Page:Selected letters of Mendelssohn 1894.djvu/55

Rh For the punctuations, comma, query, and full stop, there are different musical intonations. Possibly these are known to you already; to me they were new, and seemed quite wonderful. The first piece, for example, was begun by a fine bass voice in G, then coming to a comma he sings:—

On the last word at a question At a full stop, however, as, e. g., How singular the fall from A to C sounds is more than I can describe, especially when after the bass comes a soprano starting on D, and then making an equivalent fall from E to G, and then perhaps an alto on his note, and so on. And thus they sung three different Lectiones, always alternating with the “Canto fermo.” For an example of how they sang the “Canto fermo” utterly without regard to words or sense, the fragment, “It were better for that man that he had never been born,” was given like this:

fortissimo, without any variety of tone.