Chapter 16

So they passed on to chatting about music, a form of art for which Bloom, as a pure amateur, possessed the greatest love, as they made tracks arm-in-arm across Beresford Place. Wagnerian music, though confessedly grand in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to follow at the first go off but the music of Mercadante’s Huguenots , Meyerbeer’s Seven Last Words on the Cross , and Mozart’s Twelfth Mass , he simply revelled in, the Gloria in that being to his mind the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat. He infinitely preferred the sacred music of the catholic church to anything the opposite shop could offer in that line such as those Moody and Sankey hymns or Bid me to live and I will live thy protestant to be . He also yielded to none in his admiration of Rossini’s Stabat Mater , a work simply abounding in immortal numbers, in which his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy, made a hit, a veritable sensation, he might safely say greatly adding to her other laurels and putting the others totally in the shade in the jesuit fathers’ church in Upper Gardiner Street, the sacred edifice being thronged to the doors to hear her with virtuosos, or virtuosi rather. There was the unanimous opinion that there was none to come up to her and, suffice it to say in a place of worship for music of a sacred character, there was a generally voiced desire for an encore. On the whole, though favouring preferably light opera of the Don Giovanni description, and Martha , a gem in its line, he had a penchant , though with only a surface knowledge, for the severe classical school such as Mendelssohn. And talking of that, taking it for granted he knew all about the old favourites, he mentioned par excellence Lionel’s air in Martha , M’appari , which, curiously enough, he heard, or overheard, to be more accurate, on yesterday, a privilege he keenly appreciated, from the lips of Stephen’s respected father, sung to perfection, a study of the