The
music evidently responded to the tune of Clara's soul, and certainly
harmonized with my own disposition, for never had I heard Beethoven
interpreted and understood like this before. I am not a musician, but
I suppose even musicians do not know how much there is in that Sonata.
I cannot find another word than "oppressiveness" to describe the
sensation wrought upon the audience. One had a feeling as if mystical
rites were being performed; there rose before me a vast desert, not of
this world, weird and unutterably sad, without shape, half lit up by a
ghostly moon, in the midst of which hopeless despair waited and
sobbed and tore its hair. It was terrible and impressive because so
unearthly; and yet irresistibly attractive,--never had my spirit
come in such close proximity to the infinite. It was almost an
hallucination. I imagined that in the shapeless desert, in the dusk of
a world of shadows, I was searching for somebody dearer to me than the
whole world, one without whom I could not and would not live, and I
searched with the conviction that I should have to search forever and
never find what I was looking for. My heart was so oppressed that at
times I could scarcely breathe. I paid no attention to the mechanical
part of the execution, which no doubt was as perfect as the
expression.
All in the room seemed under the same spell, not excepting Clara
herself.
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