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Don Juan Triumphant Erik “Yes, I compose sometimes. I began that work twenty years ago. When I have finished, I shall take it away with me in that coffin and never wake up again.’ Christine “You must work at it as seldom as you can.” Erik “I sometimes work at it for fourteen days and nights together, during which I live on music only, and then I rest for years at a time.” Christine “Will you play me something out of your Don Juan Triumphant?” Erik “You must never ask me that. I will play you Mozart, if you like, which will only make you weep; but my Don Juan, Christine, burns; and yet he is not struck by fire from the Heavens. “You see, Christine, there is some music that is so terrible that it consumes all those who approach it. Fortunately, you have not come to that music yet, for you would lose all your pretty coloring and nobody would know you when you returned to Paris.” Christine (later) “Presently I heard the sound of the organ; and then I began to understand Erik’s contemptuous phrase when he spoke about Opera music. What I now heard was utterly different music. What I now heard was utterly different from what I had heard up to then. His Don Juan Triumphant (for I had not a doubt that he had rushed to his masterpiece to forget the horror of the moment) seemed to me at first one long, awful, magnificent sob. But, little by little, it expressed every emotion, every suffering of which mankind is capable. It intoxicated me; and I opened the door that separated us.” |
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