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THAT MUSIC DATES FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
I
O you, my old friends, once so young,
Who like me have borne the weight of days,
Who strike the deaf tomb with more than one regret,
And who walk bowed, for wisdom is heavy;
My friends! which of you, which of us has not often,
When mourning, with dry eye and dreaming face,
That serious friend who wounds and whom we revere,
Had laid his stern hand upon our brow,
Which of us has not sought calm in a song!
Who has not, like a sister who heals by touching,
Let melody enter into his thought!
And, without disturbing the lulled memory of the dead,
Has not found laughter and tears at once
Among the instruments, the flutes and the voices!
Which of us, when some sorrow flows over him,
Has not slipped in, vibrating with the breath of the crowd,
Into the theater filled with confused murmurs!
As a sigh sometimes is lost in clamor,
Who has not cast his soul, mingled with those souls,
Into the orchestra where winged music shivers,
Where the warrior march expires in a song of love,
Where the bass, weeping, soothes the drum!
II
Listen! listen! from the palpitating master,
The bow rushes upon all the violins.
The quivering orchestra laughs in its black den.
Everything speaks. Thus one hears without seeing them,
At evening, when the countryside raises a dull murmur,
The vintagers laughing in a ripe vineyard.
Like a frail capital on a column,
The blossomed flute has risen upon the alto.
The scales, chaste sisters hidden in the vapor,
Empty and fill their tilted amphoras,
Hold one another’s hands and sing in turn.
While a light wind makes float around,
Like a playful veil around a divine group,
These laces of sound that the fife cuts out.
Heavens! there is the bugle sounding. At that voice,
Everything awakens with a start, everything leaps at once.
The drum of a thousand echoes, beating its enormous flanks,
Makes the herd of shapeless instruments howl,
And the air fills with furious and whistling chords
That the brass serpents have twisted in their flanks.
Vast tumult through which an oboe passes sighing!
Suddenly from top to bottom the curtain tears;
Darker and more alive to the eye than a forest,
The whole symphony appears in a hymn.
Then, as in a chaos that would take back a world,
Everything is lost in the folds of a deep mist.
Each form of the song passes saying: Enough!
The sparkling sounds go out dispersed.
A night that spreads its enlarged vapors
Erases the contour of the vague melodies,
Like skiffs whose masts the water covers;
And the stretto, casting upon their confused mass
Its trembling gleams broadly spread,
Falls back into that shadow in starry clusters!
O concert that flies away in flame to all winds!
Abyss where the crescendo swells its moving floods!
How the soul is stirred! how hearts listen!
And how this bow from which notes drip,
Now in the light and now in the night,
Proudly stirs this storm of sound!
III
Powerful Palestrina, old master, old genius,
I salute you here, father of harmony,
For, like a great river from which humans drink,
All this music has flowed into your hands!
For Gluck and Beethoven, branches under which we dream,
Were born of your stock and made of your sap!
For Mozart, your son, took from your altars
That new lyre unknown to mortals,
More trembling than the grass in the breath of dawns,
Born in the sixteenth century between your sonorous fingers!
For, master, it is to you that all our sighs go,
As soon as a voice sings and a soul responds!
Oh! this master, like the creator who founds,
How does he say that there springs from his deep head
This universe of sounds, sweet and dark at once,
Echo of the hidden God whose world is the voice?
Where did this young man, child of blonde Italy,
Take this immense soul, filled to the brim?
What breath, what labor, what intuition,
Made of him this giant, god of emotion,
Toward whom turns the eye that weeps and wipes itself,
On whom a whole side of the human heart leans?
From where comes this voice that we hear on our knees?
And who then pours into him what he pours back into us?
IV
O deep mystery of sublime childhoods!
Who makes the flower be born on the slope of abysses,
And the poet on the edge of dark passions?
What god troubles his eye with strange visions?
What god shows him the star in the midst of shadows,
And, as under a crepe with black and funereal folds
One sees the intoxicating smile of a beauty,
The ideal through the transparent real?
Who then takes a child by the hand from dawn
To say to him: — In your soul there is not yet day.
Child of man! before its conquering fire
The noon of life has dried your heart,
Come, I will half-open to you depths without number!
Come, I will fill with clarity your eyes full of shadow!
Come, listen with me to what is explained elsewhere,
The confused stammering of spheres and flowers;
For, child, star in the sky or rose in the hedge,
Everything innocent like you stammers!
You will be the poet, a man who sees God!
Do not fear science, harsh path of fire,
Austere road, it is true, but chosen by great hearts,
Which religion and poetry
Border on both sides with their flowering bush.
When you can along the way, O beautiful cherished child,
Gather the white thorn and the blue bellflowers,
Your small step plays with the great leagues.
