| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: beautiful song in E major, with its wonderful harmonic and melodic
progression in the words:
"Car dans les cieux, comme sur la terre,
Sa mere va prier pour lui.
"Here the struggle begins between the unseen powers and the only human
being who has the fire of hell in his veins to enable him to resist
them; and to make this quite clear, as Bertram comes on, the great
musician has given the orchestra a passage introducing a reminiscence
of Raimbaut's ballad. What a stroke of art! What cohesion of all the
parts! What solidity of structure!
"The devil is there, in hiding, but restless. The conflict of the
Gambara |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Emma McChesney & Co. by Edna Ferber: "Don't say it, T. A. Because you don't mean it. I've had to
fight for most of my happiness. I've never before found it ready
at hand. I've always had to dig for it with a shovel and a spade
and a pickax, and then blast. I had almost twenty years of
that-- from the time I was eighteen until I was thirty-eight.
It taught me to take my happiness seriously and my troubles
lightly." She shut her eyes for a moment, and her voice was
very low and very deep and very vibrant. "So, when I'm coolest
and evenest and most mental, T. A., you may know that I've struck
gold."
A great glow illumined Buck's fine eyes. He took two quick steps
Emma McChesney & Co. |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences
and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing, and
leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires
all the original horror. We saw, as I have said, certain obstructions
on the polished floor ahead; and I may add that our nostrils were
assailed almost simultaneously by a very curious intensification
of the strange prevailing fetor, now quite plainly mixed with
the nameless stench of those others which had gone before. The
light of the second torch left no doubt of what the obstructions
were, and we dared approach them only because we could see, even
from a distance, that they were quite as past all harming power
At the Mountains of Madness |
