MUSICAL PORTRAITS

INTERPRETATIONS OF TWENTYMODERN COMPOSERS

BYPAUL ROSENFELD

NEW YORKHARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BYHARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC. 

THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANYRAHWAY, N. J. 

ToARTHUR MOORE WILLIAMSON

 _Some of the material of this book was originally printed in the form of articles in "The Dial, " "The New Republic, " and "The Seven Arts. " Thanks are due the editors of these periodicals for permission to recast and reprint it. _

CONTENTS

WAGNER, 3STRAUSS, 27MOUSSORGSKY, 57LISZT, 73BERLIOZ, 87FRANCK, 101DEBUSSY, 119RAVEL, 133BORODIN, 149RIMSKY-KORSAKOFF, 159RACHMANINOFF, 169SCRIABINE, 177STRAWINSKY, 191MAHLER, 205REGER, 223SCHOENBERG, 233SIBELIUS, 245LOEFFLER, 257ORNSTEIN, 267BLOCH, 281APPENDIX, 299

MUSICAL PORTRAITS

Wagner

Wagner's music, more than any other, is the sign and symbol of thenineteenth century. The men to whom it was disclosed, and who firstsought to refuse, and then accepted it, passionately, withoutreservations, found in it their truth. It came to their ears as thesound of their own voices. It was the common, the universal tongue. Notalone on Germany, not alone on Europe, but on every quarter of the globethat had developed coal-power civilization, the music of Wagnerdescended with the formative might of the perfect image. Men of everyrace and continent knew it to be of themselves as much as was theirhereditary and racial music, and went out to it as to their ownadventure. And wherever music reappeared, whether under the hand of theJapanese or the semi-African or the Yankee, it seemed to be growing fromWagner as the bright shoots of the fir sprout from the dark ones grownthe previous year. A whole world, for a period, came to use his idiom. His dream was recognized during his very lifetime as an integral portionof the consciousness of the entire race. 

For Wagner's music is the century's paean of material triumph. It is itscry of pride in its possessions, its aspiration toward greater and evergreater objective power. Wagner's style is stiff and diapered andemblazoned with the sense of material increase. It is brave, superb, haughty with consciousness of the gigantic new body acquired by man. Thetonal pomp and ceremony, the pride of the trumpets, the arrogant stride, the magnificent address, the broad, vehement, grandiloquentpronouncements, the sumptuous texture of his music seems foreverproclaiming the victory of man over the energies of fire and sea andearth, the lordship of creation, the suddenly begotten railways andshipping and mines, the cataclysm of wealth and comfort. His work seemsforever seeking to form images of grandeur and empire, flashing withSiegfried's sword, commanding the planet with Wotan's spear, upbuildingabove the heads of men the castle of the gods. It dares measure itselfwith the terrestrial forces, exults in the fire, soughs through theforest with the thunderstorm, glitters and surges with the river, spansmountains with the rainbow bridge. It is full of the gestures of giantsand heroes and gods, of the large proud movements of which men have everdreamed in days of affluent power. Even "Tristan und Isolde, " the highsong of love, and "Parsifal, " the mystery, spread richness and splendorabout them, are set in an atmosphere of heavy gorgeous stuffs, amidobjects of gold and silver, and thick clouding incense, while theprotagonists, the lovers and saviors, seem to be celebrating a worldlytriumph, and crowning themselves kings. And over the entire body ofWagner's music, there float, a massive diadem, the towers and parapetsand banners of Nuremberg the imperial free city, monument of avictorious burgherdom, of civic virtue that on the ruins of feudalismconstructed its own world, and demonstrated to all times its dignity andsobriety and industry, its solid worth. 

For life itself made the Wagnerian gesture. The vortex of steel andglass and gold, the black express-packets plowing the seven seas, thesmoking trains piercing the bowels of the mountains and connectingcities vibrant with hordes of business men, the telegraph wires settingthe world aquiver with their incessant reports, the whole sinisterglittering faëry of gain and industry and dominion, seemed to tread andsoar and sound and blare and swell with just such rhythm, such grandeur, such intoxication. Mountains that had been sealed thousands of years hadsplit open again and let emerge a race of laboring, fuming giants. Thedense primeval forests, the dragon-haunted German forests, were sprungup again, fresh and cool and unexplored, nurturing a mighty andfantastic animality. Wherever one gazed, the horned Siegfried, the manborn of the earth, seemed near once more, ready to clear and rejuvenatethe globe with his healthy instinct, to shatter the old false barriersand pierce upward to fulfilment and power. Mankind, waking fromimmemorial sleep, thought for the first time to perceive the sun inheaven, to greet the creating light. And where was this music moreimmanent than in the New World, in America, that essentialization of theentire age? By what environment was it more justly appreciated, Saxonthough the accents of its recitative might be? Germany had borne Wagnerbecause Germany had an uninterrupted flow of musical expression. But hadthe North American continent been able to produce musical art, it couldhave produced none more indigenous, more really autochthonous, than thatof Richard Wagner. Whitman was right when he termed these scores "themusic of the 'Leaves. '" For nowhere did the forest of the Niebelungenflourish more lushly, more darkly, than upon the American coasts andmountains and plains. From the towers and walls of New York there fell abreath, a grandiloquent language, a stridency and a glory, that wereWagner's indeed. His regal commanding blasts, his upsweeping marchingviolins, his pompous and majestic orchestra, existed in the Americanscene. The very masonry and river-spans, the bursting towns, the furyand expansiveness of existence shed his idiom, shadowed forth his proudprocessionals, his resonant gold, his tumultuous syncopations andblazing brass and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody; appearedto be struggling to achieve the thing that was his art. American lifeseemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, itsmadly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, itsloud, grandiose promise might attain something like eternal being. 

And just as in Wagner's music there sounds the age's cry of materialtriumph, so, too, there sounds in it its terrible cry of homesickness. The energy produced and hurled out over the globe was sucked back againwith no less a force. The time that saw the victory of industrialism sawas well the revival or the attempted revival of medieval modes offeeling. Cardinal Newman was as typical a figure of nineteenth-centurylife as was Balzac. The men who had created the new world felt withinthemselves a passionate desire to escape out of the present into thepast once more. They felt themselves victors and vanquished, powerfuland yet bereft and forlorn. And Wagner's music expresses with equalveracity both tides. Just as his music is brave with a sense of outwardpower, so, too, it is sick with a sense of inner unfulfilment. There isno longing more consuming, no homesickness more terrible, no strainingafter the laving, immersing floods of unconsciousness more burning thanthat which utters itself through this music. There are passages, wholehours of his, that are like the straining of a man to return into thedarkness of the mothering night out of which he came. There is music ofWagner that makes us feel as though he had been seeking to create greatwarm clouds, great scented cloths, wide curtains, as though he had cometo his art to find something in which he could envelop himselfcompletely, and blot out sun and moon and stars, and sink into oblivion. For such a healer Tristan, lying dying on the desolate, rockbound coast, cries through the immortal longing of the music. For such a divinemessenger the wound of Amfortas gapes; for such a redeemer Kundry, driven through the world by scorching winds, yearns. His lovers cometoward each other, seeking in each other the night, the descent into thefathomless dark. For them sex is the return, the complete forgetfulness. Through each of them there sounds the insistent cry:

 "Frau Minne will Es werde Nacht!"

There is no tenderness, no awareness of each other, in these men andwomen. There is only the fierce, impersonal longing for utterconsumption, the extinction of the flaming torch, complete merging inthe Absolute, the weaving All. In each of them, desire for the voidmounts into a gigantic, monstrous flower, into the shimmering thing thatenchants King Mark's garden and the rippling stream and the distanthorns while Isolde waits for Tristan, or into the devastating fever thatchains the sick Tristan to his bed of pain. 

For all these beings, and behind them Wagner, and behind him his time, yearn for the past, the pre-natal, the original sleep, and find in sucha return their great fulfilment. Siegmund finds in the traits of hisbeloved his own childhood. Siegfried awakes on the flame-engirdled hilla woman who watched over him before he was born, and waited unchangedfor his ripening. It is with the kiss of Herzeleide that Kundry enmeshesParsifal. Brunhilde struggles for the forgiving embrace of Wotan, sinkson the breast of the god in submission, reconciliation, immolation. Andit is towards an engulfing consummation, some extinction that is bothlove and death and deeper than both, that the music of his operasaspires. The fire that licks the rock of the Walkyrie, the Rhine thatrises in the finale of "Götterdämmerung" and inundates the scene andsweeps the world with its silent, laving tides, the gigantic blossomthat opens its corolla in the Liebestod and buries the lovers in a rainof scent and petals, the tranquil ruby glow of the chalice that suffusesthe close of "Parsifal, " are the moments toward which the dramasthemselves labor, and in which they attain their legitimate conclusion, completion and end. But not only his finales are full of thatentrancement. His melodic line, the lyrical passages throughout hisoperas, seem to seek to attain it, if not conclusively, at least inpreparation. Those silken excessively sweet periods, the moment ofreconciliation and embrace of Wotan and Brunhilde, the "Ach, Isolde"passage in the third act of "Tristan, " those innumerable lyrical flightswith their beginnings and subsidings, their sudden advances andregressions, their passionate surges that finally and after all theirexquisite hesitations mount and flare and unroll themselves infullness--they, too, seem to be seeking to distill some of the samebrew, the same magic drugging potion, to conjure up out of theorchestral depths some Venusberg, some Klingsor's garden full of subtlescent and soft delight and eternal forgetfulness. 

And with Wagner, the new period of music begins. He stands midwaybetween the feudal and the modern worlds. In him, the old and classicalperiod is accomplished. Indeed, so much of his music is sum, istermination, that there are times when it seems nothing else. There aretimes when his art appears entirely bowed over the past; the confluenceof a dozen different tendencies alive during the last century and ahalf; the capping of the labor of a dozen great musicians; thefulfilment of the system regnant in Europe since the introduction of theprinciple of the equal temperament. For the last time, the oldconceptions of tonality obtain in his music dramas. One feels throughout"Tristan und Isolde" the key of D-flat, throughout "Die Meistersinger"the key of C-major, throughout "Parsifal" the key of A-flat and itsrelative minor. Rhythms that had been used all through the classicalperiod are worked by him into new patterns, and do service a last time. Motifs which had been utilized by others are taken by him and brought tosomething like an ultimate conclusion. The ending, the conclusion, thecompletion, are sensible throughout his art. Few musicians have hadtheir power and method placed more directly in their hands, andbenefited so hugely by the experiments of their immediate predecessors, have fallen heir to such immense musical legacies. Indeed, Wagner wasnever loath to acknowledge his indebtedness, and there are on recordseveral instances when he paraphrased Walther's song to his masters, andsignaled the composers who had aided him most in his development. To-day, the debt is very plain. At every turn, one sees him benefiting, and benefiting very beautifully, by the work of Beethoven. The structureof his great and characteristic works is based on the symphonic form. The development of the themes of "Tristan" and "Die Meistersinger" and"Parsifal" out of single kernels; the fine logical sequence, theexpositions of the thematic material of "Parsifal" in the prelude and inGurnamanz's narrative, and its subsequent reappearance and adventuresand developments, are something like a summit of symphonic art asBeethoven made it to be understood. And his orchestra is scarcely morethan the orchestra of Beethoven. He did not require the band ofindependent instrumental families demanded by Berlioz and realized bythe modern men. He was content with the old, classical orchestra inwhich certain groups are strengthened and to which the harp, the Englishhorn, the bass-tuba, the bass-clarinet have been added. 

And his conception of an "unending melody, " an unbroken flow of musicintended to give cohesion and homogeneity to his music-dramas, was adirect consequence of the efforts of Mozart and Weber to give unity totheir operatic works. For although these composers retained the oldconvention of an opera composed of separate numbers, they neverthelessmanaged to unify their operas by creating a distinct style in each ofthem, and by securing an emotional development in the various arias andconcerted numbers. The step from "Don Giovanni" and "Euryanthe" to"Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin" does not seem quite as long a one to-day asonce it did. Indeed, there are moments when one wonders whether"Lohengrin" is really a step beyond "Euryanthe, " and whether theincrease of power and vividness and imagination has not been made at theexpense of style. Moreover, in much of what is actually progress inWagner the influence of Weber is clearly discernible. The sinisterpassages seem but developments of moments in "Der Freischütz"; the grandmelodic style, the romantic orchestra with its sighing horns andchivalry and flourishes, seem to come directly out of "Euryanthe"; theorchestral scene-painting from the sunrise and other original effects in"Oberon. "

Even Meyerbeer taught Wagner something more than the use of certaininstruments, the bass-clarinet, for instance. The old operaticspeculator indubitably was responsible for Wagner's grand demands uponthe scene-painter and the stage-carpenter. His pompous spectacles firedthe younger man not only with "Rienzi. " They indubitably gave him thecourage to create an operatic art that celebrated the new gold and powerand magnificence, and was Grand Opera indeed. If the works of the onewere sham, and those of the other poetry, it was only that Wagnerrealized what the other sought vainly all his life to attain, and wasprevented by the stock-broker within. 

