SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
Tolstoy’s rough banter
Tolstoy’s rough banter recalls Rousseau’s sarcasm about an opera of Rameau’s. In the Nouvelle Héloïse, he rails in a similar fashion against the sadly fantastic performances at the theatre. It was, even then, a question of monsters, «of dragons animated by a blockhead of a Savoyard, who had not enough spirit for the beast.»
«They assured me that they had a tremendous lot of machinery to make all this movement, and they offered several times to show it to me; but I felt no curiosity about little effects achieved by great efforts…. The sky is represented by some blue rags suspended from sticks and cords, like a laundry display…. The chariots of the gods and goddesses are made of four joists in a frame, suspended by a thick rope, as a swing might be. Then a plank is stuck across the joists, and on this is seated a god. In front of him hangs a piece of daubed cloth, which serves as a cloud upon which his splendid chariot may rest…. The theatre is furnished with little square trap-doors which, opening as occasion requires, show that the demons can be let loose from the cellars. When the demons have to fly in the air, dummies of brown cloth are substituted, or sometimes real chimney-sweeps, who swing in the air, suspended by cords, until they are gloriously lost in the rag sky….
«But you can have no idea of the dreadful cries and roarings with which the theatre resounds…. What is so extraordinary is that these howlings are almost the only things that the audience applaud. By the way they clap their hands one would take them to be a lot of deaf creatures, who were so delighted to catch a few piercing sounds now and then that they wanted the actors to do them all over again. I am quite sure that people applaud the bawling of an actress at the opera as they would a mountebank’s feats of skill at a fair–one suffers while they are going on, but one is so delighted to see them finish without an accident that one willingly demonstrates one’s pleasure…. With these beautiful sounds, as true as they are sweet, those of the orchestra blend very worthily. Imagine an unending clatter of instruments without any melody; a lingering and endless groaning among the bass parts; and the whole the most mournful and boring thing that I ever heard in my life. I could not put up with it for half an hour without getting a violent headache.
«All this forms a sort of psalmody, possessing neither tune nor time. But if by any chance a lively air is played, there is a general stamping; the audience is set in motion, and follows, with a great deal of trouble and noise, some performer in the orchestra. Delighted to feel for a few moments the rhythm that is so lacking, they torment the ear, the voice, the arms, the legs, and all the body, to chase after a tune that is ever ready to escape them….»
this was: Tolstoy’s Rough Banter
go to next chapter: Rameau’s operas
