Collected Works of A. I. Herzen, Volume 4

"Into the depths of the realm of spirits, Mozart leads us. Fear grips us, but without torment; it is a premonition of the infinite. Love and bliss breathe in the charming voices of unearthly beings; night falls in bright purple light, and with inexpressible rapture, we rush after the phantoms who call us into their ranks, flying among the clouds.

"The music of Beethoven reveals to us the realm of the infinite and the immense. Fiery rays flicker in this realm of night, and we see the shadows of giants who approach ever closer, surround us, overwhelm us, destroy us; but they do not destroy the infinite passion into which every rapture overflows, in which love, hope, and pleasure are fused, and in which we alone continue to live.

"Haydn takes the human in life romantically; he is more commensurable, more understandable to the crowd.

"Mozart takes the supernatural, the miraculous, dwelling in the interior of our spirit.

"Beethoven's music acts through fear, terror, ecstasy, and pain, and reveals precisely that infinite longing which is, in essence, the substance of romanticism. For this reason, he is a purely romantic composer; and is it not because of this that he has poor success in vocal music, which destroys with words this character of indefiniteness and infinity?"

Is it not true that in this short excerpt, one can see the immeasurable depth of artistic feeling? How full and significant are these few words, thrown out in passing about romanticism!

Do you want to know what the soul of an artist is, how far it is separated from the soul of an ordinary person—a soul with the smell of the earth, a soul in which the divine spark is soiled? Do you want to enter into its interior, into this temple of the ideal toward which the artist strives and which he can never fully tear from his soul in all its purity? Do you want to see how stormy his passions are, to follow him into a wild bacchanalia and into the embraces of a maiden? Read Hoffmann's tales: they will present to you the most complete development of an artist's life in all its phases. Let us take his Gluck referring to a character in Hoffmann's story 'Ritter Gluck', for example: is this not the type of the artist, whoever he may be—Buonarroti or Beethoven, Dante or Schiller? Listen, here is Gluck telling of the moments of rapture and inspiration:

"Perhaps the half-forgotten theme of some song, which we sing in a different manner, is the first thought belonging to us, the embryo of a giant that will devour everything around it and turn everything into its own blood, into its own body! The road is wide, and the people crowd upon it, and everyone shouts: 'We are initiated! We have reached our goal!' Through the gates of ivory they enter the realm of visions; few notice these gates, even fewer pass through them! Here everything is terrifying: mad images fly hither and thither, and these images have their characters, more or less defined. Everything spins and whirls; many fall asleep, and they melt away, annihilated in their sleep, and there is no shadow left of them—no shadow that might have told them of the marvelous light that illuminates this realm. Some, having awakened, go further and reach the truth. An exalted moment! A minute of contact with the eternal, inexpressible! Look at the sun: it is a Dreiklang triad/chord from which chords shower down like stars and wrap you in threads of light.