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Untitled Article
right track . There were but few exceptions , and those there was do reason to regret , to the readiness with which the reduced remuneration , offered by the Norwich committee on this last occasion , was accepted . It seemed , and we have no doubt it was , quite as much > of a festival to the performers as to the audience ; any one might perceive that they were in it , heart and soul ; they enjoyed every Thing ; all the new German novelties , and all the old German novelties too ; for how else can we describe the second and third acts of the Creation ? But , oh ! the gladness and the glory was to see them all at last , when they got fairly afloat with Handel upon the billows of the Red Sea ; then how they blew and scraped and banged and shouted , till all the
firstborn of Egypt trembled in their graves . Majestic , then , was Jupiter Tonans aloft , with his ' double double beat of the thundering drum ; ' , far below , Lindley ' s round face grew rounder , and his twinkling eye glanced up at Dragonetti ' s long form which was growing longer ; and the weaver boys made thorough-stitch work all trou the wilderness / and galloped the hoss , ' poor fellows , as beggars are said to do when mounted ; and amid them all , as lovely and as mighty 9 s the poetic angel of the old couplet ,
Malibran ' rode in the whirlwind , ' and 'triumphed gloriously . ' Malibran ! There ' s one who loves her art , and understands it too , and the nature without which that art is nothing . There were three things for which she was not paid at all , the sight of which repaid all who saw them . ' The first good joy' was to see her crying , as at the quartet in the Last Judgment , when other people were singing . The next was , to see her singing away ,
bless her heart , when nobody could hear her , in the loudest choruses . And the third was , her sitting , on the Sunday , in the gallery of St . Margaret's little out-of-the-way church , with the charity-girls , chanting the ' old hundred / and dismissing the bewildered clergyman , who would have bowed her to the first seat in the synagogue , with , ' Go your ways to the desk ; where should a singing-girl sit but with the singing-girls ? ' The act
was like her acting , unconventional ; as was her volunteering , at the last concert , in the gladness of her spirit , a comic song , which some of the quidnuncs said was ' not treating the patrons and the audience with proper respect . ' Perhaps it was not . But never having cared about proper respect ourselves , we cannot pretend to judge . So far from objecting to such ' liberties / we only wish they were rights . Beautifully did the arch witchery
of that song contrast with the lofty enthusiasm and deep feeling which she had previously evinced . * Ye sacred priests' was sung by her , for the first time , on the Friday morning . Was it feeling or study which made her discard the traditional whine of the recitative , and by her dignified rebuke of the hesitating priests give new and far more touching pathos to the commencement of the air , and thus heighten the devout jubilancy of its close ?
Untitled Article
Rejections on the Norwich Musical Festival . 759
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1833, page 759, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2626/page/27/
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