And Chopin's harmonic feeling as well as Berlioz's orchestral wizardryplayed a rôle in Wagner's artistic education. But for all hisincalculable indebtednesses, Wagner is the great initiator, thecompeller of the modern period. It is not only because he summarized theold. It is because he began with force a revolution. In expressing theman of the nineteenth century, he discarded the old major-minor systemthat had dominated Europe so long. That system was the outcome of aconception of the universe which set man apart from the remainder ofnature, placed him in a category of his own, and pretended that he wasboth the center and the object of creation. For it called man theconsonance and nature the dissonance. The octave and the fifth, thebases of the system, are of course, to be found only in the human voice. They are, roughly, the difference between the average male and theaverage female voice, and the difference between the average soprano andalto. It is upon those intervals that the C-major scale and itstwenty-three dependents are based. But with the coming of a conceptionthat no longer separated man from the rest of creation, and placed himin it as a small part of it, brother to the animals and plants, toeverything that breathes, the old scale could no longer completelyexpress him. The modulations of the noises of wind and water, theinfinite gradations and complexes of sound to be heard on theplanisphere, seemed to ask him to include them, to become conscious ofthem and reproduce them. He required other more subtle scales. And withWagner the monarchy of the C-major scale is at an end. "Tristan undIsolde" and "Parsifal" are constructed upon a chromatic scale. The oldone has had to lose its privilege, to resign itself to becoming simplyone of a constantly growing many. If this step is not a colossal one, itis still of immense importance. The musical worthies who ran aboutwringing their hands after the first performance of each of Wagner'sworks, and lamented laws monstrously broken, and traditions shattered, were, for once, right. They gauged correctly from which direction thewind was blowing. They probably heard, faintly piping in the distance, the pentatonic scales of Moussorgsky and Debussy, the scales ofScriabine and Strawinsky and Ornstein, the barbarous, exotic and Africanscales of the future, the one hundred and thirteen scales of whichBusoni speaks. And to-day there are no longer musical rules, forbiddenharmonies, dissonances. Siegfried has broken them along with Wotan'sspear. East and West are near to merging once again. No doubt, had therebeen no Wagner, the change would have arrived nevertheless. However, itwould have arrived more slowly. For what he did accomplish was the rapidemptying of the old wine that still remained in the wineskin, thepreparation of the receptacle for the new vintage. He forced the new toput in immediate appearance. 

The full impact of these reforms, the full might of Wagner, we of ourgeneration doubtlessly never felt. They could have been felt only by thegeneration to whom Wagner first disclosed himself, the generation thatattained maturity between 1850 and 1880. It was upon the men of thosedays that he did his full work of destruction and revival. It was inthem he battered down walls. It was them he made to hear afresh, tostretch and grow in the effort to comprehend him. At the moment weencountered Wagner, his work was already something of a closedexperience, something we were able to accept readily and with a certainease because it had been accepted and assimilated by an entire world, and become part of the human organism. Its power was already slightlydiminished. For instance, Wagner the musician was no longer able to makeeither Wagner the poet or Wagner the philosopher exist for us as theyexisted for the men of the earlier generation. Only Houston StewartChamberlain still persisted in trying to stand upon the burning deckwhence all the rest had fled. For us, it was obvious that if Wagner'swork throned mightily it was because of his music, and oftentimes inspite of his verse and his doctrine. For us, it was a commonplace thatdramatic movement and the filling up of scenes by the introduction ofcharacters who propose pointless riddles to one another and explain atlength what their names are not, are incompatible; that poetry does notconsist in disguising commonplace expressions in archaic andalliterative and extravagant dress; that Wotan displays no grasp of theessentials of Schopenhauer's philosophy when he insists on dubbingBrunhilde his Will. 

And yet, whatever the difference, most of Wagner's might was still inhim when first we came to know his music. The spell in which he hadbound the generation that preceded ours was still powerful. For us, too, there occurred the moments when Siegfried's cavernous forest depthsfirst breathed on us, when for the first time "Die Meistersinger"flaunted above the heads of all the world the gonfalon of art, when forthe first time we embarked upon the shoreless golden sea of "Tristan undIsolde. " For us, too, the name of Richard Wagner rang and sounded aboveall other musical names. For us, too, he was a sort of sovereign lord ofmusic. His work appeared the climax toward which music had aspiredthrough centuries, and from which it must of necessity descend again. Other, and perhaps purer work than his, existed, we knew. But it seemedremote and less compelling, for all its perfection. New music wouldarrive, we surmised. Yet we found ourselves convinced that it wouldprove minor and unsatisfactory. For Wagner's music had for us anincandescence which no other possessed. It was the magnetic spot ofmusic. Its colors blazed and glowed with a depth and ardor that seemedto set it apart from other music as in an enchanted circle. It unlockedus as did no other. We demanded just such orchestral movement, just suchsuperb gestures, just such warm, immersing floods, and were fulfilled bythem. That there would come a day when the magnetism which it exerted onus would pass from it, and be seen to have passed, seemed the remotestof possibilities. 

For we accepted him with the world of our minority. For each individualthere is a period, varying largely in extent, during which his existenceis chiefly a process of imitation. In the sphere of expression, thatsubmission to authority extends well over the entire period ofgestation, well into the time of physical maturity. There are few men, few great artists, even, who do not, before attaining their proper idiomand gesture, adopt those of their teachers and predecessors. Shakespearewrites first in the style of Kyd and Marlowe, Beethoven in that of Haydnand Mozart; Leonardo at first imitates Verrocchio. And what theutilization of the manner of their predecessors is to the artist, thatthe single devotion to Wagner was to us. For he was not only in theatmosphere, not only immanent in the lives led about us. His figure wasvivid before us. Scarcely another artistic personality was as largelyupon us. There were pictures, on the walls of music-rooms, ofgray-bearded, helmeted warriors holding mailed blonde women in theirarms, of queens with golden ornaments on their arms leaning overparapets and agitating their scarves, of women throwing themselves intothe sea upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish men and younggirls conversing teasingly through a window by a lilac-bush, that wereWagner. There were books with stories of magical swans and hordes ofgold and baleful curses, of phantasmal storm ships and hollow hills andswords lodged in tree-trunks awaiting their wielders, of races of godsand giants and grimy dwarfs, of guardian fires and potions offorgetfulness and prophetic dreams and voices, that were Wagner. Therewere adults who went to assist at these things of which one read, whodeparted in state and excitement of an evening to attend performances of"Die Walküre" and "Tristan und Isolde, " and who spoke of theseexperiences in voices and manners different from those in which theyspoke, say, of the theater or the concert. And there were magnificentand stately and passionate pieces that drew their way across thepianoforte, that seized upon one and made one insatiable for them. Longbefore we had actually entered the opera house and heard one of Wagner'sworks in its entirety, we belonged to him and knew his art our own. Wewere born Wagnerians. 

But of late a great adventure has befallen us. What once seemed theremotest of possibilities has actually taken place. We who were born andgrew under the sign of Wagner have witnessed the twilight of the god. Hehas receded from us. He has departed from us into the relative distanceinto which during his hour of omnipotence he banished all othercomposers. 

He has been displaced. A new music has come into being, and drawn near. Forms as solid and wondrous and compelling as his are about us. Littleby little, during the last years, so gradually that it has been almostunbeknown to us, our relationship to him has been changing. Somethingwithin us has moved. Other musicians have been working their way in uponour attention. Other works have come to seem as vivid and deep of hue, as wondrous and compelling as his once did. Gradually the musicalfirmament has been reconstellating itself. For long, we were unaware ofthe change, thought ourselves still opposite Wagner, thought the rays ofhis genius still as direct upon us as ever they were. But of late sowide has the distance become that we have awakened sharply to thechange. Of a sudden, we seem to ourselves like travelers who, havingboarded by night a liner fast to her pier and fallen asleep amidfamiliar objects, beneath the well-known beacons and towers of the port, waken suddenly in broadest daylight scarcely aware the vessel has beengotten under way, and find the scene completely transformed, findthemselves out on ocean and glimpse, dwindling behind them, the harborand the city in which apparently but a moment since they had lainenclosed. 

It is the maturing of a generation that has produced the change. Foreach generation the works of art produced by its members have a distinctimportance. Out of them, during their time, there sparks the creativeimpulse. For every generation is something of a unit. 

 "Chaque génération d'hommes Germant du champs maternal en sa saison, Garde en elle un secret commun, un certain noeud dans la profonde contexture de son bois, "

Claudel assures us through the mask of Tête d'Or. And the resemblancesbetween works produced independently of each other within the space of afew years, generally so much greater than those that exist between anyone work of one age and any of another, bears him out. The styles ofPalestrina and Vittoria, which are obviously dissimilar, arenevertheless more alike than those of Palestrina and Bach, Vittoria andHaendel; just as those of Bach and Haendel, dissimilar as they are, havea greater similarity than that which exists between those of Bach andMozart, of Haendel and Haydn. And so, for the men of a single period thework produced during their time is a powerful encouragement toself-realization, to the espousal of their destiny, to the fulfilment oftheir life. For the motion of one part of a machine stirs all theothers. And there is a part of every man of a generation in the workdone by the other members of it. The men who fashion the art of one'sown time make one's proper experiment, start from one's own point ofdeparture, dare to be themselves and oneself in the face of thegainsaying of the other epochs. They are so belittling, socondescending, so nay-saying and deterring, the other times and theirmasterpieces! They are so unsympathetic, so strange and grand andremote! They seem to say "Thus must it be; this is form; this is beauty;all else is superfluous. " Who goes to them for help and understanding islike one who goes to men much older, men of different habits andsympathies, in order to explain himself, and finds himself disconcertedand diminished instead, glimpses a secret jealousy and resentmentbeneath the mask. But the adventure of encountering the artist of one'sown time is that of finding the most marvelous of aids, corroboration. It is to meet one who has been living one's life, and thinking one'sthoughts, and facing one's problems. It is to get reassurance, to acceptoneself, to beget courage to express one's self in one's own manner. 

And we of our generation have finally found the music that is socreatively infecting for us. We have found the music of thepost-Wagnerian epoch. It is our music. For we are the offspring of thegeneration that assimilated Wagner. We, too, are the reaction fromWagner. Through the discovery we have come to learn that music can giveus sensations different than those given us by Wagner's. We have learnedwhat it is to have music say to us, "It is thus, after all, that youfeel. " We have finally come to recognize that we require of music forms, proportions, accents different from Wagner's; orchestral movement, color, rhythms, not in his. We have learned that we want an altogetherdifferent stirring of the musical caldron. A song of Moussorgsky's orRavel's, a few measures of "Pelléas" or "Le Sacre du printemps, " asingle fine moment in a sonata of Scriabine's, or a quartet or suite ofBloch's, give us a joy, an illumination, a satisfaction that little ofthe older music can equal. For our own moment of action is finally athand. 

So Wagner has retreated and joined the company of composers who expressanother day than our own. The sovereignty that was in him has passed toother men. We regard him at present as the men of his own time mighthave regarded Beethoven and Weber. Still, he will always remain the oneof all the company of the masters closest to us. No doubt he is not thegreatest of the artists who have made music. Colossal as were hisforces, colossal as were the struggles he made for the assumption of hisart, his musical powers were not always able to cope with the tasks heset himself. The unflagging inventive power of a Bach or a Haydn, therobustness of a Haendel or a Beethoven, the harmonious personality of aMozart, were things he could not rival. He is even inferior, in thematter of style, to men like Weber and Debussy. There are many moments, one finds, when his scores show that there was nothing in his mind, andthat he simply went through the routine of composition. Too often hepermitted the system of leading-motifs to relieve him of the necessityof creating. Too often, he made of his art a purely mental game. Hisemotion, his creative genius were far more intermittent, his breath farless long than one once imagined. Some of the earlier works havecommenced to fade rapidly, irretrievably. At present one wonders how itis possible that one once sat entranced through performances of "TheFlying Dutchman" and "Tannhäuser. " "Lohengrin" begins to seem a littlebrutal, strangely Prussian lieutenant with its militaristic trumpets, its abuse of the brass. One finds oneself choosing even among the actsof "Tristan und Isolde, " finding the first far inferior to the poignant, magnificent third. Sometimes, one glimpses a little too long behind hiswork not the heroic agonist, but the man who loved to languish inmournful salons, attired in furred dressing gowns. 

Indeed, if Wagner seems great it is chiefly as one of the most delicateof musicians. It is the lightness of his brush stroke that makes usmarvel at the third act of "Tristan, " the first scene of the "Walküre. "It is the delicacy of his fancy, the lilac fragrance pervading hisinventions, that enchants us in the second act of "Die Meistersinger. "Through the score of "Parsifal" there seem to pass angelic forms andwings dainty and fragile and silver-shod as those of Beardsley's "Morted'Arthur. "

But the debt we owe him will always give him a vast importance in oureyes. The men of to-day, all of them, stand directly on his shoulders. It is doubtful whether any of us, the passive public, would be hereto-day as we are, were it not for his music. 

Strauss

Strauss was never the fine, the perfect artist. Even in the first flareof youth, even at the time when he was the meteoric, dazzling figureflaunting over all the baldpates of the universe the standard of themusical future, it was apparent that there were serious flaws in hisspirit. Despite the audacity with which he realized his amazing andpoignant and ironic visions, despite his youthful fire andexuberance--and it was as something of a golden youth of music thatStrauss burst upon the world--one sensed in him the not quitebeautifully deepened man, heard at moments a callow accent in hiseloquence, felt that an unmistakable alloy was fused with the generousgold. The purity, the inwardness, the searchings of the heart, thereligious sentiment of beauty, present so unmistakably in the art of thegreat men who had developed music, were wanting in his work. He hadneither the unswerving sense of style, nor the weightiness of touch, that mark the perfect craftsman. He was not sufficiently a scrupulousand exacting artist. It was apparent that he was careless, too easilycontented with some of his material, not always happy in his detail. Mixed with his fire there was a sort of laziness and indifference. But, in those days, Strauss was unmistakably the genius, the original andbitingly expressive musician, the engineer of proud orchestral flights, the outrider and bannerman of his art, and one forgave his shortcomingsbecause of the radiance of his figure, or remained only half-consciousof them. 

