"
"Where have I seen you?--for I know you."
"Where? you ask. But everywhere: under the warm sun of the East, by
the white oceans of the Pole.... I have found you everywhere, for
you are Beauty itself, you are immortal Love!"
The music is not without a certain nobility, and bears the imprint of
the calm, strong spirit of belief. But I was sorry that the story was
only about a mere entity when I had been getting interested in a man. I
can never understand the attraction of this kind of symbolism. Unless it
is allied to sublime powers of creation in metaphysics or morals--such
as that possessed by a Goethe or an Ibsen--I do not see what such
symbolism can add to life, though I see very well what it takes away
from it. But it is, after all, a matter of taste; and, anyway, there is
nothing in this story to astonish us greatly. This transition from
realism to symbolism is something in opera with which we have grown only
too familiar since the time of Wagner.
But the story does not stop there; for we leave symbolic abstractions to
enter a still more extraordinary domain, which is removed even farther
still from realities.
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