Dramatic singing physiologically estimated / by Walter Hayle Walshe.

  • Walshe, Walter Hayle, 1812-1892.
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dramatic singing physiologically estimated / by Walter Hayle Walshe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    highest models of fifty years ago, long held to have arrived at the Ultima Thule of tone-development, maybe surpassed in their power of at once intoxica- ting the musical sense and deeply impressing the in- tellect and more earnest emotions. Parts of 6 Lohen- grin ’ and6 Tannhauser5—those ideal orchestral songs —do, more than other operatic music, positively trans- port the hearer to another and a loftier sphere than that in which he daily lives and moves and has his being, impressing him the while with an indefinable sense of no longer belonging to the commonplace existence around him. Music more touching there may be, nay, there is : music so exalting there is none. The writer, when he first heard the introduc- tion to Lohengrin, wrapt in dreaminess by its weird charm, vividly experienced the mystic feeling, that something like the passing events had occurred be- fore, that the tones he heard were a reminiscence of bygone harmony, that he had already lived a life of which such music formed an integral part. Every one has at times felt this singular impression even in regard of ordinary daily affairs; but the expla- nation of the freak of consciousness has baffled philosophers, from Plato, for whom 6 all knowledge was recollection/ down to the psychologist of to-day. Meanwhile, that the writer cannot be held singular in having been cozened by poetic orchestration into