Sonate de Vinteuil - Jorge Arriagada
“Isn’t it beautiful, that Vinteuil sonata?” Swann asked me. “The moment when night is falling among the trees, when the arpeggios of the violin call down a cooling dew upon the earth. You must admit it’s lovely; it shows all the static side of moonlight, which is the essential part. It’s not surprising that a course of radiant heat such as my wife is taking should act on the muscles, since moonlight can prevent thel eaves from stirring. That’s what is expressed so well in that little phrase, the Bois de Boulogne plunged in a cataleptic trance. By the sea it’s even more striking, becuase you have there the faint response of the waves, which, of course, you can hear quite distinctly since nothing else can move. In Paris it’s the other way around: at most, you may notice unfamiliar lights among the old buildings, the sky lit up as though by a colourless and harmless conflagration, a sort of vast news item of which you get a hint here and there. But in Vinteuil’s little phrase, and in the whole sonata for that matter, it’s not like that; the scene is laid in the Bois; in the gruppetto you can distinctly hear a voice saying: ‘I can almost see to read the paper!”
- “In Search of Lost Time Vol. II: Within a Budding Grove”, Marcel Proust
