The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: voices and led by the women (in B flat), crowns the stupendous work
expressive of the life of nations and of man. Here you have every
emotion, human and divine."
Andrea gazed at Gambara in blank amazement. Though at first he had
been struck by the terrible irony of the situation,--this man
expressing the feelings of Mahomet's wife without discovering them in
Marianna,--the husband's hallucination was as nothing compared with
the composer's. There was no hint even of a poetical or musical idea
in the hideous cacophony with which he had deluged their ears; the
first principles of harmony, the most elementary rules of composition,
were absolutely alien to this chaotic structure. Instead of the
 Gambara |