Fear neither boredom nor fatigue. — Come!
Listen to nature in its vague conversations.
Hear under each object the parable welling up.
Under the universal being see the eternal symbol,
And man and destiny, and the tree and the forest,
The black tombs, furrows where regret germinates;
And, as on our sorrows branches are attached,
Consolations leaning over our bowed brow,
And, like the spirit of the radiant just,
The sun, that glory blossomed in the skies!
V
God! what Palestrina, in man and in things,
Must have heard voices joyful and morose!
How one feels that in that age when our heart smiles,
When he already was thinking, he carried in his mind,
Like a river with fleeting wave,
All that the cloud or the shore threw to him!
How he walked, still a child, all pensive,
In the fields, and, from dawn, in the depths of the massive wood,
And near the precipice, the terror of mothers!
In turn drowned in shadow, dazzled by chimeras,
How he opened his soul when spring
Dips the flowering bank in the water of clear ponds,
When ivy climbs back to favorite branches,
When grass with buttercups mingles daisies!
At that uncertain hour when the day is about to die,
When everything falls asleep, the heart forgetting to suffer,
The birds to sing and the herds to graze,
How many times under his eyes a rustic cart,
Living group of noise, horses and voices,
Climbed on the hillside into the woods
Some road hollowed between the yellow ochres,
While, near a water fleeing under the alders,
He listened to the moaning in the evening mists
A hoarse bell at the bottom of a black valley!
How many times, watching the murmur of cottages,
The mocking blade of grass that whistles between two stones,
The plaintive cry of the plowshare groaning and dragged,
The nest that chatters at the bottom of a ruined cloister
From which shadow spreads over the tombs of monks,
The field gilded by dawn where the oats converse
Which, to see us pass, like a happy people,
Lean in tumult at the edge of the sunken path,
The bee that gaily sings and speaks to the rose,
Among all these objects of which being is composed,
How many times he dreamed, dark scrutinizer,
Seeking to explain to himself what they said among themselves!
And each evening, after his long walks,
Letting serenades laugh under the balconies,
When he came back content, grave and mute,
Something more stirred in his heart.
Fly, it had its honey; shrub, its dew.
He came by degrees to what in his thought
Everything lived. — Holy labor that poets do! —
In his head, like the deep universe,
The air ran, birds sang, flame and wave
Bent, the harvest gilded the blond earth,
And roofs and mountains and the descending shadow
Mingled, and evening came, dark and chasing
The beast to its den and man to his home,
And the high forests, which a wind from heaven stirs,
Joyful to be reborn at the departure of winters,
Shook madly their great green plumes!
Thus spirit, form, shadow, light and flame,
The urn of the whole world poured itself into his soul!
VI
Neither painter nor sculptor! He was a musician.
He came, a new Orpheus, after the ancient Orpheus;
And, as the ocean brings only its wave,
He brought only the art of mystery and the vague!
The lyre that weeps softly while singing aloud!
That pours to all a sound in which each finds a word!
The lute in which is translated, still more ineffable,
The unexpressed dream that fades at dawn!
For he saw nothing through the sparkling angle,
For his mind, from the immense and swarming world
That swam before his eyes in the undefined shadow,
Extinguished color and drew out harmony!
Thus always his hymn, descending from the skies,
Penetrates the mind through the pious side,
Like a ray of night through a church window!
In listening to his songs that the soul idealizes,
It seems, at those chords that, touching even the heart,
Make the just smile and the wicked muse,
That one breathes a perfume of censers and candles,
And one believes one sees pass one of those virgin angels
As Giotto dreamed, as Dante saw,
Serene beings poised on this restless world,
With blue pupils, with opal robe,
Who, while in the midst of an already pale azure
The golden point of a star bursts at the orient,
In a beautiful field of clover wander smiling!
VII
Happy those who lived in that sublime century
When, still gilding the summit of human genius,
The old Gothic sun was dying on the horizon!
When already, carrying its secret into the night,
The dead cathedral on an unfaithful soil
No longer made churches spring up around it!
Immense being still obstructed at every degree,
Like a Babel with crowded approaches,
With dungeons, with belfries, with soaring spires,
With edifices built for all thoughts;
Of genius and stone enormous piling;
Vast mass from which the day was slowly leaving!
Mysterious century when the dark science
Of ancient Daedalus agonized in the shadow,
While at the other end of the confused horizon,
Between Tasso and Luther, those two leafy oaks,
Serene, and whitening with its pure light
Your marvelous dome, O holy Architecture,
In that sky, which Albrecht Dürer admired apart,
Music rose, that moon of art!
March 29, 1837.
Victor Hugo
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-que-la-musique-date-du-seizieme-siecle-victor-hugo/