Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/24

 with a delicate one which wears the garland of gaiety and is also capable of the expression of fine shades. In Pergolesi, Cimarosa, Rossini, and one may add in Mozart, for his masterpieces contain magnificient pages of opéra-bouffe—in all these, then, the great attraction of opéra-bouffe is that it speaks a language at the same time incisive and playful, one which lends itself to accents of emotion and to bubbling laughter, which can pass without shock or break from the light to the tender, from farce to elegance, from a rhythm of strong comic animation to that of tender sighs. It is this variety, this mixture this enchanting lightness which explains Stendhal’s outburst “Opéra-bouffe is the masterpiece of the human mind.” He added that this cheerful music had the power of moving him to melancholy and to tender tears, whereas music of tragical tone left him resentful and cold; it was not that his sensibility to impressions was blunted; on the contrary it was excessive. His impression can be easily understood if connected with the Barber of Seville, the last in date of the masterpieces of opéra-bouffe, and the work of the happiest genius who has handled this form. It appears more natural still if taken in connection with the works of Pergolesi and Cimarosa, which have not the richness and dazzling play of fancy of The Barber, but which have (as I think) more tenderness and sentiment. I would call attention, for instance, to that air in the Servant Mistress, which seems to me to be the masterpiece of that masterpiece—where Pandolphe, brought face to face with the mad folly into which the girl’s coquetry is dragging him, considers her with a mixture of fright, passion and philosophy. What flexibility of tone Coloured in turn with pathos and cheerfulness but