My Musical Life

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

11-12

text excerpt

I remember perfectly well falling into a kind of dream as I leant over the painted iron balcony and looked down on this splendid vista. The silverbell-like tones of an Erard it was the 1000 guinea piano pierced through the human hum, and noise of splashing waters, but it was a long way off. Suddenly, in the adjoining gallery, the large organ broke out with a blare of trumpets that thrilled and riveted me with an inconceivable emotion. I knew not then what those opening bars were. Evidently something martial, festal, jubilant, and full of triumph. I listened and held my breath to hear MENDELSSOHN'S "Wedding March" for the first time, and not know it! To hear it when half the people present had never heard of MENDELSSOHN, three years after his death, and when not one in a hundred could have told me what was being played that is an experience I shall never forget. As successive waves of fresh inexhaustible inspiration flowed on, vibrating through the building without a check or a pause, the peculiar Mendelssohnian spaces of cantabile melody alternating as they do in that march with the passionate and almost fierce decision of the chief processional theme, I stood riveted, bathed in the sound as in an element. I felt ready to melt into those harmonious yet turbulent waves and float away upon the tides of "Music's golden sea setting towards Eternity." The angel of TENNYSON'S Vision might have stood by me whispering, ‘And thou listenest the lordly music flowing from the illimitable years’. Someone called me, so I was told afterwards, but I did not hear. They supposed that I was following, they went on, and were soon lost in the crowd. Presently one came back and touched me, but I did not feel. I could not be roused, my soul was living apart from my body. When the music ceased the spell slowly dissolved, and I was led away still half in dreamland. For long years afterwards the "Wedding March” which is now considered banale and claptrap by the advanced school, affected me strangely.

excerpt from 'My Musical Life' pp. 11-12 (352 words)

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