To the most exceptional of my readers I should like to say just a word as to what I really demand of music. It should be cheerful and yet profound, like an October afternoon. It should be unique, wanton, and tender, and like a dainty, sweet woman in roguishness and grace. . . . I shall never admit that a German can understand what music is. Those musicians, the greatest of them, who are called German, are all foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutchmen-or Jews; or else, like Heinrich Schiitz, Bach, and Hdndel, they are Germans of a strong race, a type now extinct. I myself have still enough of the Pole in me to let all other music go, if only Chopin is left to me. For three reasons I would except '"7agner's Siegfried Idyll, and perhaps also a few things of Liszt, who excelled all other musicians in the noble accent of his orchestration; and finally everything that has come from beyond the Alps-this side of the Alps. I would not know how to dispense with Rossini, and still less with my Southern counterpart in music, my Venetian maestro, Pietro Gasti. And when I say beyond the Alps, I really mean only Venice. Seeking to find another word for music, I inevitably come back to Venice. I do not know how to make a distinction between tears and music. I do not know how to think of joy, or of the south, without a shudder of fear.
On the bridge I stood
But lately, in the dark night.
From far away came the sound of singing;
In golden drops it rolled away
Over the glittering rim.
Gondolas, lights, music
Drunk, swam far out in the darkness... My soul, a stringed instrument,
Invisibly moved,
Sang a gondola song secretly,
Gleaming in bright happiness.
-Did any hearken?
