Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

64 My MUSICAL EXPERIENCES
the subject. I wish I could recall even the outline
of what he said to me one day about Listz's Venezia
( Napoli, and Beethoven's Sonata Appassionata ; as
it is, I only give a general impression.
' Nothing is so immaterial as music,' he said,
referring to the vexed question of how much strict
form is essential to the manifestation of a high form
of an art idea. ' Great flashes of wonderful colour,
in which we cannot exactly perceive a definite, clear
outline or form, may call up in us streams of fasci-
nating suggestion ; and when this suggestiveness is
present in a composition, who shall say that there is
less of true art than when the form is clear and defi-
nite ? I make no comparison,' he continued, ' be-
tween these two (the Venezia e Napoli and the
Appassionata), for they are so essentially different as
to exclude all possibility of comparison ; I hold that
there is as much beauty, though of a different kind,
in the one as in the other.' ' There is a theory,' he
said to me more than once, ' that music is the faint
reminiscence of a language which we used, either in
a previous and immaterial existence, or in some
earlier stage of our development, but the meaning of
which we have lost. I am not saying,' he added,
' that I believe this, but there is much in it that
would lead one to fancy such a conclusion may not
be very far from the truth.'
For two summers I saw much of Sgambati, whose
wife was my friend, and who asked me to join them