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Zeitblom and his young bride visit Adrian and Schildknapp in their summer refuge of Palestrina in 1912, the second year of their Italian sojourn. Once again, there is a lengthy description of the place and the household where they are residing and of the people hosting them which, as near as I can tell, are of no importance to the story. Surprisingly, Goethe is not quoted once.
p215 On the badly out-of-tune square piano in the friends’ living-room he [Adrian] played to us once during our stay -- unfortunately only once -- from the completed sections, mostly already scored for a specially chosen orchestra, of the “pleasant well-conceited comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost,” as the piece was called in 1598. He played characteristic passages and a few complete scene sequences: the first act, including the scene outside Armado’s house, and several later numbers which he had partly anticipated: in particular Biron’s monologues, which he had had especially in mind from the first, the one in verse at the end of the third act, as well as the prose one in the fourth: “They have pitched a toil, I am toiling a pitch -- pitch that defiles”; which, while always preserving the atmosphere of the comic and grotesque, expresses musically still better than the first the deep and genuine despair of the young man over his surrender to the suspect black beauty, his raging abandonment of self-mockery: “By the Lord, this love is as mad as Ajax; it kills sheep; it kills me, I a sheep”: this partly because the swift-moving, unjointed, ejaculatory prose, with its many plays on words, inspired the composer to invent musical accents of quite peculiar fantasticality; partly, also, because in music the repetition of the significant and already familiar, the suggestive or subtle invention, always makes the strongest and most speaking impression. And in the second monologue elements of the first are thus delightfully recalled to mind. This was true above all for the embittered self-castigation of the heart because of its infatuation with the “whitely wanton with a velvet brow, with two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes,” and again quite particularly for the musical picture of these beloved accursed eyes: a melisma darkly flashing out of the sound of combined cellos and flutes, half lyrically passionate and half burlesque, which in the prose, at the place “O, but her eye -- by this light, but for her eye, I would not love her,” recurs in a wildly caricatured way, where the darkness of the eyes is intensified by the pitch, but the lightning flash of them is this time given to the piccolo.
p216 There can be no doubt that the strangely insistent and even unnecessary, dramatically little justified characterization of Rosaline as a faithless, wanton, dangerous piece of female flesh -- a description only given to her in Biron’s speeches, whereas in the actual setting of the comedy she is no more than pert and witty -- there can be no doubt that this characterization springs from a compulsion, heedless of artistic indiscrepancies, on the poet’s part, an urge to bring in his own experiences and, whether it fits or not, to take poetic revenge for them. Rosaline, as the lover never tires of portraying her, is the dark lady of the second sonnet sequence, Elizabeth’s maid of honour, Shakespeare’s love, who betrayed him with the lovely youth. And the “part of my rhyme and here my melancholy” with which Biron appears on stage for the prose monologue (“Well, she hath one o’ my sonnets already:) is one of those which Shakespeare addressed to this black and whitely beauty. And how does Rosaline come to apply to the sharp-tongued, merry Biron of the play such wisdom as:
The blood of youth burns not with such excess
As gravity’s revolt to wantonness?
For he is young and not at all grave, and by no means the person who could give occasion to such a comment as that it is lamentable when wise men turn fools and apply all their wit to give folly the appearance of worth. In the mouth of Rosaline and her friends Biron falls quite out of his role; he is no longer Biron, but Shakespeare in his unhappy affair with the dark lady; and Adrian, who had the sonnets, that profoundly extraordinary trio of poet, friend, and beloved, always by him in a pocket edition, had been from the beginning at pains to assimilate the character of his Biron to this particular and favourite dialogue and to give him a music which, in suitable proportion to the burlesquing style of the whole, makes him “grave” and intellectually considerable, a genuine sacrifice to a shameful passion.
That was beautiful, and I praised it highly. And how much reason there was besides for praise and joyful amaze in what he played to us!...
p218 Yes admiration and sadness mingled strangely as I contemplated this music. “How beautiful!” the heart said to itself -- mine at least said so -- “and how sad!” The admiration was due to a witty and melancholy work of art, an intellectual achievement which deserved the name of heroic, something just barely possible, behaving like arrogant travesty. I know not how otherwise to characterize it than by calling it a tense, sustained, neck-breaking game played by art at the edge of impossibility. It was just this that made one sad. But admiration and sadness, admiration and doubt, is that not almost the definition of love? It was with a strained and painful love of him and what was his that I listened to Adrian’s performance...
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