Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/79

Rh character. He had just begun the final chorus of Act II.: How mysterious, O Lord, are Thy ways! Hardly had he written the initial movement, a largo with pathetic modulations, when he was forced to stop. He has noted at the foot of the page:

"Have got so far, Wednesday, 13th February. Prevented from continuing because of my left eye."

He breaks off for ten days. On the eleventh he writes on his manuscript:

"The 23rd February, am a little better. Resumed work."

And he sets to music these words, which contain a tragic allusion to his own misfortune:

Laboriously, in five days' time—five days!—and formerly he could have written a whole act in the time—he struggles on to the end of this sombre chorus, which illumines, in the darkness that envelops him, one of the grandest affirmations of faith in time of suffering. On emerging from these gloomy and tormented passages, a few voices (tenor and bass) in unison murmur very softly