ke a wild beast, loves her as tenderly as a mother does her child.
Unliterary art, plastic or musical, is inexorable: the man who grovels
is no proud man; the man who fells down to the right and left, is no
dreamer; the man whose whole soul is wrath and destruction, is no lover;
the mood is the mood; art can give only it; and the general character,
the connection between moods, the homogeneous something which pervades
every phase of passion, however various, escapes the powers of all save
the art which can speak and explain. How then obtain our Cherubino, our
shiftiest and most fickle of pages? How? Why, by selecting just one of
his very many moods, the one which is nearest allied to fickleness and
volubility; the mood which must most commonly be the underlying, the
connecting one, the mood into which all his swagger and sentiment sooner
or later resolve; the tone of voice into which his sobs will quickest be
lost, the attitude which will soonest replace the defiant strut; the
frame of mind which, though one and indivisible itself, is the nearest
to instability: levity.

Let Cherubino sing words of tenderness and passion, of audacity and
shyness, to only one sort of music, to light and careless music; let the
jackanapes be for ever before us, giggling and pirouetting in melody and
rhythm; it will not be Cherubino, the whole Cherubino; it will be only
a miserable fragmentary indication of him, but it will be the right
indication; the psychological powers of music do not go far, but thus
far they can go. Analysis of the nature of musical expression has shown
us how much it may accomplish; the choice of the artist alone can tell
us how much it should accomplish; the scientific investigation is at an
end, the artistic judgment must begin. Chapelmaster Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, here are your means of musical expression, and here is the thing
to be expressed; on careful examination it appears distinctly that the
only way in which, with your melodies, rhythms, and harmonies, you
can give us, not a copy, but a faint indicative sketch, something
approaching the original as much as four lines traced in the alley sand
of your Schloss Mirabell Gardens at Salzburg resemble the general aspect
of the Mirabell Palace; that the only way in which you can give us such
a distantly approximative....

Signor Maestro Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Vice-Chapelmaster of His Most
Reverend Highness the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, has meanwhile sat
d