Three by Cain: Serenade, Love's Lovely Counterfeit, the Butterfly by James M. Cain

I could. He listened, his face set like flint. I finished and was going to start something else, when he touched my arm. “Play a little of that again.”
    I played it again, then gave him some Italians in Algiers, and then some Barber. It took quite a while. I know a lot of Rossini. I didn’t sing, just played. On the woodwind strain in the Barber overture, I just brushed the strings with my fingers, then for the climax came in big over the hole, and it really sounded like something. I stopped, and he smoked his pipe a long time. “ ’Tis fine, musicianly music, isn’t it?”
    “It’s all of that. And it’s no worse for being gay, and not taking itself too seriously.”
    “Aye, it has a twinkle in its eye, and a sparkle in its beat.”
    “Your friend Beethoven patronized him, the son-of-a-bitch. Told him to keep on writing tunes, that was what he was good for. All Rossini was doing at the time was trying to give him a lift, so he wouldn’t have to live like a hog in the dump he found him in.”
    “If he patronized him it was his right.”
    “The hell it was. When a Beethoven overture is as good as a Rossini overture, then it’ll be his right. Until then, let him keep his goddam mouth shut.”
    “Lad, lad, you’re profaning a temple.”
    “No, I’m not. You say he’s the greatest composer that ever lived, and so do I. He wrote the nine greatest symphonies everput on paper, and that makes him the greatest composer. But listen, symphonies are not all of music. When you get to the overtures, Beethoven’s name is not at the top, and Rossini’s is. The idea of a man that could write a thing like the Leonora No. 3 high-hatting Rossini. Why, when those horns sound off, off-stage, it’s a cheap vaudeville effect that makes the William Tell Overture sound like a Meistersinger’s Prelude, by comparison.”
    “I confess I don’t like it.”
    “Oh yeah, he would show the boys how to write an overture, wouldn’t he? He didn’t have overtures in him. You know why? To write an overture, you’ve got to love the theatre, and he didn’t. Did you ever hear Fidelio?”
    “I have, and it shames me—”
    “But Rossini loved the theatre, and that’s why he could write an overture. He takes you into the theatre—hell, you can even feel them getting into their seats, and smell the theatre smell, and see the lights go up on the curtain. Who the hell told Beethoven he could treat that guy as somebody with an amusing talent that he ought to cultivate?”
    “Just the same he was a great man.”
    I played the minuet from the Eighth Symphony. You can get most of that on the guitar. “… That was something to hear. By the way you play him, lad, you think he’s a great man yourself, I take it?”
    “Yes.”
    “The other too. From now on I shall listen to him.” We were several days out before he got around to McCormack, and he kind of brought it up offhand, as we were sitting on deck at sundown, like it was just something he happened to think of. But when he found out I thought McCormack was one of the greatest singers that ever lived, he began to talk. “So you say the singers admire the fellow?”
    “Admire him? Does a ballplayer admire Ty Cobb?”
    “Between ourselves, I’m no enthusiast for the art. As you’ve observed, I’m a symphony man myself, and I believe the great music of the world has been written for fiddlers, not singers.But with McCormack I make an exception. Not because he’s an Irishman, I give you my word on that. You were right about Herbert. If there’s one thing an Irishman hates more than a landlord it’s another Irishman. ’Tis because he makes me feel music I had previously been indifferent to. I don’t speak of the ballads he sings, mush a man wouldn’t spit into. But I have heard him sing Händel. I heard him sing a whole program of Händel at a private engagement in Boston.”
    “He can sing it, all right.”
    “Until then, I had not cared for Händel, but he revealed it to