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Music from the East. 49
first four bars of his 'Pater Noster,' in the last of which the repose, yet awe, which the words convey is entirely disturbed by the sudden transition or leap in the melody—effective, it may be, but hardly devotional. But let the great qualities and defects imputed to his peculiar people have been ever so strong in the man, I am as unable to find any echoes from the synagogue in his music, as in the music of his great fellow-student under the fantastic and empirical Abbe Vogler, of whom I shall have to speak more than once—Carl Maria von Weber.
From the Hebrews, an opulent and refined and musical people,—a people, withal, without a country—it is an abrupt, yet not wholly unnatural transition, to pass to another world of homeless wanderers, in diametrically opposite circumstances—the world of Gipsies. By this passage we are transported from luxury, wealth, an elaborate cultivation, into what may be called the howling wilderness of Art: a wilderness, however, teeming with interesting natural productions. I cannot do better than avail myself of the distinction traced by the Abbe Liszt, in his book on the Music of the Bohemians, which, wild and exaggerated
though it be in style, contains much ingenious specu-
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