For, once his period of apprenticeship passed, and all desire to writesymphonies and chamber-music in the styles of Schumann and Mendelssohnand Brahms, to construct operas after the pattern of "Tannhäuser" and"Parsifal" gone out of him, this slender, sleepy young Bavarian with thepale curly hair and mustaches had commenced to develop the expressivepower of music amazingly, to make the orchestra speak wonderfully as ithad never spoken before. Under his touch the symphony, that most rigidand abstract and venerable of forms, was actually displaying some of thenovel's narrative and analytical power, its literalness and concretenessof detail. It was describing the developments of a character, waspsychologizing as it had hitherto done only in conjunction with poetryor the theater. Strauss made it represent the inflammations of the sexillusion, comment upon Nietzsche and Cervantes, recount the adventures, somersaults and end of a legendary rascal, portray a hero of our time. He made all these intellectual concepts plastic in a music of abrilliance and a sprightliness and mordancy that not overmany classicsymphonies can rival. Other and former composers, no doubt, had dreamtof making the orchestra more concretely expressive, more preciselynarrative and descriptive. The "Pastoral" symphony is by no means thefirst piece of deliberately, confessedly programmatic music. And beforeStrauss, both Berlioz and Liszt had experimented with the narrative, descriptive, analytical symphony. But it was only with Strauss that thesymphonic novel was finally realized. 

Neither Berlioz nor Liszt had really embodied their programs in livingmusic. Liszt invariably sacrificed program to sanctioned musical form. For all his radicalism, he was too trammeled by the classical concepts, the traditional musical schemes and patterns to quite realize thesymphony based on an extra-musical scheme. His symphonic poems revealhow difficult it was for him to make his music follow the curve of hisideas. In "Die Ideale, " for instance, for the sake of a conventionalclose, he departed entirely from the curve of the poem of Schiller whichhe was pretending to transmute. The variations in which he reproducedLamartine's verse are stereotyped enough. When was there a time whencomposers did not deform their themes in amorous, rustic and warlikevariations? The relation between the pompous and somewhat empty "Lamentand Triumph" and the unique, the distinct thing that was the life ofTorquato Tasso is outward enough. And even "Mazeppa, " in which Liszt'svirtuosic genius stood him in good stead, makes one feel as thoughLiszt could never quite keep his eye on the fact, and finally becameengrossed in the weaving of a musical pattern fairly extraneous to hisidea. The "Faust Symphony" is, after all, an exception. Berlioz, too, failed on the whole to achieve the musical novel. Whenever he did attainmusical form, it was generally at the expense of his program. Are thesomewhat picturesque episodes of "Harold in Italy, " whatever theirvirtues, and they are many, more than vaguely related to the Byronismthat ostensibly elemented them? The surprisingly conventional overtureto "King Lear" makes one feel as though Berlioz had sat through aperformance of one of Shakespeare's comedies under the impression thathe was assisting at the tragedy, so unrelated to its subject is themusic. And where, on the other hand, Berlioz did succeed in beingregardful of his program, as in the "Symphonic Fantastique, " or in"Lélio, " there resulted a somewhat thin and formless music. 

But Strauss, benefiting by the experiments of his two predecessors, realized the new form better than any one before him had done. For hepossessed the special gifts necessary to the performance of the task. Hepossessed, in the first place, a miraculous power of musicalcharacterization. Through the representative nicety of his themes, through his inordinate capacity for thematic variation andtransformation, his playful and witty and colorful instrumentation, Strauss was able to impart to his music a concreteness anddescriptiveness and realism hitherto unknown to symphonic art, tocharacterize briefly, sparingly, justly, a personage, a situation, anevent. He could be pathetic, ironic, playful, mordant, musing, at will. He was sure in his tone, was low-German in "Till Eulenspiegel, " courtlyand brilliant in "Don Juan, " noble and bitterly sarcastic in "DonQuixote, " childlike in "Tod und Verklärung. " His orchestra was able toaccommodate itself to all the folds and curves of his elaborateprograms, to find equivalents for individual traits. It is not simply "aman, " or even "an amatory hero" that is portrayed in "Don Juan. " It isno vague symbol for the poet of the sort created by "Orpheus" or "Tasso"or "Mazeppa. " It is Lenau's hero himself, the particular being Don JuanTenorio. The vibrant, brilliant music of the up-surging, light-treadingstrings, of the resonant, palpitating brass, springs forth in virilemarch, reveals the man himself, his physical glamour, his intoxicationthat caused him to see in every woman the Venus, and that in the endmade him the victim as well as the hero of the sexual life. It is TillEulenspiegel himself, the scurvy, comic rascal, the eternal dirty littleboy with his witty and obscene gestures, who leers out of every measureof the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers at his nose's endat all the decorous and respectable world. Here, for once, orchestralmusic is really wonderfully rascally and impudent, horns gleeful andwindy and insolent, wood-wind puckish and obscene. Here a musical formreels hilariously and cuts capers and dances on bald heads. Thevariation of "Don Quixote" that describes with wood-wind and tambourineDulcinea del Toboso is plump and plebeian and good-natured with her veryperson, is all the more trenchantly vulgar and flat for the precedingsuave variation that describes the knight's fair, sonorous dream of her. There is no music more plaintively stupid than that which in the samework figures the "sheep" against which Don Quixote battles so valiantly. Nor is there any music more maliciously, malevolently petty than thatwhich represents the adversaries in "Ein Heldenleben. " So exceedinglydefinite is the portrait of the Hero's Consort, for which Frau RichardStrauss, without doubt, sat, that without even having seen a photographof the lady, one can aver that she is graced with a diatonic figure. And, certainly the most amusing passage of "Sinfonia Domestica" is thatcomplex of Bavarian lustihood, Bavarian grossness, Bavarian dreaminessand Bavarian good nature, the thematic group that serves as autoportraitof the composer. 

And just as there seemed few characters that Strauss could not paint, inthose days, so, too, there seemed few situations, few atmospheres, towhich he could not do justice. A couple of measures, the sinisterpalpitation of the timpani and the violas, the brooding of thewood-wind, the dull flickering of the flutes, the laboring breath of thestrings, and we are lying on the death-bed, exhausted and gasping forair, weighed by the wrecks of hopes, awaiting the cruel blows on theheart that will end everything. Horns and violins quaver and snarl, flutes shrill, a brief figure descends in the oboes and clarinets, andTill has shed his rascal-sweat and danced on the air. The orchestrareveals us Don Juan's love affairs in all their individuality: first thepassionate, fiery relation with the Countess, quickly begun and quicklyended; then the gentler and more inward communion with Anna, with theboredom resulting from the lady's continual demand for sentiment andromantic posturing; then the great night of love and roses, with itsintoxicated golden winding horns, its ecstatically singing violins; andfinally the crushing disappointment, the shudder of disgust. The battlein "Ein Heldenleben" pictures war really; the whistling, ironicalwind-machine in "Don Quixote" satirizes dreams bitingly as no music hasdone; the orchestra describes the enthusiastic Don recovering from hismadness, and smiles a conclusion; in "Also Sprach Zarathustra" it pileshigh the tomes of science, and waltzes with the Superman in distantworlds. 

And then, though less fecund an inventor than Liszt, less rich and largea temperament than Berlioz, Strauss was better able than either of hismasters to organize his material on difficult and original lines, andfind musical forms representative of his programs. Because of theirlabors, he was born freer of the classical traditions than they hadbeen, and was able to make music plot more exactly the curves of hisconcepts, to submit the older forms, such as the rondo and the theme andvariations, more perfectly to his purpose. Compositions of the sort of"Till Eulenspiegel, " "Tod und Verklärung" and "Ein Heldenleben, " solidlymade and yet both narrative and dramatic, place the symphonic poem inthe category of legitimate musical forms. The themes of "Till" grow outof each other quite as do the themes of a Beethoven symphony or of"Tristan" or of "Parsifal. " Indeed, Strauss has done for the symphonicpoem something of what Wagner did for the opera. And not an overwhelmingnumber of classical symphonies contain music more eloquent than, say, the "sunrise" in "Also Sprach Zarathustra, " or the final variation of"Don Quixote" with its piercing, shattering trumpets of defeat, or theterrifying opening passage of "Tod und Verklärung. " For Strauss was ableto unloose his verve and fantasy completely in the construction of hisedifices. His orchestra moves in strangest and most unconventionalcurves, shoots with the violence of an exploding firearm, ambles like apalfrey, swoops like a bird. There are few who, at a first hearing of aStrauss poem, do not feel as though some wild and troubling and panicpresence had leaned over the concert hall and bedeviled the orchestra. For, in his hands, it is no longer the familiar and terrorless thing itonce had been, a thing about whose behavior one can be certain. It hasbecome a formidable engine of steel and gold, vibrant with mad andunexpected things. Patterns leap and tumble out of it. Violin musiclaunches swiftly into space, trumpets run scales, the tempi move withthe velocity of express trains. It has become a giant, terrible bird, the great auk of music, that seizes you in its talons and spirals intothe empyrean. 

But it was what he seemed to promise to perform, to bring into being, even more than what he had already definitely accomplished, that spreadabout the figure of Strauss the peculiar radiance. It was Nietzsche whohad made current the dream of a new music, a music that should befiercely and beautifully animal, full of laughter, of the dry good lightof the intellect, of "salt and fire and the great, compelling logic, ofthe light feet of the south, the dance of the stars, the quiveringdayshine of the Mediterranean. " The other composers, the Beethovens andBrahms and Wagners, had been sad, suffering, wounded men, men who hadlost their divine innocence and joy in the shambles, and whose spiritualbodies were scarred, for all the muscular strength gained during theirfights, by hunger and frustration and agony. Pain had even marred theirsong. For what should have been innocence and effortless movement andgodlike joy, Mozartean coordination and harmony, was full of terriblecries, and convulsive, rending motions, and shrouding sorrow. AndNietzsche had dreamt of music of another sort. He had dreamt of a musicthat should be a bridge to the Superman, the man whose every motionwould be carefree. He had seen striding across mountain chains in thebright air of an eternal morning a youth irradiant with unbroken energy, before whom all the world lay open in vernal sunshine like a domainbefore its lord. He had seen one beside whom the other musicians wouldstand as convicts from Siberian prison camps who had stumbled upon abanquet of the gods. He had seen a young Titan of music, drunken withlife and fire and joy, dancing and reeling and laughing on the top ofthe world, and with fingers amid the stars, sending suns andconstellations crashing. He had caught sight of the old and eternallyyouthful figure of Indian Dionysos. 

And even though Strauss himself could scarcely be mistaken for the god, nevertheless he made Nietzsche's dream appear realizable. He permittedone for an instant to perceive a musical realm in which the earth-fastcould not breathe. He permitted one for an instant to hear ringing "theprelude of a deeper, mightier, perchance a more evil and mysteriousmusic; a super-German music which does not fade, wither and die awaybeside the blue and wanton sea and the clear Mediterranean sky; a musicsuper-European, which would assert itself even amid the tawny sunsets ofthe desert; a music whose soul is akin to the palm-trees; a music thatcan consort and prowl with great, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey; amusic whose supreme charm is its ignorance of Good and Evil. " For hecame with some of the light and careless and arrogant tread, theintellectual sparkling, the superb gesture and port, of the musician ofthe new race. The man who composed such music, one knew, had been bornon some sort of human height, in some cooler, brighter atmosphere thanthat of the crowded valleys. For in this music there beat a fasterpulse, moved a lighter, fierier, prouder body, sounded a more ironic anddisdainful laughter, breathed a rarer air than had beat and moved andsounded and breathed in music. It made drunken with pleasant sound, withfull rich harmonies, with exuberant dance and waltz movements. It seemedto adumbrate the arrival of a new sort of men, men of saner, sounder, more athletic souls and more robust and cool intelligences, a generationthat was vitally satisfied, was less torn and belabored by theinexpressible longings of the romantic world, a generation very much athome on the globe. For it had none of the restless, sick desire ofWagner, none of his excessive pathos, his heaviness and stiff grandeur. It had come down off its buskins, was more easy, witty, diverting, exciting, popular and yet cerebral. Though it was obviously the speechof a complicated, modern man, self-conscious, sophisticated, nervous, product of a society perhaps not quite as free and Nietzschean as itdeemed itself, but yet cultivated and illuminated and refined, itnevertheless seemed exuberantly sound. The sweet, broad, diatonic idiom, the humor, the sleepy Bavarian accent, the pert, naïve, littlefolk-tunes it employed, the tranquil, touching, childlike tones, theclose of "Tod und Verklärung, " with its wondrous unfolding of corollaupon corolla, were refreshing indeed after all the burning chromaticismof Wagner, the sultry air of Klingsor's wonder-garden. 

And this music glittered with the sun. The pitch of Wagner's orchestrahad, after all, been predominantly sober and subdued. But in theorchestra of Strauss, the color-gamut of the _plein-air_ painters got amusical equivalent. Those high and brilliant tints, these shimmering, biting tones, make one feel as though Strauss made music with thepaint-brush of a Monet or a Van Gogh. His trumpets are high andbrilliant and silvery, his violins scintillant and electric, at momentswinding a lazy, happy, smoke-blue thread through the sunburnt fabric ofthe score. His horns glow with soft, fruity timbres. The new sweetnessof color which he attains in his songs, the pale gold of "Morgen, " therose of the Serenade, the mild evening blue of "Traum durch dieDämmerung, " shimmers throughout his orchestra scores. Never have windinstruments sounded more richly, dulcetly, than in that "Serenade fürdreizehn Bläser. " At a first hearing of "Also Sprach Zarathustra, " itseemed as though the very dayspring had descended into the orchestra tomake that famous, brassy opening passage. For here, in the hand ofStrauss, the orchestra begins to round out its form and assume itslogical shape. The various families of instruments are made independent;often play separately. The shattering brass of which Berlioz had dreamtis realized. Violas d'amore, hecklephones, wind-machines, are introducedinto the band; the familiar instruments are used in unfamiliarregisters. Through the tone-poems of Strauss, the orchestral composerfor the first time has a suitable palette, and can achieve a brillianceas great as that which the modern painter can attain. 

