreams where our senses become more powerful, where the universe reveals itself in gigantic proportions in relation to mankind.” There was a moment of silence. “I still shudder,” said the unfortunate artist, “at the four measures of the kettledrums which pierced me to the core at the opening of that brief overture where the trombone solo, the flutes, the oboes, and the clarinet flood the soul with fantastic colors. That andante in C-minor foreshadows the theme of the invocation of souls in the abbey, and magnifies the scene by its announcement of an entirely spiritual struggle. I shuddered!”

  Gambara struck the keys with a firm hand and masterfully developed Meyerbeer’s theme by a sort of spiritual explosion in the manner of Franz Liszt. It was no longer a piano but a whole orchestra that was playing—the genius of music was evoked.

  “That is the style of Mozart!” he cried. “You see how this German handles chords, and through what learned modulations he transforms terror to reach the dominant of C. I hear Hell in it! The curtain rises. What do I see? The only spectacle deserving of the name infernal, an orgy of knights, in Sicily. And here, in this chorus in F, all human passions unchained by a bacchic allegro. All the strings by which the devil leads us are stirred! This is the joy men know when, yielding to vertigo, they dance over an abyss. What movement in that chorus! The reality of life, life naïve and homely, stands out in G-minor in Raimbaut’s simple song. How this fellow refreshes my soul, if only for a moment, when he reminds the drunken Robert of green Normandy. The sweetness of the beloved homeland runs like a golden thread through this somber opening. Then comes that marvelous ballad in C-major, accompanied by the chorus in C-minor, taking up the narration until ‘I am Robert!’ bursts forth. The rage of the prince offended by his vassal is already more than a natural emotion; but it calms down, for memories of childhood return with Alice in that allegro in A-major, so full of movement and grace. Can you hear the cries of that innocence which in this infernal drama is persecuted from the start? ‘No, no!’” sang Gambara, making the piano echo his straining voice. “His native land and memories of his youth bloom once more in Robert’s heart—his mother’s shade appears, accompanied by gentle religious meditations! Religion inspires that beautiful ballad in E-major with its marvelous harmonic and melodic progression on the words: