When Frederick and his friends entered, a woman and a slim toreador were
dancing. The music was of an exciting nature, and the character of the
performance and the performer immediately took the artists captive. The
dance was an eccentric mixture of drollness, innocence, and wildness.
When watching the toreador, Frederick felt as if he were in an arena at
Seville; when watching the girl, as if he were near the Gulf of Corinth,
or on one of the islands of the Cyclades. He promptly decided to leave
Spain and follow the lovely dancer to her home in Greece, where she was
his Chloe and he, her Daphnis. Old shepherds sat tippling in a pine grove
dedicated to Pan. From the highland meadows he looked down upon the far
off AEgean Sea beating noiselessly against the rocky coast-line.
The music of the orchestra turned into the piping of Pan, while Webster
and Forster, the heavy fumes, the air vitiated by the exhalations of five
thousand people no longer existed. The pure breath of spring was rustling
in the pines. The shepherdess was dancing as she had learned to dance
from the droll caperings of the goats or, by natural inheritance, from
great Pan himself. It was a dance of young, wild, bubbling joy in life.
"The origin of all music," thought Frederick, "is dance and song in one
and the same person. The feet compel the rhythm that the throat voices;
and if the dancer herself does not sing, she hears music different from
the music to which she is dancing, and if she dances without an
accompaniment, we who behold her hear her music nevertheless. The
melodies I hear in this girl's dancing are comparable in their bucolic
innocence to the things of the same sort that Mozart, Beethoven and
Schubert wrote. They have exorcised the vulgar muse from this vulgar
place, banishing her to a remote distance."
The dancer was a Spaniard. She made little leaps in the air and tossed
her head archly, as if for her own joy, unconscious both of the audience
and the toreador, who sometimes picked her up and held her aloft. Her
dancing was innocent, entirely free from sensuality. At the conclusion of
her performance, Frederick and his friends clapped madly, while the vast
audience gave very scanty signs of applause.
"Caviar to the general," said Frederick.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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