Music will be one of the redeemers of the people from crass commercialism.
--
* An uncollected essay by Lanier, "Mazzini on Music", `The Independent',
June 27, 1878.
--
While Lanier held before the American people the vision
of what they might accomplish in music, he held up to musicians
the high ideal of what they should be. In the essay just quoted,
he indorses the saying of Mazzini's that "musicians may become
a priesthood and ministry of moral regeneration. . . . Why rest contented
with stringing notes together -- mere trouveres of a day --
when it remains with you to consecrate yourselves, even on earth,
to a mission such as in the popular belief only God's angels know?"
With his high ideal of what a musician should be, he could not but be
disgusted at times with the Bohemianism of the men who played with him,
and with the loose moral life of many more eminent musicians.
"Ah, these heathenish Germans!" he exclaims, as he sees some of the orchestra
at a church service making fun of the communion service: "Double-bass was
a big fellow, with a black mustache, to whom life was all a joke,
which he expressed by a comical smile, and Viola was a young Hercules,
so full of beer that he dreamed himself in heaven, and Oboe was a young sprig,
just out from Munich, with a complexion of milk and roses, like a girl's,
and miraculously bright spectacles on his pale blue eyes,
and there they sat -- Oboe and Viola and Double-bass -- and ogled each other,
and raised their brows, and snickered behind the columns,
without a suspicion of interest either in the music or the service.
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