This power of hearing
music with the eyes, as it were, is common to all thorough musicians,
and is, of course, most highly developed in the great composers.
Schumann even alludes to the opinion, which some one had expressed,
that a thorough musician ought to be able, on listening for the first
time to a complicated orchestral piece, to _see_ it bodily as a score
before his eyes. He adds, however, that this is the greatest feat that
could be imagined; and I, for my part, doubt whether even the
marvellously comprehensive mind of a musical genius would be able to
accomplish it.
These facts illustrate the manner in which composers, being virtuosi
of the musical imagination, are able to elaborate mentally, and keep
in the memory, a complete operatic or symphonic score, just as, for
example, Alexander Dumas, when he wished to write a new novel, used to
hire a yacht and sail on Southern waters for several days, lying on
his back--which, by the way, is an excellent method of starting a
train of thought--and thus arranging all the details of the plot in
his mind.
The exact way in which _original_ ideas come into the mind is, of
course, a mystery in music as in literature.
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