To-day, it is difficult to realize that Richard Strauss ever incensedsuch high hopes, that there was a time when he made appear realizableNietzsche's mad dream of a modern music, and that for awhile the nimbusof Dionysos burnt round his figure. To-day it is difficult to rememberthat once upon a time Strauss seemed to the world the golden youth ofmusic, the engineer of proud orchestral flights, the outrider andbannerman of his art. For it is long since he has promised to reveal thenew beauty, the new rhythm, has seemed the wonderful start and flighttoward some rarer plane of existence, some bluer ether, the friend ofeverything intrepid and living and young, the "arrow of longing for theSuperman. " It is a long while since any gracious, lordly light hasirradiated his person. In recent years he has become almost the veryreverse of what he was, of what he gave so brave an earnest of becoming. He who was once so electric, so vital, so brilliant a figure has becomedreary and outward and stupid, even. He who once seemed the champion ofthe new has come to fill us with the weariness of the struggle, withdeep self-distrust and discouragement, has become a heavy and oppressiveweight. He who once sought to express the world about him, to be thepoet of the coming time, now seems inspired only by a desire to do theamazing, the surface thing, and plies himself to every ephemeral andshallow current of modern life. For Strauss has not only not deepenedand matured and increased in stature; he has not even stood still, remained the artist that once he was. He has progressively and steadilydeteriorated during the last decade. He has become a bad musician. He isthe cruel, the great disappointment of modern music, of modern art. Thedream-light has failed altogether, has made the succeeding darkness thethicker for the momentary illumination. Strauss to-day is seen as arocket that sizzled up into the sky with many-colored blaze, and thenbroke suddenly and extinguished swiftly into the midnight. 

It is not easy, even for those who were aware from the very first thatStrauss was not the spirit "pardlike, beautiful and swift" and thatthere always were distinctly gross and insensitive particles in him, torecognize in the slack and listless person who concocts "Joseph'sLegende" and the "Alpensymphonie, " the young and fiery composer, geniusdespite all the impurities of his style, who composed "TillEulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote"; not easy, even though the contours ofhis idiom have not radically altered, and though in the sleepy facileperiods of his later style one catches sight at times of the broad, simple diction of his earlier. For the later Strauss lacks pre-eminentlyand signally just the traits that made of the earlier so brilliant andengaging a figure. Behind the works of the earlier Strauss there wasvisible an intensely fierily experiencing being, a man who had powerfuland poignant and beautiful sensations, and the gift of expressing themrichly. Behind the work of the latter there is all too apparent a manwho for a long while has felt nothing beautiful or strong or full, whono longer possesses the power of feeling anything at all, and isinwardly wasted and dull and spent. The one had a burning and wonderfulpressure of speech. The other seems unable to concentrate energy andinterest sufficiently to create a hard and living piece of work. Theone seemed to blaze new pathways through the brain. The other stepslanguidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. Thecontriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated intothe death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying withhis medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in "Der Rosenkavalier, "Haendel in "Joseph's Legende, " Offenbach and Lully (a coupling that onlyStrauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in "Ariadne auf Naxos. " Hehas become increasingly facile and unoriginal, has taken to quotingunblushingly Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky, Wagner, himself, even. Hisinsensitivity has waxed inordinately, and led him to mix styles, tocommingle dramatic and coloratura passages, to jumble the idioms ofthree centuries in a single work, to play all manner of pointless prankswith his art. His literary taste has grown increasingly uncertain. Hewho was once so careful in his choice of lyrics, and recognized thetalents of such modern German poets as Birnbaum and Dehmel and Mackay, accepts librettos as dull and inartistic and precious as those withwhich Hofmannsthal is supplying him, and lends his art to the boringbuffooneries of "Der Rosenkavalier" and "Ariadne auf Naxos. " Somethingin him has bent and been fouled. 

One thing at least the Strauss of the tone-poems indisputably was. Hewas freely, dazzlingly, daringly expressive. And this is what theStrauss of the last years thinly and rarely is. It is not Oscar Wilde'swax flowers of speech, nor the excessively stiff and conventionalizedaction of "Salome, " that bores one with the Strauss opera of that name. It is not even the libretto of "Der Rosenkavalier, " essentially coarseand boorish and insensitive as it is beneath all its powderedpreciosity, that wearies one with Strauss's "Musical Comedy"; or thehybrid, lame, tasteless form of "Ariadne auf Naxos" that turns oneagainst that little monstrosity. It is the generally inexpressive andinsufficient music in which Strauss has vested them. The music of"Salome, " for instance, is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. Itwas the evacuation of an obsessive desire, the revulsion from a pitilesssensuality that the poet had intended to procure through thisrepresentation. But Strauss's music, save in such exceptional passagesas the shimmering, restless, nerve-sick opening page, or the beginningof the scene with the head, or certain other crimson patches, hampersand even negates the intended effect. It emasculates the drama with itspervasive prettiness, its lazy felicitousness where it ought to bemonstrous and terrifying, its reminiscences of Mendelssohn, Tchaikowskyand "Little Egypt. " The lascivious and hieratic dance, the dance of theseven veils, is represented by a _valse lente_. Oftentimes the scoreverges perilously on circus-music, recalls the sideshows at countyfairs. No doubt, in so doing it weakens the odor exuded by Wilde's play. But if we must have an operatic "Salome, " it is but reasonable to demandthat the composer in his music express the sexual cruelty and frenzysymbolized in the figure of the dancer. And the Salome of Strauss'sscore is as little the Salome of Wilde as she is the Salome of Flaubertor Beardsley or Moreau or Huysmans. One cannot help feeling hereminently a buxom, opulent Berliner, the wife, say, of the proprietor ofa large department store; a heavy lady a good deal less "dämonisch" and"perverse" than she would like to have it appear. But there are momentswhen one feels as though Strauss's heroine were not even a Berliner, orof the upper middle class. There are moments when she is plainly Käthi, the waitress at the Münchner Hofbraühaus. And though she declares toJokanaan that "it is his mouth of which she is enamored, " she deliversthe words in her own true-hearted, unaffected brogue. 

Nor is "Elektra, " more sharp than "Salome, " though it oftentimes is, themusical equivalent for the massive and violent forms of archaic Greeksculpture that Strauss intended it be. Elektra herself is perhaps moretruly incarnate fury than Salome is incarnate luxury; ugliness anddemoniacal brooding, madness and cruelty are here more sheerlypowerfully expressed than in the earlier score; the scene ofrecognition between brother and sister is more large and touching thananything in "Salome"; Elektra's paean and dance, for all its closenessto a banal _cantilena_, its _tempo di valse_ so characteristic of thelater Strauss, is perhaps more grandiosely and balefully triumphant thanthe dancer's scene with the head. Nevertheless, the work is by no meansrealized. It is formally impure, a thing that none of the earliertone-poems are. Neither style nor shape are deeply felt. Both aresuperficially and externally conceived; and nothing so conclusivelydemonstrates it as the extreme ineffectually of the moments of contrastwith which Strauss has attempted to relieve the dominant mood of hiswork. Just as in "Salome" the more restless and sensual passages, lazilyfelt as they are, are nevertheless infinitely more significant than theintensely contrasting silly music assigned to the Prophet, so, too, in"Elektra, " the moments when Strauss is cruel, brutal, ugly are of a muchhigher expressiveness than those in which he has sought to writebeautifully. For whereas in moments of the first sort the lions of theMycenæ gates do at times snarl and glower, in those of the second it isthe Teutonic beer-mug that makes itself felt. Elektra laments her fatherin a very pretty and undistinguished melody, and entreats her sister toslay Klytemnæstra to the accompaniment of a sort of _valse perverse_. Itis also in _tempo di valse_ that Chrysothemis declares her need ofwifehood and motherhood. As an organism the work does not exist. 

But even the expressiveness and considerability of "Salome" and"Elektra, " limited and unsatisfactory as they are, are wanting in themore recent works. With "Der Rosenkavalier, " Strauss seems to havereached a condition in which it is impossible for him to penetrate asubject deeply. No doubt he always was spotty, even though in his goldendays he invariably fixed the inner informing binding rhythm of each ofhis works. But his last works are not only spotty, but completelyspineless as well, invertebrate masses upon which a few jewels, a fewfine patches, gleam dully. "Salome" and "Elektra" had at least a certaindignity, a certain bearing. "Der Rosenkavalier, " "Ariadne auf Naxos, ""Joseph's Legende" and "Eine Alpensymphonie" are makeshift, slack, slovenly despite all technical virtuosity, all orchestral marvels. Everyone knows what the score of "Rosenkavalier" should have been, a gay, florid, licentious thing, the very image of the gallant century with itsmundane amours and ribbons and cupids, its _petit-maîtres_ and furbelowsand _billets-doux_, its light emotions and equally light surrenders. ButStrauss's music is singularly flat and hollow and dun, joyless andsoggy, even though it is dotted with waltzes and contains the delightfulintroduction to the third act, and the brilliant trio. It has all theworst faults of the libretto. Hofmannsthal's "comedy for music, " thoughgross and vulgar in spirit, and unoriginal in design, is full of a sortof clever preciosity, full of piquant details culled fromeighteenth-century prints and memoirs. The scene of the coiffing is aprint of Hogarth's translated to the stage; Rofrano's name "OctavianMaria Ehrenreich Bonaventura Fernand Hyazinth" is like an essay on theculture of the Vienna of Canaletto; the polite jargon ofeighteenth-century aristocratic Austria spoken by the characters, withits stiff, courteous forms and intermingled French, must have beenstudied from old journals and gazettes. And Strauss's score is equallyprecious, equally a thing of erudition and cleverness. Mozart turned theimbecilities of Schickaneder to his uses; Weber triumphed over theridiculous romancings of Helmine von Chezy. But Strauss followsHofmannsthal helplessly, soddenly. Just as Hofmannsthal imitatesHogarth, so Strauss imitates Mozart, affects his style, his turns, hisspirit; inserts a syrupy air in the style of Haendel or Méhul in thefirst act; and jumbles Mozart with modern comic-opera waltzes, Haendelwith post-Wagnerian incantations. And like Hofmannsthal's libretto, thescore remains a superficial and formless thing. The inner and coherentrhythm, the spiritual beat and swing, the great unity and direction, arewanting. "I have always wanted to write an opera like Mozart's, and nowI have done it, " Strauss is reported to have said after the firstperformance of "Der Rosenkavalier. " But "Der Rosenkavalier" is almostantipodal to "Don Giovanni" or to "Falstaff" or to "Die Meistersinger"or to any of the great comic operas. For it lacks just the thing theothers possess abundantly, a strong lyrical movement, a warm emotionthat informs the music bar after bar, scene after scene, act after act, and imparts to the auditor the joy, the vitality, the beauty of whichthe composers' hearts were full. It is a long while since Strauss hasfelt anything of the sort. 

Had the new time produced no musical art, had no Debussy nor Scriabine, no Strawinsky nor Bloch, put in appearance, one might possibly havefound oneself compelled to believe the mournful decadence of RichardStrauss the inevitable development awaiting musical genius in the modernworld. There exists a group, international in composition, which, aboveall other contemporary bodies, arrogates to itself the style ofmodernity. It is the group, tendrils of which reach into every greatcapital and center, into every artistic movement and cause, of the boredones, the spoilt ones. The present system has lifted into a _quasi_aristocratic and leisurely state vast numbers of people withoutbackground, without tradition or culture or taste. By reason of itslargeness and resources, this group of people without taste, withoutinterest, without finesse, has come to dominate in particular the worldof art as the world of play, has come to demand distraction, sensation, excitement which its unreal existence does not afford it. Indeed, thisband has come to give a cast to the whole of present-day life; itsmembers pretend to represent present-day culture. It is with this groupwith its frayed sensibilities and tired pulses that Strauss has becomeincreasingly identified, till of late he has become something like itscourt-musician, supplying it with stimulants, awaking its curiosities, astonishing and exciting it with the superficial novelty of his works, trying to procure it the experiences it is so lamentably unable toprocure itself. It is for it that he created the trumpery horrors, thesweet erotics of the score of "Salome. " It is for it that he imitatedMozart saccharinely in "Der Rosenkavalier"; mangled Molière's comedy;committed the vulgarities and hypocrisies of "Joseph's Legende. " And didno evidence roundly to the contrary exist, one might suppose this groupto really represent modern life; that its modernity was the only trueone; and that in expressing it, in conforming to it, Strauss wasfunctioning in the only manner granted the contemporary composer. Butsince such evidence exists aplenty, since a dozen other musicians, tospeak only of the practitioners of a single art, have managed to keepthemselves immune and yet create beauty about them, to remain on theplane upon which Strauss began life, to persevere in the direction inwhich he was originally set, and yet live fully, one finds oneselfconvinced that the deterioration of Strauss, which has made him musicalpurveyor to this group, has not been the result of the pressure ofoutward and hostile circumstances. One finds oneself positivelyconvinced that it was some inner weakness within himself that permittedthe spoilt and ugly folk to seduce him from his road, and use him fortheir purposes. 

