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Show T H E COMPOSITION OF BALLETS. 189 attention was paid in suiting the action to the music exactly ; and those who failed to observe this rule, were severely attacked and censured. Scrupulous care should be taken to adapt the music with precision to pantomimic gesture. Particular attention also should be paid to avoid those mistakes to which we are but too often witnesses, namely, the ridiculous endeavour to suit an air taken from a serious opera to the action of those who are performing a comic scene ; and, on the contrary, pretending to represent the discourse of two grave characters by playing gay dancing music. This would be doing, as the satiric artist has it, " Cantar su la ciaccona il miserere."--SALV. R O S A * . The music should describe the characters and passions belonging to it; striving to strengthen and complete the picture. The accent and melody of the airs, should always vary with the subject of the Ballet. The music of an Asiatic Ballet ought certainly to be of a different character to that of which the scene and action lie in a village; again, the rythmus and melody of the airs in a mythologic Ballet must not be of the same species as those of a ballet of chir valry and romance. A perfect analogous concord should subsist between what we see and what we hear. The ideas of the composer should accord with those of the author ; and the labours of both should be ever most closely and agreeably united. Let us profit by the examples of the ancients, and attend to the lessons of the great masters of Italy. By these means the multitude may be reclaimed to a just taste for music of a description truly pathetic, capable of delighting the soul as well as the sense; of a style, also, so pure that it ceases to delight as soon as the artist neglects the rules of science and the laws of reason22. * Or, dancing a hornpipe to the Dead March. |
