“Well, these are the discoveries I have guessed and made.  Yes,” said Gambara, with increasing vehemence, “hitherto men have noted effects rather than causes.  If they could but master the causes, music would be the greatest of the arts.  Is it not the one which strikes deepest to the soul?  You see in painting no more than it shows you; in poetry you have only what the poet says; music goes far beyond this.  Does it not form your taste, and rouse dormant memories?  In a concert-room there may be a thousand souls; a strain is flung out from Pasta’s throat, the execution worthily answering to the ideas that flashed through Rossini’s mind as he wrote the air.  That phrase of Rossini’s, transmitted to those attentive souls, is worked out in so many different poems.  To one it presents a woman long dreamed of; to another, some distant shore where he wandered long ago.  It rises up before him with its drooping willows, its clear waters, and the hopes that then played under its leafy arbors.  One woman is reminded of the myriad feelings that tortured her during an hour of jealousy, while another thinks of the unsatisfied cravings of her heart, and paints in the glowing hues of a dream an ideal lover, to whom she abandons herself with the rapture of the woman in the Roman mosaic who embraces a chimera; yet a third is thinking that this very evening some hoped-for joy is to be hers, and rushes by anticipation into the tide of happiness, its dashing waves breaking against her burning bosom.  Music alone has this power of throwing us back on ourselves; the other arts give us infinite pleasure.  But I am digressing.

“These were my first ideas, vague indeed; for an inventor at the beginning only catches glimpses of the dawn, as it were.  So I kept these glorious ideas at the bottom of my knapsack, and they gave me spirit to eat the dry crust I often dipped in the water of a spring.  I worked, I composed airs, and, after playing them on any instrument that came to hand, I went off again on foot across Italy.  Finally, at the age of two-and-twenty, I settled in Venice, where for the first time I enjoyed rest and found myself in a decent position.  I there made the acquaintance of a Venetian nobleman who liked my ideas, who encouraged me in my investigations, and who got me employment at the Venice theatre.

“Living was cheap, lodging inexpensive.  I had a room in that Capello palace from which the famous Bianca came forth one evening to become a Grand Duchess of Tuscany.  And I would dream that my unrecognized fame would also emerge from thence one day to be crowned.

“I spent my evenings at the theatre and my days in work.  Then came disaster.  The performance of an opera in which I had experimented, trying my music, was a failure.  No one understood my score for the Martiri.  Set Beethoven before the Italians and they are out of their depth.  No one had patience enough to wait for the effect to be produced by the different motives given out by each instrument, which were all at last to combine in a grand ensemble.