And in the end it is as the victim of a psychic deterioration that oneis forced to regard this unfortunate man. The thing that one seeshappening to so many people about one, the extinction of a flame, thewithering of a blossom, the dulling and coarsening of the sensibilities, the decay of the mental energies, seems to have happened to him, too. And since it happens in the lives of so many folk, why should itsurprise one to see it happening in the life of an artist, anddeflowering genius and ruining musical art? All the hectic, unrealactivity of the later Strauss, the dissipation of forces, points back tosuch a cause. He declares himself in every action the type who can nolonger gather his energies to the performance of an honest piece ofwork, who can no longer achieve direct, full, living expression, who canno longer penetrate the center of a subject, an idea. He is the type ofman unfaithful to himself in some fundamental relation, unfaithful tohimself throughout his deeds. Many people have thought a love of moneythe cause of Strauss's decay; that for the sake of gain he hasdelivered himself bound hand and foot into the power of his publishers, and for the sake of gain turned out bad music. No doubt, the love ofmoney plays an inordinate rôle in the man's life, and keeps on playing agreater and greater. But it is probable that Strauss's desire forincessant gain is a sort of perversion, a mania that has gotten controlover him because his energies are inwardly prevented from taking theirlogical course, and creating works of art. Luxury-loving as he is, Strauss has probably never needed money sorely. Some money hedoubtlessly inherited through his mother, the daughter of the Munichbeer-brewer Pschorr; his works have always fetched large prices--hispublishers have paid him as much as a thousand dollars for a singlesong; and he has always been able to earn great sums by conducting. Nomatter how lofty and severe his art might have become, he would alwayshave been able to live as he chose. There is no doubt that he would haveearned quite as much money with "Salome" and "Der Rosenkavalier" hadthey been works of high, artistic merit as he has earned with them intheir present condition. The truth is that he has rationalized hisunwillingness to go through the labor-pains of creation by pretending tohimself a constant and great need of money, and permitting himself todissipate his energies in a hectic, disturbed, shallow existence, in atremor of concert-tours, guest-conductorships, money-making enterprisesof all sorts, which leave him about two or three of the summer monthsfor composition, and probably rob him of his best energies. So worksleave his writing table half-conceived, half-executed. The score of"Elektra" he permits his publishers to snatch from him before he isquite finished with it. He commences composing "Der Rosenkavalier"before having even seen the third act. The third act arrives; Straussfinds it miserable. But it is too late. The work is half-finished, andStrauss has to go through with it. Composition becomes more and more amechanical thing, the brilliant orchestration of sloppy, undistinguishedmusic, the polishing up of details, the play of superficial clevernesswhich makes a score like "Der Rosenkavalier, " feeble as it is, interesting to many musicians. 

And Richard Strauss, the one living musician who could with greatestease settle down to uninterrupted composition, gets to his writing tablein his apartment in Charlottenburg every evening at nine o'clock, thatis, whenever he is not on duty at the Berlin Opera. 

And always the excuses: "Earning money for the support of wife and childis not shameful, " "I am going to accumulate a large enough fortune sothat I can give up conducting entirely and spend all my time composing. "But one can be sure that when Strauss soliloquizes, it is a differentdefense that he makes. One can be sure, then, that he justifies himselfcynically, bitterly, grossly, tells himself that the game is not worththe candle, that greatness is a matter of advertisement, that only thevalues of the commercial world exist, that other success than theprocurement of applause and wealth and notoriety constitutes failure. Why should you take the trouble to write good work that will bring youposthumous fame when without trouble you can write work that will bringyou fame during your lifetime? The whole world is sham and advertisementand opportunism, is it not? Reputations are made by publishers andnewspapers. Greatness is a matter determined by majorities. But impressthe public, but compose works that will arouse universal comment, butbreak a few academic formulas and get yourself talked about, but writemusic that will surprise and seem wonderful at a first hearing, and yourfame is assured. The important thing is to live luxuriously and keepyour name before the public. In so doing one will have lived life asfully as it can be lived. And after one is dead, what does it allmatter?

Yet, though the world be full of men whose spiritual energies have beenlamed in kindred fashions, the terrible misadventure of Richard Straussremains deeply affecting. However far the millions of bright spirits whohave died a living death have fallen, their fall has been no fartherthan this man's. There can be no doubt of the completeness of Strauss'sdisaster. It is a long while since he has been much besides a bore tohis once fervent admirers, an object of hatred to thousands of honest, idealistic musicians. He has completely, in his fifty-sixth year, lostthe position of leadership, of eminence that once he had. Even beforethe war his operas held the stage only with difficulty. And it ispossible that he will outlive his fame. One wonders whether he is notone of the men whose inflated reputations the war has pricked, and thata world will shortly wonder, before his two new operas, how it waspossible that it should have been held at all by the man. Had he beenthe most idealistic, the most uncompromising of musicians he could notbe less respected. Perhaps his last chance lay in the "Alpensymphonie. "Here was a ceremony that could have made him priest once again. Europehad reached a summit, humanity had had a vision. Before it lay a longdescent, a cloudburst, the sunset of a civilization, another night. Could Strauss have once more girded himself, once more summoned thefaith, the energy, the fire that created those first grand pages thatwon a world to him, he might have been saved. But it was impossible. Something in him was dead forever. And so, to us, who should have beenhis champions, his audiences, his work already seems old, part of thepast even at its best, unreal except for a few of the fine symphonicworks. To us, who once thought to see in him the man of the new time, he seems only the brave, sonorous trumpet-call that heralded a king whonever put in his appearance, the glare that in the East lights the skyfor an instant and seems to promise a new day, but extinguishes again. He is indeed the false dawn of modern music. 

Moussorgsky

The music of Moussorgsky comes up out of a dense and livid ground. Itcomes up out of a ground that lies thickly packed beneath our feet, andthat is wider than the widest waste, and deeper than the bottomlessabysses of the sea. It comes up from a soil that descends downwardthrough all times and ages, through all the days of humankind, down tothe very foundations of the globe itself. For it grows from the flesh ofthe nameless, unnumbered multitudes of men condemned by life throughoutits course to misery. It has its roots where death and defeat have been. It has its roots in all bruised and maimed and frustrated flesh, in allflesh that might have borne a god and perished barren. It has its rootin every being who has been without sun, in every being who has sufferedcold and hunger and disease, and pierces down and touches everyvoiceless woe, every defeat that man has ever known. And out of that seaof mutilated flesh it rises like low, trembling speech, halting andinarticulate and broken. It has no high, compelling accent, noeloquence. And yet, it has but to lift its poor and quavering tones, andthe splendor of the world is blotted out, and the great, glowingfirmament is made a sorrowful gray, and, in a single instant, we haveknowledge of the stern and holy truth, know the terrible floor uponwhich we tread, know what man has ever suffered, and what our ownexistences can only prove to be. 

For it is the cry of one possessed and consumed in every fiber of hisbeing by that single consciousness. It is as though Moussorgsky, thegreat, chivalric Russian, the great, sinewy giant with blood aflame forgorgeousness and bravery and bells and games and chants, had been allhis days the Prince in "Khovanchtchina" to whom the sorceress foretells:"Disgrace and exile await thee. Honors and power and riches will be tornfrom thee. Neither thy past glory nor thy wisdom can save thee. Thouwilt know what it is to want, and to suffer, and to weep the tears ofthe hopeless. And so, thou wilt know the truth of this world. " It is asthough he had heard that cry incessantly from a million throats, asthough it had tolled in his ears like a bourdon until it informed himquite, and suffused his youth and force and power of song. It is asthough his being had been opened entirely in orientation upon the vast, sunless stretches of the world, and distended in the agony of taking upinto himself the knowledge of those myriad broken lives. For it is thecountless defeated millions that live again in his art. It is they whospeak with his voice. Better even than Walt Whitman, Moussorgsky mighthave said:

 "Through me, voices long dumb, many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion"--

It is as though he had surrendered himself quite to them, hadrelinquished to them his giant Russian strength, his zest of life, hisjoy, had given them his proud flesh that their cry and confession mightreach the ears of the living. 

Sometimes, Moussorgsky is whole civilizations discarded by life. Sometimes, he is whole cultures from under which the earth has rolled, whole groups of human beings who stood silently and despairingly for aninstant in a world that carelessly flung them aside, and then turned andwent away. Sometimes he is the brutal, ignorant, helpless throng thatkneels in the falling snow while the conquerors, the great ones of thisworld, false and true alike, pass by in the torchlight amid fanfares andhymns and acclamations and speak the fair, high words and make thekingly gestures that fortune has assigned to them. Sometimes he is evenlife before man. He is the dumb beast devoured by another, larger; theplants that are crowded from the sunlight. He knows the ache and pain ofinanimate things. And then, at other moments, he is a certain forgottenindividual, some obscure, nameless being, some creature, some sentientworld like the monk Pimen or the Innocent in "Boris Godounow, " and outof the dust of ages an halting, inarticulate voice calls to us. He isthe poor, the aging, the half-witted; the drunken sot mumbling in hisstupor; the captives of life to whom death sings his insistent, luringsongs; the half-idiotic peasant boy who tries to stammer out hisdeclaration of love to the superb village belle; the wretched fool whoweeps in the falling snowy night. He is those who have never beforespoken in musical art, and now arise, and are about us and make us onewith them. 

But it is not only as content that they are in this music. This music isthey, in its curves and angles, in its melody and rhythms, in its styleand shape. There are times when it stands in relation to other music assome being half giant, half day-laborer, might stand in the company ofscholars and poets and other highly educated and civilized men. Theunlettered, the uncouth, the humble, the men unacquainted with eloquenceare in this music in very body. It pierces directly from their throats. No film, no refinement on their speech, no art of music removes themfrom us. As Moussorgsky originally wrote these scores, their forms arevisible on page after page. When his music laughs it laughs likebarbarians holding their sides. When it weeps, it weeps like some littleold peasant woman crouching and rocking in her grief. It has all theboisterousness and hoarseness of voices that sound out of peasant-cabinsand are lodged in men who wear birch-bark shoes and eat coarse food andsuffer cold and hunger. Within its idiom there are the croonings andwailings of thousands of illiterate mothers, of people for whomexpression is like a tearing of entrails, like a terrible birth-giving. It has in it the voices of folk singing in fairs, of folk sitting ininns; exalted and fanatical and mystical voices; voices of children andserving-maids and soldiers; a thousand sorts of uncouth, grim, sharpspeakers. The plaint of Xenia in "Boris Godounow" is scarcely more thanthe underlining of the words, the accentuation of the voice of somesimple girl uttering her grief for some one recently and cruelly dead. There are moments when the whole of "Boris Godounow, " machinery of operaand all, seems no more elegant, more artful and refined than one of thesimpler tunes cherished by common folk through centuries, passed fromgeneration to generation and assumed by each because in moments of griefand joy and longing and ease it brought comfort and solace and relief. This music is common Russia singing. It is Russia speaking without theuse of words. For like the folk-song, it has within it the genius andvalues of the popular tongue. Moussorgsky's style is blood-brother tothe spoken language, is indeed as much the Russian language as music canbe. In the phrase of Jacques Rivière, "it speaks in words ending in_ia_ and _schka_, in humble phrases, in swift, poor, suppliant terms. "Indeed, so unconventional, so crude, shaggy, utterly inelegant, areMoussorgsky's scores, that they offend in polite musical circles evento-day. It is only in the modified, "corrected" and indubitablycastrated versions of Rimsky-Korsakoff that "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina"maintain themselves upon the stage. This iron, this granite andadamantine music, this grim, poignant, emphatic expression will not fitinto the old conceptions. The old ones speak vaguely of "musicalrealism, " "naturalism, " seeking to find a pigeon-hole for this greatquivering mass of life. 

No doubt the music of Moussorgsky is not entirely iron-gray. Just as, inthe midst of "Boris, " there occurs the gentle scene between the Czar andhis children, so scattered through this stern body of music there arelight and gay colors, brilliant and joyous compositions. Homely andpopular and naïve his melodies and rhythms always are, littlepeasant-girls with dangling braids, peasant lads in gala garb, coloredballs that are thrown about, singing games that are played to theregular accompaniment of clapping palms, songs about ducks andparrakeets, dances full of shuffling and leaping. Even the movements ofthe sumptuous "Persian Dances" in "Khovanchtchina" are singularly naïveand simple and unpretentious. Sometimes, however, the full gorgeousnessof Byzantine art shines through this music, and the gold-dusty modes, the metallic flatness of the pentatonic scale, the mystic twilit chantsand brazen trumpet-calls make us see the mosaics of Ravenna, the blackand gold ikons of Russian churches, the aureoled saints upon brickedwalls, the minarets of the Kremlin. There is scarcely an operatic scenemore magnificent than the scene of the coronation of Tsar Boris, withits massive splendors of pealing bells and clarion blares and thecaroling of the kneeling crowds. Then, like Boris himself, Moussorgskysweeps through in stiff, blazoned robes, crowned with the domed, flashing Slavic tiara. And yet through all these bright colors, asthrough the darker, sadder tones of the greater part of his work, therecomes to us that one anguished, overwhelming sense of life, that singlegreat consciousness. The gay rich spots are but part of it, intensifythe great somber mass. Their simplicity, their childlikeness, theirinnocence, are qualities that are perceived only after suffering. Thesunlight in them is the gracious, sweet, kindly sunlight that falls onlybetween nights of pain. The bright and chivalric passages of "Boris, "the music called forth by the memories of feudal Russia, and the gloryof the Czars, give a deeper, stranger, even more wistful tone to thegreat gray pile of which they are a part. "Khovanchtchina" is never somuch the tragedy, the monument to beings and cultures superseded andcast aside in the relentless march of life, as in the scene when PrinceIvan Khovansky meets his death. For at the moment that the old boyar, and with him the old order of Russia, goes to his doom, there is intonedby his followers the sweetest melody that Moussorgsky wrote or couldwrite. And out of that hymn to the glory of the perishing house thereseems to come to us all the pathos of eternally passing things, all thewistfulness of the last sunset, all the last greeting of a vanishedhappiness. More sheerly than any other moment, more even than theinfinitely stern and simple prelude that ushers in the last scene of"Boris" and seems to come out of a great distance and sum up all thesadness and darkness and pitifulness of human existence, that scenebrings into view the great bleak monolith that the work of Moussorgskyreally is, the great consciousness it rears silently, accusingly againstthe sky. As collieries rear themselves, grim and sinister, above miningtowns, so this music rears itself in its Russian snows, and stands, awful and beautiful. 

