Page:Red (1925).pdf/212

 very nearly succeeded in making famous again, for Chinese music, even for Grieg's piano concerto, but seldom do mood and music strike me simultaneously.

There are hours in which the charming melancholy and faded sentimentality of Werther and Eugen Oniegin, lyric dramas curiously similar in feeling, would come as a boon. There are nights when Les Larmes, and the Letter Song in Tchaikovsky's opera, would send me sobbing from the theatre, for these airs evoke a certain artificial Victorian atmosphere of grief more potently than any book or picture with which I am familiar. When Tatjana begins the Letter Song, if you are in the mood—and how seldom this is!—the key of the play is handed into your keeping, the soul of the composition communes with your own soul, and a vague sympathy with something perhaps alien to your own nature takes possession of you.

Sometimes I am seized with a desire for the dance, a craving for a conventional rhythmic expression, for, at least, even if one cannot dance, one sometimes itches to hear dance music, but these will not be the nights on which The Beautiful Blue Danube, Coppélia, or Beethoven's Seventh Symphony will be played. Der Rosenkavalier would fill the breach, but how often can one hear Der Rosenkavalier?