130
B. H.
HAG61N
of awe before the enonnous possibilities of psychological expression
that music has developed." True, in 1923 he speaks of the inability of
youth to appreciate the self-sufficient beauty of Mozart, and writes that
"my delight in Mozart has gone on increasing since I first came com–
pletely under his spell some fifteen or twenty years ago." But those
statements in 1911 were made not by a youth but by a man of forty–
three. And in 1924 he asks, "Is Mozart never dull and feebly repetitious,
especially in his symphonic slow movements?," citing his "dilly-dallying
in the slow movement of the G-minor Symphony."
Again, we find Newman, in 1913, describing
II Trovatore
and
the other operas of Verdi's middle period as "just the awkward but
fascinating sprawlings of a cub," with nothing of the real Verdi that
he says is to be heard only in the Requiem,
Otello
and
Falstaff.
This
reveals his inability to perceive the superb results of the operation
01
the impressive powers of the real Verdi of those earlier works--e.g.
the melodic power that produces
"T acea la notte"
and the other superb
melodic structures. And as late as 1933 we find him exhibiting this
lack of perception even about a work as late as
Don Carlo,
which is
for him a major example of "how little [Verdi] really changed from
first to last; time after time, in his latest works, we discover that a
really fine piece of expression is actually nothing more than an old
fonnula with a better face on it"; and "unfortunately the reverse is
also true; as likely as not, a later work will show us not an improved
but a degraded version of the fonnula." Particular illustration of this-–
which for him includes the ensembles in the
auto-da-fi
scene and
Philip's study that actually are excellent and effective specimens of
the genre--is apparently all he hears in
Don Carlo,
which he says "is
often interesting because it reads like a sketch for something Verdi
was to do better in 'Aida' or 'Otello.' " And by his silence about them
he reveals his failure to perceive the marvelous achievements of Verdi's
matured powers in the great pages of the work: not only the entire
scene with Philip's famous soliloquy, his interview with the Grand In–
quisitor, the quartet, Eboli's confession to Elisabetta, and her «0
don
fatale,"
not only Elisabetta's
"Tu che le vanita"
in the last act, with
its melodic grandeur that is unique in Verdi's writing, but the tre–
mendous orchestral prelude to this act, and the second-act colloquies
of Carlo and Elisabetta and of Philip and Rodrigo, which have the
flexible and free-ranging vocal phraseology, the imaginatively re–
sourceful supporting orchestral invention that one hears in
Otello,
and
are some of Verdi's most accomplished, incandescent and affecting
writin~.
What Newman
is
further unaware of
is
the truth
and the