And, of late, the single shaft has out-topped the glamorous Wagnerianhalls. The operas of Moussorgsky have begun to achieve the eminence thatWagner's once possessed. To a large degree, it is the change of timesthat has advanced and appreciated the art of Moussorgsky. Although"Boris" saw the light at the same time as "Die Götterdämmerung, " andalthough Moussorgsky lies chronologically very near the former age, heis far closer to us in feeling than is Wagner. The other generation, with its pride of material power, its sense of well-being, its surgetoward mastery of the terrestrial forces, its need of luxury, was unableto comprehend one who felt life a grim, sorrowful thing, who felthimself a child, a crone, a pauper, helpless in the terrible cold. Forthat was required a less naïve and confident generation, a day moresophisticated and disabused and chastened. And so Moussorgsky's music, with its poor and uncouth and humble tone, its revulsion from pride andmaterial grandeur and lordliness, its iron and cruelty and bleakness, lay unknown and neglected in its snows. Indeed, it had to await thecoming of "Pelléas et Mélisande" in order to take its rightful place. For while Moussorgsky may have influenced Debussy artistically, it wasDebussy's work that made for the recognition and popularization ofMoussorgsky's. For the music of Debussy is the delicate and classicaland voluptuous and aristocratic expression of the same consciousness ofwhich Moussorgsky's is the severe, stark, barbaric; the caress asopposed to the pinch. Consequently, Debussy's art was the more readilycomprehensible of the two. But, once "Pélleas" produced, the assumptionof "Boris" was inevitable. Moussorgsky's generation had arrived. The menwho felt as he, who recognized the truth of his spare, metallic style, his sober edifices, had attained majority. A world was able to perceivein the music of the dead man its symbol. 

But it is by no means alone the timeliness of Moussorgsky that hasadvanced him to his present position. It is the marvelous originality ofhis art. He is one of the most completely and nobly original amongcomposers, one of the great inventors of form. The music of Moussorgskyis almost completely treasure-trove. It is not the development of anyone thing, the continuation of a line, the logical outcome of the laborsof others, as the works of so many even of the greatest musicians are. It is a thing that seems to have fallen to earth out of the arcana offorms like some meteorite. At the very moment of Wagner's triumph and ofthe full maturity of Liszt and Brahms, Moussorgsky composed as though hehad been born into a world in which there was no musical tradition, aworld where, indeed, no fine musical literature, and only a fewfolk-songs and orthodox liturgical chants and Greek-Catholic scalesexisted. Toward musical theory he seems to have been completelyindifferent. Only one rule he recognized, and that was, "Art is a meansof speech between man and man, and not an end. " He was self-taught, andactually invented an art of music with each step of composition. Andwhat he produced, though it was not great in bulk, was novel with anewness that is one of the miracles of music. Scarcely a phrase in hisoperas and songs moves in a conventional or unoriginal curve. The songsof Moussorgsky are things that can be recognized in each of theirmoments, so deeply and completely distinctive they are. There is not abar of the collection called "Sans soleil" that is not richly andpowerfully new. The harmonies sound new, the melodies are free andstrange and expressive, the forms are solid and weighty as bronze andiron. They are like lumps dug up out of the earth. The uttermostsimplicity obtains. And every stroke is decisive and meaningful. Moussorgsky seems to have crept closer to life than most artists, tohave seized emotions in their nakedness and sharpness, to have felt withthe innocence of a child. One of his collections is entitled "La Chambred'Enfants. " And that surprise and wonder at all the common facts oflife, the sharpness with which the knowledge of death comes, characterize not alone this group, but all the songs. He is throughoutthem the child who sees the beetle lie dead, and who expresses hiswonder and trouble directly from his heart with all the sharpness ofnecessary speech. So much other music seems indirect, hesitating, timorous, beside these little forms of granite. 

And then, Moussorgsky's operas, "Boris" in particular, are dramaticallyswifter than most of Wagner's. He never made the mistake the master ofBayreuth so frequently made, of subordinating the drama to the music, and arresting the action for the sake of a "Waldweben" or a"Charfreitagszauber. " The little scenes of Pushkin's play spinthemselves off quickly through the music; the action is reinforced by askeleton-like form of music, by swift vivid tonal etchings, by thesimplest, directest picturings. Musical characterization is of thesharpest; original ideas pile upon each other and succeed each otherwithout ado. The score of Boris, slim as it is, is a treasure house ofinventions, of some of the most perfect music written for the theater. Few operatic works are musically more important, and yet lesspretentious. And "Khovanchtchina, " fragmentary though it is, is almostno less full of noble and lovely ideas. These fragments, melodies, choruses, dances are each of them real inventions, wonderful piecescaught up in nets, the rarest sort of beauties. A deep, rich glow playsover these melodies. Their simplicity is the simplicity of perfectlyfelicitous inventions, of things sprung from the earth without effort. They are so much like folk-tunes that one wonders whether they were notproduced hundreds of years ago and handed down by generations ofRussians. One of them even, the great chorus in the first scene, mightstand as a sort of national anthem for Russia. Others, like theinstrumental accompaniment to the first entrance of Prince IvanKhovansky, are some of those bits that represent a whole culture, awhole tradition and race. 

These pieces are the children of an infinitely noble mind. There issomething in those gorgeous melodies, those magnificent cries, thoseproud and solemn themes of which both "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina" arefull, that makes Wagner seem plebeian and bourgeois. Peasant-like thoughthe music is, reeking of the soil, rude and powerful, it still seems torefer to a mind of a prouder, finer sort than that of the other man. Thereticence, the directness, the innocence of any theatricality, theavoidance of all that is purely effective, the dignity of expression, the salt and irony, the round, full ring of every detail are good andfortifying after the scoriac inundations of Wagner's genius. The gauntgray piles, the metallic surfaces, the homelinesses of Moussorgsky, aremore virile, stronger, more resisting than Wagner's music. Only folkaristocratically sure of themselves can be as gay and light at will. Ifthere is anything in modern music to be compared with the sheer, blunt, powerful volumes of primitive art it is the work of Moussorgsky. And asthe years pass, the man's stature and mind become more immense, moreprodigious. One has but to hearken to the accent of the greater part ofmodern music to gauge in whose shadow we are all living, how far theimpulse coming from him has carried. The whole living musical world, from Debussy to Bloch, from Strawinsky to Bartok, has been vivified byhim. And, certainly, if any modern music seems to have the resistingpower that beats back the centuries and the eons, it is his pieces ofbronze and ironware and granite. What the world lost when ModestMoussorgsky died in his forty-second year we shall never know. 

But, chiefest of all, his music has the grandeur of an essentiallyreligious act. It is the utterance of the profoundest spiritualknowledge of a people. Moussorgsky was buoyed by the great force of theRussian charity, the Russian humility, the Russian pity. It was thatgreat religious feeling that possessed the man who had been a foppishguardsman content to amuse ladies by strumming them snatches of "IlTrovatore" and "La Traviata" on the piano, and gave him his profoundsense of reality, his knowledge of how simple and sad a thing human lifeis after all, and made him vibrate so exquisitely with the sufferinginherent in the constitution of the world. It gave his art its color, its character, its tendency. It filled him with the unsentimental, warm, animal love that made him represent man faithfully and catch the verybreath of his fellows as it left their bodies. Certainly, it was fromhis race's dim, powerful sense of the sacrament of pain that his musicflows. He himself confessed that it was the sense of another'sinarticulate anguish, sympathy with a half-idiotic peasant-boystammering out his hopeless love, that first stirred the poet withinhim and led him to compose. The music of defeat, the insistent cry ofthe world's pain, sound out of his music because the Russian folk hasalways known the great mystery and reality and good of suffering, hasknown that only the humble, only those who have borne defeat and painand misfortune can see the face of life, that sorrow and agony canhallow human existence, and that while in the days of his triumph andwell-being man is a cruel and evil being, adversity often makes toappear in him divine and lovely traits. Dostoievsky was never more theRussian prophet than when he wrote "The Idiot, " and uttered in it hishumble thanksgiving that through the curse of nature, through the utteruselessness of his physical machine, through sickness and foolishnessand poverty, he had been saved from doing the world's evil and adding toits death. And Moussorgsky is the counterpart of the great romancer. Like the other, he comes in priestly and ablutionary office. Like theother, he expresses the moving, lowly god, the god of the low, broadforehead and peasant garb, that his people bears within it. Both proseand music are manifestations of the Russian Christ. To Europe in itslate hour he came as emissary of the one religious modern folk, andcalled on men to recognize the truth and reform their lives inaccordance with it. He came to wrest man from the slavery of the newgigantic body he had begotten, to wean him from lust of power, topacify and humble him. Once more he came to fulfil the Old Testamentaryprophets. The evangel of Tolstoy, the novels of Dostoievsky, the musicof Moussorgsky are the new gospels. In Moussorgsky, music has given thenew world its priest. 

Liszt

Oh, magnificent and miserable Abbé Liszt! Strange and unnatural fusionof traits the most noble and the most mean! One can scarcely say whichwas the stronger in you, the grand seigneur or the base comedian. For inyour work they are equally, inextricably commingled. In your art it isthe actor who thrones it in the palace hall, the great lord of music whostruts and capers on the boards of the itinerant theater. Nowhere, inall music, is grandeur nigher to the dust, and nowhere does the dustreveal more grandiose traits. Your compositions are the most brilliantof bastards, the most lamentable of legitimate things. They smite uswith both admiration and aversion, affect us as though the scarlet satinrobes of a patrician of Venice were to betray the presence beneath themof foul, unsightly rags. They remind us of the façades of the palaces ofVicenza, which, designed by the pompous and classicizing Palladio, areexecuted in stucco and other cheap materials. 

And yet, the many works in which you do not show yourself the artistreveal the plenitude of your powers almost as much as the few in whichyou do. The most empty of your many ostentatious orchestral soliloquies, the most feeble of your many piano-pyrotechnics, the iciest of yourbouquets of icy, exploding stars, the brassiest of your blatantperorations, the very falsest of your innumerable paste jewels, declarethat you were born to sit among the great ones of your craft. For theyreveal you the indubitable virtuosic genius. The very cleverness of theimitation of the precious stone betrays how deep a sense of the beautyof the real gem you had, how expert you were in the trade of diamondcutter. Into the shaping of your bad works of art there went atemperament, a playfulness, a fecundity, a capriciousness, a genius thatmany better artists have not possessed. 

You were indeed profusely endowed, showered with musical gifts as somecradled prince might be showered with presents and honors. Everything inyour personality was grand, seigneurial, immense in scale. You were bornmusical King of Cyprus and Jerusalem and Armenia, titular sovereign ofvast, unclaimed realms. Few composers have been more inventive. Nocomposer has ever scattered abroad ideas with more liberal hand. Compositions like the B-minor piano-sonata, the tone-poem "Mazeppa, " the"Dante" symphony, whatever their artistic value, fairly teem withoriginal themes of a high order, are like treasure houses in which goldornaments lie negligently strewn in piles. Indeed, your inventive powersupplied not only your own compositions with material, but those of yourson-in-law, Richard Wagner, as well. As James Huneker once so brightlyput it, "Wagner was indebted to you for much besides money, sympathy, and a wife. " For Siegmund and Sieglinde existed a long while in your"Dante" symphony before Wagner transferred them to "Die Walküre";Parsifal and Kundry a long while in your piano-sonata before heintroduced them into his "Bühnenweihfestspiel. "

You were equipped for piano-composition as was no other of your time. For you the instrument was a newer, stranger, more virgin thing than itwas for either Schumann or Chopin. You knew even better than they how tolisten for its proper voice. You were more deeply aware than they of itsproper color and quality. You seem to have come to it absolutely withoutpreconceived ideas. Your B-minor sonata, however unsatisfactory itsactual quality, remains one of the magistral works of the sort. For fewworks better exhibit the various ranges of the instrument, bettercontrast different volumes of piano-sound. The sonata actually lies ondifferent planes, proceeds from various directions, delimits a solidform, makes even Beethoven's seem flat and two-dimensional by contrast. Here, almost for the first time, is a sonata that is distinctly music_of_ the pianoforte. And the modern achievements in pianofortecomposition do not by any means lessen the wonder of your comprehensionof the instrument's dynamics. The new men, Scriabine and the composersof the modern French school, may have penetrated more deeply than itwas in your power to do, may have achieved where you failed. Nevertheless, they could not have progressed had it not been for yourway-finding. They are immeasurably indebted to you. 

