The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac

know that power in order to conjugate all these forces according to their true laws. Composers are working on substances of which they are ignorant. Why do instruments made of wood and metal, the bassoon and the horn, for example, resemble each other so little while employing the same substances, that is: the constituent gases of the atmosphere? Their dissimilarities proceed from some decomposition of these gases, or from an apprehension of their particular principles which modulate by virtue of unknown faculties. If we knew those faculties, science and art would have much to gain! Well, I have traced such discoveries; I have actually made them! Yes!” exclaimed Gambara, becoming tremendously excited. “Hitherto man has merely noted effects rather than causes! If he were to penetrate the causes, music would become the greatest of all the arts. Is it not the art which penetrates the soul most deeply? We see only what painting shows us, we hear only what the poet tells us, music goes far beyond that: Does it not form your very thoughts, does it not waken torpid memories? Here you have a thousand souls in a hall, a single phrase leaps from Pasta’s throat, her execution corresponding perfectly to the ideas flashing in Rossini’s soul when he wrote his aria, and Rossini’s phrase transmitted to those thousand souls develops into a thousand different poems: to one person it reveals itself as a woman long desired, to another some shore along which he has walked under trailing willows—the lapping waves and the hopes that danced under those leafy bowers; one woman remembers a thousand feelings which tormented her during an hour of jealousy; another summons up the unfulfilled longings of her heart and conceives in the rich colors of her dreams an ideal being to whom she surrenders with all the ardor of the figure caressing her fantasy in the Roman mosaic; another anticipates that this very night she will realize her desire, and plunges already into the torrent of pleasures, receiving their tide upon her fiery breast. Music alone has the power to make us return to our inmost selves, while the other arts give us only specific, only limited pleasures. But I am wandering far afield. These were my first ideas, quite vague at that, for an inventor merely glimpses a sort of dawn. Yet I carried these glorious ideas at the bottom of my wallet; they comforted me amply for having nothing to eat but dry crusts I dipped in the wayside fountains. I worked, I composed melodies, and after performing them on some instrument or other, I resumed my travels through Italy. Finally, at the age of twenty-two, I came to live in Venice, where for the first time I knew peace and found myself in a tolerable situation. Here I made the acquaintance of an old Venetian nobleman who enjoyed my ideas, who encouraged me in my pursuits, and who gave me employment at the Tetra la Fenice. Life was cheap, lodgings cost little—I occupied an apartment in that same Palazzo Capello from which, one night, the celebrated Bianca emerged to become the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. I imagined that my unknown glory would similarly emerge some day, to be similarly crowned. I spent my evenings at the theater and my days at work. I suffered a disaster: the performance of my first opera,
The Martyrs
, in which I had experimented with my new ideas, was a fiasco. None of my music was understood—give Beethoven to the Italians, and they won’t have a clue! No one in Venice had the patience to wait for an effect prepared by various motifs which each instrument played separately and which were to come together in an ultimate harmony. I had great expectations for that opera of mine, for we always believe success is within our grasp, we lovers of the blue goddess Hope! If you believe yourself destined to achieve great things, it is difficult not to feel they are coming your way; there are always chinks in the dark lantern, through which the light gleams. In that same palazzo lived a