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8 National Music of the World. |
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given rise to columns of controversy, and the blunder having been pounced on as a rare beauty by the transcendentalists, among them one no less ingenious than M. Berlioz. It is only a year or two since the journals of Paris recorded the correction of a false F in a work no less recent and hackneyed than the overture to ' Guillaume Tell.' With instances, which could be multiplied by the thousand, such as these —oversights arising not so much from neglect as from imaginative quickness—few, save the wilfully credulous, will put implicit trust in musical notation, above all, when it is the vehicle of such crude irregularities as abound in national music.
Further, wTe have to allow for something more indirect in everything that concerns report of national music. So long as humanity shall last, the influence of feeling no less than of fact, the circumstances of time and place, must be taken into account, however advanced be the state of intelligence, in all records dealing with representative art. Think of the raptures which have filled the pages of modern tourists, describing as realities matters which are virtually only so many sensations. Two may be instanced : the first of these being the Sistine 'Miserere' in the Holy Week at Rome. The music of this far-famed |
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