Not even Wagner had an influence on the new age greater than yours, morelargely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the goodfriend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntaxand balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vagueregions, the _terra incognita_ of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its general, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to theromantic period, your conviction that the content conditions the form ofevery piece makes you the link between classic and modern musical art. The symphonic poem, whether or not it originates in the overtures ofBeethoven, is mainly your handiwork, since although you yourself werenot sufficiently free of the classic formulas to create a symphonic formentirely programmatic, as Strauss has subsequently done, younevertheless gave him the hint whereby he has profited most. Theimpressionists, too, seem to stem from you. The little piece called "Lesjeux d'eau de La Villa d'Este" seems not a little to anticipate theirstyle. And although you were not responsible for the music of thenationalistic Russian school, the robust, colorful barbarian in younevertheless made you welcome and encourage their work. It made youwrite to Borodin and Moussorgsky those cordial letters which pleasedthem so much. For at that time they were but obscure workmen, while youwere the very prince of musicians. 

Indeed, nothing is more princely, nothing better reveals the amplitude, the generosity of your spirit, than your relations with your fellowcraftsmen. Artists are oftentimes so petty in their conduct toward eachother that it is indeed refreshing to read with what infallible kindnessyou treated so many composers less fortunately situated than yourself. And not only Wagner and César Franck benefited by your good deeds. Manyobscurer and younger men, poor Edward MacDowell, for instance, knew whatit was to receive cordial and commendatory letters from you, to beassisted by you in their careers, to have their compositions brought toperformance by the best German orchestras through your aid. And you hadno conceit in you, smilingly referred to your symphonic poems as"Gartenmusik, " and replied to Wagner, when he informed you that he hadstolen such and such a theme from you, "Thank goodness, now it will atleast be heard!" Had you, O Liszt, expressed the nobility of your natureas purely in your composition as you expressed it in your socialrelations, we could have complained of no mountainous rubble, no squalormarring the perfect splendor of your figure. 

But, unhappily, the veritable grandeur of your endowment never begotitself a body of work really symbolic of itself. For if your music, as awhole, has any grandeur, it is the hollow grandeur of inflation, ofostentation, of externality. Your music is almost entirely a monstrous_décor de théâtre_. It is forever seeking to establish tragical andsatanic and passional atmospheres, to suggest immense and regal andterrific things, to gain tremendous effects. It is full of loud, grandiloquent pronouncements, of whirlwinds, thunderstorms, coronationson the Capitoline, ideals, lamentations, cavalcades across half of Asia, draperies, massacres, frescoes, façades, magnificats, lurid sunsets, scimitars, miracles, triumphs of the cross, retreats from the world. Itis full of all the romantic properties. Like vast pieces of stagescenery the various passages and movements are towed before our eyes, and we are bidden to feast our eyes on representations of titanic rocksand lowering skies and holy hermits' dwellings that remind usdangerously of the wonders displayed in the peepshows at gingerbreadfairs. The atmosphere of the compositions is so invariably sensational, the gesture so calculated, so theatrical, that much of the trulyimpressive material, the quantities of original ideas, lose allsubstantiality, and become indistinct components of these vast mountainsof ennui, these wastes of rhetorical and bombastic instruments, theseloud and prancing concertos of circus-music. There is something almostinsulting to the intelligence in these over-emphasized works, thesepretentious façades, these vast, pompous frescoes by Kaulbach, theseByronic instrumental soliloquies, these hollow, empty flourishes of thebrass, these foolishly satanic chromatics, these inevitable triumphs ofthe cross and the Gregorian modes. 

No doubt, much of your fustian and rhodomontade, your diabolicattitudes, your grandiose battles between the hosts of evil and thelight of the Tree, your interminable fanfares, was due the age in whichyou grew. The externality, the pompousness of intention, the theatricalpostures, was part of the romantic constitution. The desire to achievesensational effects, the tendency to externalize, to assume theatricalpostures and intend pompously, was inborn in every single one of the menamong whom you passed your youth. For they had suddenly, painfullybecome aware that nature was supremely indifferent to their individualfates and sorrows. So wounded were they in their _amour-propre_ thatthey sought to restore their diminished sense of self-worth byexaggerating the importance and intensity of their sufferings andseeking to convince themselves of their satanic sins and dreadful dooms. Manfred, posing darkly on an Alpine crag and summoning

 "Nature to her feud With bile & buskin attitude, "

was the type of you all. You had to ward off consciousness of your owninsignificance by conceiving yourselves amid stupendous surroundings, lurid natural effects, flaming prairies, pinnacles, torrents, coliseums, subterranean palaces, moonlit ruins, bandit dens, and as laboring underfrightful curses, dire punishments, ancestral sins, etc. , etc. 

But while we find the frenetic romanticism of a Delacroix, for instance, attractive, even, because of the virtue of his painting, and forgivethat of a Berlioz and a Chateaubriand because of the many beauties, theveritable grandeurs of their styles, we cannot quite learn to loveyours. For in you the disease was aggravated by the presence of anotherpowerful incentive to strut and posture and externalize and inflate yourart. For you were the virtuoso. You were the man whose entire being waspointed to achieve an effect. You were the man whose life is lived onthe concert-platform, whose values are those of the concert-room, whofinds his highest good in the instantaneous effect achieved by hisperformance. From childhood you were the idolized piano-virtuoso. Allyour days you were smothered in the adulation showered upon you in verytangible form by the great ladies of every capital of Europe. And avirtuoso you remained all your existence. You never developed out ofthat early situation into something more salutary to the artist. On thecontrary, you came to require the atmosphere of the performance, theexhibition, about you continually, to find the rose leaves and theclouds of perfume absolutely necessary. Most of your composition seemsbut the effort to perpetuate about you the admiration and the adulation, the glowing eyes and half-parted lips and heaving bosoms. Everything inyour piano-music is keyed for that effect. The shamelesssentimentalities, the voluptuous lingerings over sweet chords andincisive notes, the ostentatious recitatives, the moist, sensualclimaxes, the titillating figuration, the over-draperies, were calledinto existence for the immediate, the overwhelming effect at firsthearing. Everything is broadened and peppered and directed to obtainingyou the Pasha-power you craved. Besides being windy and theatrical, yourmusic is what Nietzsche so bitterly called it, "Die Schule derGeläufichkeit--nach Frauen. "

So your vast artistic endowment lies squandered, your ideas shallowlyset, your science misused. For while fate showered you magnificentlywith gifts, it seems to have at the same time sought to negate itsliberality by fusing in your personality the base alloy, by decreeingthat you should have enormous powers and yet abuse them. It preventedyou from often being completely genuine, completely incandescent, completely fine. It refused you for the greater part the true adamantinehardness of the artist, the inviolability of soul, the sense of style. It made you, the prodigiously fecund inventor, the mine of thematicmaterial, prodigal; unable to refine your ore, to chase your ideas, andgive them their full value. Wagner could have said of you, had he sowished, what Haendel is reported to have said of the composer from whomhe borrowed, "Of what use is such a good idea to a man like him?" Onemust indeed go to Wagner for the appreciation of many of the inventions, the Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Parsifal and Kundry, music, which youcast from you so carelessly. As for yourself, you are too much the"virtuosic genius"; too much, at heart, the actor. Your music is perhapsthe most cunningly carpentered for effect, the most artificial known tous. You are perhaps the most brilliant artifex of music. 

We always seem to see you sitting on the concert-platform before us, immersed in the expression of your passion, your disgust of passion, your renunciation of passion. But the absorption is not quite ascomplete as it would appear to be. During the entire performance, youhave been secretly keeping one wicked little eye trained on the ladiesof the audience. 

Sometimes you play the religious. Perhaps there truly was in you a veinof devotion and faith. The fact that you took Holy Orders to escapemarrying the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, who pursued you those manyyears and doubtlessly bored you with her theological writings, does notentirely disprove its existence. Indeed, your "Dante" symphony, withits Hell full of impenitent sexual offenders, its Purgatory full ofthose who repent them of their excesses, its Paradise represented by ahymn to the Virgin, suggests what manner of rôle, and how real a one, religion might have played in your luxurious existence. But, for themost part, the religiosity of your music recalls overmuch thefashionable confessor's. You bring consolation, doubtlessly. But youbring it by choice into the boudoir. You speak sadly of the cruel windsof lust. You dwell on the example of the pious St. Elizabeth of Hungary. You spread your hands over fair penitents, making a series of the mostbeautiful gestures. You whisper honeyed forgiveness for passional sins. You always excite tears and gratitude. But, in the end, your"Consolation" turns out only another "Liebestraum. "

No doubt, you loved your native land. But your patriotism recallsdangerously the restaurant Magyar, the fiddler in the frogged coat. Youdraw from your violin passionate laments. In a sort of ecstasy youcelebrate Hungaria. Then, smiling brilliantly, you pass the hat. 

Once, only, your eye did not wander liquidly to the gallery. Once, only, your workmanship was not marred by schemes for titillating effects, forsensational contrasts, for grandiose and bombastic expression. Once, only, you were completely the artist, impregnating your work with afine glow of life, making it deeply dignified and impassioned, sincereand firm, profoundly moving. For you, too, there was the cardinalexception. For you there was the "Faust Symphony. " The work is romanticmusic, the music of the Byronic school _par excellence_. Here, too, isthe brooding and revolt, the satanic cynicism, the expert's language. But here the miracle has taken place, and your music, generally so looseand shallow and theatrical, has the point, the intensity, thesignificance that it seems everywhere else to lack. Here, for once, is awork of yours that moves by its own initiative, that has an independentand marvelous life, that is brilliant and yet substantial. Here you havematerialized yourself. We believe in your Faust as we believe neither inyour Tasso nor in your Mazeppa nor in your Orpheus. For he utters yourown romantic brooding in touching and impressive terms. In the themethat conjures up before us "Faust in ritterlicher Hofkleidung desMittelalters, " you have expressed your own seigneurial pride anddaintiness. Goethe must have tapped with his tragedy, his characters, some vein long choked in you. In each of the three movements, the Faust, the Marguerite and the Mephisto, you make your best music. There is realdrama in the first. There is a warm, fragrant hush in the second. Perhaps Gretchen plucks her daisy a little too thoroughly. But there isa rare sensitiveness and delicacy of feeling in her music. It is all inpastels. There is something very youthful and warm in it that perhaps noother composition of yours displays, as though in composing it you hadrecaptured pristine emotions long since spoiled. 

But it is the third movement, the _Allegro ironico_, that opened yoursluices and produced your genius. For in the conception of Mephisto youfound in Goethe, you found your own spiritual equation. You, too, werevictim of a disillusioned intellect that played havoc with all you foundpure and lovely and poured its sulphuric mockery over all youraspiration. For all your mariolatry, you were full of "der Geist derstets verneint. " And so you were able to create a musical Mephisto thatwill outlive your other work, sonata and all, and express you to othertimes. For here, all that one senses dimly behind your sugared andpretentious compositions speaks out frankly. Listening to this mightyscherzo, we know the cynicism that corroded your spirit. We hear itsurge and fill the sky. We hear it pour its mocking laughter over griefand longing and pride, over purity and tenderness in those outrageousorchestral arabesques that descend on the themes of the "Faust" and"Marguerite" movements, and whip them into grinning distortions. We hearit deny and stamp and curse, topple the whole world over in ribaldscorn. The concluding chorus may seek to call in another emotion. Youmay turn with all apparent fervor and pray "das Ewig-Weibliche" to saveyou. The other expression remains the telling one. It is one of thesupreme pieces of musical irony. It ranks with "Till Eulenspiegel" and"Petrouchka. "

It is also the saddest of your works. For it makes us know, once forall, how infinitely much greater a musician you might have been, Omiserable and magnificent Abbé Liszt!

Berlioz

The course of time, that has made so many musicians recede from us anddwindle, has brought Berlioz the closer to us and shown him great. Theage in which he lived, the decades that followed his death, found himunsubstantial enough. They recognized in him only the projector ofgigantic edifices, not the builder. His music seemed scaffolding only. Though a generation of musicians learned from him, came to listen to theproper voices of the instruments of the orchestra because of him, thoughmusic became increasingly pictural, ironic, concrete because he hadlabored, his own work still appeared ugly with unrealized intentions. Ifhe obtained at all as an artist, it was because of his freneticromanticism, his bizarreness, his Byronic postures, traits that wereafter all minor and secondary enough in him. For those were the only ofhis characteristics that his hour could understand. All others itignored. And so Berlioz remained for half a century simply the composerof the extravagant "Symphonic Fantastique" and the brilliant "Harold inItaly, " and, for the rest, a composer of brittle and arid works, barrenof authentic ideas, "a better litterateur than musician. " However, withthe departure of the world from out the romantic house, Berlioz hasrapidly recovered. Music of his that before seemed ugly has graduallycome to have force and significance. Music of his that seemed thin andgray has suddenly become satisfactory and red. Composers as eminent asRichard Strauss, conductors as conservative as Weingärtner, critics assensitive as Romain Rolland have come to perceive his vast strength andimportance, to express themselves concerning him in no doubtfullanguage. It is as though the world had had to move to behold Berlioz, and that only in a day germane to him and among the men his kin could heassume the stature rightfully his, and live. 

