Cosima diário. Texto sobre orquestra

Diário 1 

0-Saturday, January 23,1869

By lunch I am well once more; our conversation concerns yesterdays reading. Comparison with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in which as R. says the choruses soften everything and give it a musical transfiguration, as it were, whereas in Shakespeare everything is spread before us and stays naked and terrifying. 

1- 17/01/1871 

His intended work The Destiny of Opera is very much occupying R.’s thoughts, and many of his conversations now lead in this direction. The significance of the orchestra, its position as the ancient chorus, its huge advantage over the latter, which talks about the action in words, whereas the orchestra conveys to us the soul of this action—all this he explains to us in detail. Every utterance from him is doctrine to me. — p. 523.

2- 16/03/1871

I come upon him at work, he is altering the words to fit the melody, and says: “Nothing worth while will come just from writing a good poem and then putting a melody to it. I can see how the irregularities of the Greek choruses arose; I also knew what I was doing when I constructed my Nibelungen meter—I knew it would accommodate itselfto the music. p.349

Triday, September 29 

3- “I have composed a Greek chorus,” R.exclaims to me in the morning, “but a chorus which will be sung, so to speak, by the orchestra; after Siegfried’s death, while the scene is being changed, the Siegmund theme will be played, as if the chorus were saying: ‘This was his father’; then the sword motive; and finally his own theme; then the curtain goes up, Gutrune enters, thinking she has heard his horn. How could words ever make the impression that these solemn themes, in their new form, will evoke? Music always expresses the direct present.”p.418.

4-Monday, May  1873

Over coffee I open Aeschylus at random and am astonished by the scornful answer of the seventh Fury to Orestes (“In the dead put then thy confidence, thou slayer of thy mother”). I tell R. that in my memory these things always seem more emphatic, more general in tone, and I am continually amazed by their personal, Shakespearean manner. R. agrees with me and says that, particularly in view of the huge theaters and the use of masks and buskins, the effect of this liveliness of speech (“in Sophocles the chorus in fact lies throughout”) is impossible to imagine—^particularly in the comedy of Aristophanes. “How could the audience follow it at that distance? I can only conclude that the Greeks saw and heard things in a quite different way from us stay-at- homes and spectacle wearers.” — We talk about the battles of these chosen people—^Plataea in particular fascinates R., he says one cannot study it too closely, so interesting is it. — In the afternoon to the house; from our architect we hear curious things!  

5- Wednesday, November 18. 1874.

I find R. reading Oedipus in the evening, after his work, comparing the translation with the text. “It is like a Persian carpet,” he says, “a torrent of beauty—now vanished forever: we are barbarians.” We then come to the Oresteia, the scene of Cassandra with the chorus, and R. declares it to be the most perfect thing mortal art has ever produced