At first it is all a clear subjective
utterance of the hero's woes and hopes and fears, without definite
touches of external things. Yet, right in the second scene the torrent
is clear almost to the eye, and the events pass before us with sharp
distinctness. Tending, then, to look on the third as purest pastoral,
we are struck in the midst by an ominous strain from one of the earliest
moments of the work, the answer of the first theme of all. Here notes of
horns ring a monotone; presently a church-bell adds a higher note. The
peaceful pastoral airs then return, like the sun after a fleeting storm.
The whole of this third scene of Tschaikowsky's agrees with no special
one in Byron's poem, unless we go back to the second of the first act,
where Manfred, in a morning hour, alone upon the cliffs, views the
mountains of the Jungfrau before he makes a foiled attempt to spring
into the abyss. By a direction of the poet, in the midst of the
monologue, "the shepherd's pipe in the distance is heard," and Manfred
muses on "the natural music of the mountain reed."
The last scene of the music begins with Byron's fourth of Act II and
passes over all the incidents of the third act that precede the hero's
death, such as the two interviews with the Abbot and the glorious
invocation to the sun.
From Tschaikowsky's title, we must look for the awful gloom of the
cavernous hall of Arimanes, Byron's "Prince of Earth and Air." The gray
figure from most ancient myth is not less real to us than Mefistofeles
in "Faust.
Pages:
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114