“Next comes a quintette such as Rossini can give us. If he was ever justified in giving vent to that flowery, voluptuous grace for which Italian music is blamed, is it not in this charming movement in which each person expresses joy? The enslaved people are delivered, and yet a passion in peril is fain to moan. Pharaoh’s son loves a Hebrew woman, and she must leave him. What gives its ravishing charm to this quintette is the return to the homelier feelings of life after the grandiose picture of two stupendous and national emotions:--general misery, general joy, expressed with the magic force stamped on them by divine vengeance and with the miraculous atmosphere of the Bible narrative. Now, was not I right?” added Massimilla, as the noble _sretto_ came to a close. “Voci di giubilo, D’ in’orno eccheggino, Di pace l’ Iride Per noi spunto.” (Cries of joy sound about us. The rainbow of peace dawns upon us.) “How ingeniously the composer has constructed this passage!” she went on, after waiting for a reply. “He begins with a solo on the horn, of divine sweetness, supported by _arpeggios_ on the harps; for the first voices to be heard in this grand concerted piece are those of Moses and Aaron returning thanks to the true God. Their strain, soft and solemn, reverts to the sublime ideas of the invocation, and mingles, nevertheless, with the joy of the heathen people. This transition combines the heavenly and the earthly in a way which genius alone could invent, giving the _andante_ of this quintette a glow of color that I can only compare to the light thrown by Titian on his Divine Persons. Did you observe the exquisite interweaving of the voices? the clever entrances by which the composer has grouped them round the main idea given out by the orchestra? the learned progressions that prepare us for the festal _allegro_? Did you not get a glimpse, as it were, of dancing groups, the dizzy round of a whole nation escaped from danger? And when the clarionet gives the signal for the _stretto_,--‘_Voci di giubilo_,’--so brilliant and gay, was not your soul filled with the sacred pyrrhic joy of which David speaks in the Psalms, ascribing it to the hills?” “Yes, it would make a delightful dance tune,” said the doctor. “French! French! always French!” exclaimed the Duchess, checked in her exultant mood by this sharp thrust. “Yes; you would be capable of taking that wonderful burst of noble and dainty rejoicing and turning it into a rigadoon. Sublime poetry finds no mercy in your eyes. The highest genius,--saints, kings, disasters,--all that is most sacred must pass under the rods of caricature. And the vulgarizing of great music by turning it into a dance tune is to caricature it. With you, wit kills soul, as argument kills reason.” They all sat in silence through the _recitative_ of Osiride and Membrea, who plot to annul the order given by Pharaoh for the departure of the Hebrews.