Cherubino is by no means the most important person in the plot of the Nozze.  But he strikes the keynote of the opera.  His love is the standard by which we measure the sad, retrospective, stately love of the Countess, who tries to win back an alienated husband.  By Cherubino we measure the libertine love of the Count, who is a kind of Don Juan without cruelty, and the humorous love of Figaro and his sprightly bride Susanna.  Each of these characters typifies one of the many species of love.  But Cherubino anticipates and harmonises all.  They are conscious, experienced, world-worn, disillusioned, trivial.  He is all love, foreseen, foreshadowed in a dream of life to be; all love, diffused through brain and heart and nerves like electricity; all love, merging the moods of ecstasy, melancholy, triumph, regret, jealousy, joy, expectation, in a hazy sheen, as of some Venetian sunrise.  What will Cherubino be after three years?  A Romeo, a Lovelace, a Lothario, a Juan? a disillusioned rake, a sentimentalist, an effete fop, a romantic lover?  He may become any one of these, for he contains the possibilities of all.  As yet, he is the dear glad angel of the May of love, the nightingale of orient emotion.  This moment in the unfolding of character Mozart has arrested and eternalised for us in Cherubino’s melodies; for it is the privilege of art to render things most fugitive and evanescent fixed imperishably in immortal form.

IV

This is indeed a rhapsodical production.  Miranda was probably right.  Had it not been for Pauline Lucca, I might not have philosophised the Nozze thus.  Yet, in the main, I believe that my instinct was well grounded.  Music, especially when wedded to words, more especially when those words are dramatic, cannot separate itself from emotion.  It will not do to tell us that a melody is a certain sequence of sounds; that the composer chose it for its beauty of rhythm, form, and tune, and only used the words to get it vocalised.  We are forced to go farther back, and ask ourselves, What suggested it in the first place to the composer? why did he use it precisely in connection with this dramatic situation?  How can we answer these questions except by supposing that music was for him the utterance through art of some emotion?  The final fact of human nature is emotion, crystallising itself in thought and language, externalising itself in action and art.  ‘What,’ said Novalis, ‘are thoughts but pale dead feelings?’ Admitting this even in part, we cannot deny to music an emotional content of some kind.  I would go farther, and assert that, while a merely mechanical musician may set inappropriate melodies to words, and render music inexpressive of character, what constitutes a musical dramatist is the conscious intention of fitting to the words of his libretto such melody as shall interpret character, and the power to do this with effect.