Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/154

 felt than defined, for which musicians have only one word, oddly chosen it may be thought, but there is no substitute for it. "A thing is, or is not, musical," they say, and it often happens that they deny the epithet to music that is very well constructed. Meyerbeer's music is often well constructed. But it rarely deserves to be called musical. One is distinctly conscious that this expression describes a kind of divine lightness of the elements.

I would not be taken to mean that movement is wanting in Meyerbeer's works. But the movement that may be discovered in them is not really (as it should be) that of the music itself, or very rarely so. It is the movement of the great melodramatic and scenic machine to whose engines the music is harnessed; they give it an artificial and seeming animation without fully succeeding in relieving its heaviness. What is original about Meyerbeer is that he applied to the use of grand opera all the music that had been made in Europe from Bach to Auber, sacred and profane music, vocal and instrumental music. In this sense, an ill-informed public was not wrong in finding "great music" in his work. But it was presented to them (side by side with a great deal of little and even bad music) in a kind of refraction, on the very artificial plane and in the terribly gilded setting of grand opera. Meyerbeer himself took cognisance of the world of poetry and the world of sounds with a sort of enthusiasm, from the angle of grand opera. Grand opera, that was what he loved, with the love of a barbarian, a manufacturer and a real artist, simultaneously. This love inspired him now and again with a kind of theatrical poetry, of which the expression crops up especially in certain passages of the Africaine. I like