I shook my head. “_Rigoletto?_” “I’m afraid not.” “_Bohème? Fanciulla del West? Pagliacci?_” I had to go on disappointing him. “Not even _Norma_? Or the _Barbiere_?” I put on Battistini in “La ci darem” out of _Don Giovanni_. He agreed that the singing was good; but I could see that he didn’t much like the music. Why not? He found it difficult to explain. “It’s not like _Pagliacci_,” he said at last. “Not palpitating?” I suggested, using a word with which I was sure he would be familiar; for it occurs in every Italian political speech and patriotic leading article. “Not palpitating,” he agreed. And I reflected that it is precisely by the difference between _Pagliacci_ and _Don Giovanni_, between the palpitating and the non-palpitating, that modern musical taste is separated from the old. The corruption of the best, I thought, is the worst. Beethoven taught music to palpitate with his intellectual and spiritual passion. It has gone on palpitating ever since, but with the passion of inferior men. Indirectly, I thought, Beethoven is responsible for _Parsifal_, _Pagliacci_, and the _Poem of Fire_; still more indirectly for _Samson and Delilah_ and “Ivy, cling to me.” Mozart’s melodies may be brilliant, memorable, infectious; but they don’t palpitate, don’t catch you between wind and water, don’t send the listener off into erotic ecstasies. Carlo and his elder children found my gramophone, I am afraid, rather a disappointment. They were too polite, however, to say so openly; they merely ceased, after the first day or two, to take any interest in the machine and the music it played. They preferred the guitar and their own singing. Guido, on the other hand, was immensely interested. And he liked, not the cheerful dance tunes, to whose sharp rhythms our little Robin loved to go stamping round and round the room, pretending that he was a whole regiment of soldiers, but the genuine stuff. The first record he heard, I remember, was that of the slow movement of Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for two violins. That was the disk I put on the turntable as soon as Carlo had left me. It seemed to me, so to speak, the most musical piece of music with which I could refresh my long-parched mind--the coolest and clearest of all draughts. The movement had just got under way and was beginning to unfold its pure and melancholy beauties in accordance with the laws of the most exacting intellectual logic, when the two children, Guido in front and little Robin breathlessly following, came clattering into the room from the loggia.