For we exist to-day in a time of barbarian inroads. We are beholding theold European continent of music swarmed over by Asiatic hordes, Scythsand Mongols and Medes and Persians, all the savage musical tribes. Oncemore the old arbitrary barrier between the continents is disappearing, and the classic traits of the West are being mingled with those of thesubtle, sensuous, spiritual East. It is as if the art of music, with itsnew scales, its new harmonies, its new coloring, its new rhythmicallife, were being revolutionized, as if it were returning to itsbeginnings. It is as if some of the original impulse to make music werereawakening. And so, through this confusion, Berlioz has suddenly flamedwith significance. For he himself was the rankest of barbarians. A worklike the "Requiem" has no antecedents. It conforms to no acceptedcanon, seems to obey no logic other than that of the rude and powerfulmind that cast it forth. For the man who could write music so crude, sosheerly strong, so hurtling, music innocent of past or tradition, theworld must indeed have been in the first day of its creation. For such aone forms must indeed have had their pristine and undulled edge andundiminished bulk, must have insisted themselves sharply andcompellingly. The music has all the uncouthness of a direct andunquestioning response to such a vision. Little wonder that it wasunacceptable to a silver and romantic epoch. The romanticists hadaspired to paint vast canvases, too. But the vastness of their canvaseshad remained a thing of intention, a thing of large and pretentiousdecoration. Berlioz's music was both too rude and too stupendous fortheir tastes. And, in truth, to us as well, who have felt the greatcubical masses of the moderns and have heard the barbarian tread, thesense of beauty that demanded the giant blocks of the "Requiem" musicseems still a little a strange and monstrous thing. It seems indeed anatavism, a return to modes of feeling that created the monuments ofother ages, of barbarous and forgotten times. Well did Berlioz term hiswork "Babylonian and Ninevitish"! Certainly it is like nothing so muchas the cruel and ponderous bulks, the sheer, vast tombs and ramparts andterraces of Khorsabad and Nimroud, bare and oppressive under the sun ofAssyria. Berlioz must have harbored some elemental demand for forminherent in the human mind but buried and forgotten until it woke tolife in him again. For there is a truly primitive and savage power inthe imagination that could heap such piles of music, revel in theshattering fury of trumpets, upbuild choragic pyramids. Here, beforeStrawinsky and Ornstein, before Moussorgsky, even, was a music barbarousand radical and revolutionary, a music beside which so much of modernmusic dwindles. 

It has, primarily, some of the nakedness, some of the sheerness ofcontour, toward which the modern men aspire. In the most recent yearsthere has evidenced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous andfluent contours of the musical impressionists, from the style of"Pelléas et Mélisande" in particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg andMagnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, theone through a sort of mathematical harshness, the second through aGothic severity, the third through a machine-like regularity, to givetheir work a new boldness, a new power and incisiveness of design. Something of the same sharpness and sheerness was attained by Berlioz, if not precisely by their means, at least to a degree no less remarkablethan theirs. He attained it through the nakedness of his melodic line. The music of the "Requiem" is almost entirely a singularly powerful andcharacteristic line. It is practically unsupported. Many personspretend that Berlioz wanted a knowledge of harmony and counterpoint. Certainly his feeling for harmony was a very rudimentary one, in nowiserefined beyond that of his predecessors, very simple when compared tothat of his contemporaries, Chopin and Schumann. And his attempts atcreating counterpoint, judged from the first movement of "Harold inItaly, " are clumsy enough. But it is questionable whether this ignorancedid not stand him in good stead rather than in bad; and whether, in theend, he did not make himself fairly independent of both these musicalelements. For the "Requiem" attains a new sort of musical grandeur fromits sharp, heavy, rectangular, rhythmically powerful melodic line. Itvoices through it a bold, naked, immense language. With Baudelaire, Berlioz could have said, "L'énergie c'est le grâce suprême. " For thebeauty of this his masterpiece lies in just the delineating power, thecharacteristic of this crude, vigorous, unadorned melody. Doubtless tothose still baffled by its nudity, his music appears thin. But if it isat all thin, its thinness is that of the steel cable. 

And it has the rhythmical vivacity and plenitude that characterizes thenewest musical art. If there is one quality that unites in a place apartthe Strawinskys and Ornsteins, the Blochs and Scriabines, it is thefearlessness and exuberance and savagery with which they pound outtheir rhythms. Something long buried in us seems to arise at thevibration of these fierce, bold, clattering, almost convulsive strokes, to seek to gesticulate and dance and leap. And Berlioz possessed thiselemental feeling for rhythm. Schumann was convinced on hearing the"Symphonie Fantastique" that in Berlioz music was returning to itsbeginnings, to the state where rhythm was unconstrained and irregular, and that in a short while it would overthrow the laws which had bound itso long. So, too, it seems to us, despite all the rhythmical innovationsof our time. The personality that could beat out exuberantly music asrhythmically various and terse and free must indeed have possessed aprimitive naïveté and vitality and spontaneity of impulse. Whatmanifestation of unbridled will in that freedom of expression! Berliozmust have been blood-brother to the savage, the elemental creature whoout of the dark and hidden needs of life itself invents on his rudemusical instrument a mighty rhythm. Or, he must have been like apowerful and excited steed, chafing his bit, mad to give his energyrein. His blood must forever have been craving the liberation of turgidand angular and irregular beats, must forever have been crowding hisimagination with new and compelling combinations, impelling him to themovements of leaping and marching. For he seems to have found inprofusion the accents that quicken and lift and lance, found them inall varieties, from the brisk and delicate steps of the ballets in "LaDamnation de Faust" to the large, far-flung momentum that drives thechoruses of the "Requiem" mountain high; from the mad and riotousfinales of the "Harold" symphony and the "Symphonie Fantastique" to thered, turbulent and _canaille_ march rhythms, true music of insurgentmasses, clangorous with echoes of tocsins and barricades andrevolutions. 

But it is in his treatment of his instrument that Berlioz seems mostclosely akin to the newest musicians. For he was the first to permit theorchestra to dictate music to him. There had, no doubt, existed skilfuland sensitive orchestrators before him, men who were deeply aware of thenature of their tools, men who, like Mozart, could scarcely represstheir tears at the sound of a favorite instrument, and wrote marvelouslyfor flutes and horns and oboes and all the components of their bands. But matched with his, their knowledge of the instrument was patentlyrelative. For, with them, music had on the whole a general timbre. Phrases which they assigned, say, to violins or flutes can be assignedto other instruments without doing the composition utter damage. But inthe works of Berlioz music and instruments are inseparable. One cannotat all rearrange his orchestration. Though the phrases that he haswritten for bassoon or clarinet might imaginably be executed by otherinstruments, the music would perish utterly in the substitution. Whatinstrument but the viola could appreciate the famous "Harold" theme? Forjust as in a painting of Cézanne's the form is inseparable from thecolor, is, indeed, one with it, so, too, in the works of Berlioz and themoderns the form is part of the sensuous quality of the band. WhenRimsky-Korsakoff uttered the pronouncement that a composition fororchestra could not exist before the orchestration was completed, he wasonly phrasing a rule upon which Berlioz had acted all his life. ForBerlioz set out to learn the language of the orchestra. Not only did hecall for new instruments, instruments that have eventually becomeintegral portions of the modern bands, but he devoted himself to a studyof the actual natures and ranges and qualities of the old, and wrote thecelebrated treatise that has become the textbook of the science ofinstrumentation. The thinness of much of his work, the feebleness of theoverture to "Benvenuto Cellini, " for instance, results from hisinexperience in the new tongue. But he had not to practise long. It wasnot long before he became the teacher of his very contemporaries. Wagnerowes as much to Berlioz's instrumentation as he owes to Chopin'sharmony. 

But for the new men, he is more than teacher. For them he is like thediscoverer of a new continent. Through him they have come to find a newfashion of apprehending the world. Out of the paint-box that he opened, they have drawn the colors that make us see anew in their music the faceof the earth. The tone-poems of Debussy and the ballets of Ravel andStrawinsky, the scintillating orchestral compositions of Strauss andRimsky and Bloch, could scarcely have come to be had not Berlioz calledthe attention of the world to the instruments in which the colors andtimbres in which it is steeped, lie dormant. 

And so the large and powerful and contained being that, after all, wasBerlioz has come to appreciation. For behind the fiery, the volcanicBerlioz, behind the Byronic and fantastical composer, there was alwaysanother, greater man. The history of the art of Berlioz is the historyof the gradual incarnation of that calm and majestic being, the gradualtriumph of that grander personality over the other, up to the finalunclosing and real presence in "Roméo" and the "Mass for the Dead. " Thewild romanticist, the lover of the strange and the lurid and thegrotesque who created the "Symphonic Fantastique, " never, perhaps, became entirely abeyant. And some of the salt and flavor of Berlioz'sgreater, more characteristic works, the tiny musical particles, forinstance, that compose the "Queen Mab" scherzo in "Roméo, " or thebizarre combination of flutes and trombones in the "Requiem, " macabre asthe Orcagna frescoes in Pisa, are due his fantastical imaginings. But, gradually, the deeper Berlioz came to predominate. That deeper spiritwas a being that rose out of a vast and lovely cavern of the human soul, and was clothed in stately and in shining robes. It was a spirit thatcould not readily build itself out into the world, so large and simpleit was, and had to wait long before it could find a worthy portal. Itmanaged only to express itself partially, fragmentarily, in varioustransformations, till, by change, it found in the idea of the Mass forthe Dead its fitting opportunity. Still, it was never entirely absentfrom the art of Berlioz, and in the great clear sense of it gained inthe "Requiem" we can perceive its various and ever-presentsubstantiations, from the very beginning of his career. 

It is in the overture to "King Lear" already, in that noble and graciousintroduction. From the very beginning, Berlioz revealed himself a proudand aristocratic spirit. Even in his most helpless moments, he is alwaysnoble. He shows himself possessed of a hatred for all that is unjust andungirt and vulgar. There is always a largeness and gravity and chastityin his gesture. The coldness is most often simply the apparent coldnessof restraint; the baldness, the laconism of a spirit that abhorredloose, ungainly manners of speech. Even the frenetic and orgiasticfinales of the "Harold" and "Fantastic" symphonies are tempered by anathletic steeliness and irony, are pervaded, after all, by the good drylight of the intellect. The greater portion of the "Harold" isobviously, in its coolness and neatness and lightness, the work of onewho was unwilling to dishevel himself in the cause of expression, whooutlined his sensations reticently rather than effusively, and stoodalways a little apart. The "Corsair" overture has not the wild, richballadry of that of the "Flying Dutchman, " perhaps. But it is full ofthe clear and quivering light of the Mediterranean. It is, in the wordsof Hans von Bülow, "as terse as the report of a pistol. " And it fliesswiftly before a wind its own. The mob-scenes in "Benvenuto Cellini" arebright and brisk and sparkling, and compare not unfavorably with certainpassages in "Petrouchka. " And, certainly, "Roméo" manifestsunforgettably the fineness and nobility of Berlioz's temper. "The musiche writes for his love scenes, " some one has remarked, "is the best testof a musician's character. " For, in truth, no type of musical expressiongives so ample an opportunity to all that is latently vulgar in him toproduce itself. And one has but to compare the "Garden Scene" of "Roméo"with two other pieces of music related to it in style, the second act of"Tristan" and the "Romeo" of Tchaikowsky, to perceive in how gracious alight Berlioz's music reveals him. Wagner's powerful music hangs overthe garden of his lovers like an oppressive and sultry night. Foliageand streams and the very moonlight pulsate with the fever of the blood. But there is no tenderness, no youth, no delicacy, no grace in Wagner'slove-passages. Tchaikowsky's, too, is predominantly lurid and sensual. And while Wagner's at least is full of animal richness, Tchaikowsky's ismorbid and hysterical and perverse, sets us amid the couches anddraperies and pink lampshades instead of out under the night-time sky. Berlioz's, however, is full of a still and fragrant poesy. His is themusic of Shakespeare's lovers indeed. It is like the opening of heartsdumb with the excess of joy. It has all the high romance, all theecstasy of the unspoiled spirit. For Berlioz seems to have possessedalways his candor and his youth. Through three hundred years men haveturned toward Shakespeare's play, with its Italian night and its balconyabove the fruit-tree tops, in wonder at its youthful loveliness, itsdelicate picture of first love. In Berlioz's music, at last, it found aworthy rival. For the musician, too, had within him some of thegraciousness and highness and sweetness of spirit the poet manifested sosovereignly. 

But it is chiefly in the "Requiem" that Berlioz revealed himself in allthe grandeur and might of his being. For in it all the aristocraticcoolness and terseness of "La Damnation de Faust" and of "Harold enItalie, " all the fresco-like calm of "Les Troyens à Carthage, " findtheir freest, richest expression. "Were I to be threatened with thedestruction of all that I have ever composed, " wrote Berlioz on the eveof his death, "it would be for that work that I would beg life. " And hewas correct in the estimation of its value. It is indeed one of thegreat edifices of tone. For the course of events which demanded ofBerlioz the work had supplied him with a function commensurate with hispowers, and permitted him to register himself immortally. He was calledby his country to write a mass for a commemoration service in the churchof the Invalides. That gold-domed building, consecrated to the memory ofthe host of the fallen, to the countless soldiers slain in the wars ofthe monarchy and the republic and the empire, and soon to become thetomb of Napoleon, had need of its officiant. And so the genius ofBerlioz arose and came. The "Requiem" is the speech of a great andclassic soul, molded by the calm light and fruitful soil of theMediterranean. For all its "Babylonian and Ninevitish" bulk, it is fullof the Latin calm, the Latin repose, the Latin resignation. The simpletone, quiet for all its energy, the golden sweetness of the "Sanctus, "the naked acceptance of all the facts of death, are the language of onewho had within him an attitude at once primitive and grand, an attitudethat we have almost come to ignore. Listening to the Mass, we findourselves feeling as though some _vates_ of a Mediterranean folk werecome in rapt and lofty mood to offer sacrifice, to pacify the living, tocelebrate with fitting rites the unnumbered multitudes of the heroicdead. There are some compositions that seem to find the common groundof all men throughout the ages. And to the company of such works of art, the grand Mass for the Dead of Hector Berlioz belongs. 

Still, the commission to write the "Requiem" was but a momentarywelcoming extended to Berlioz. The age in which he lived was unpreparedfor his art. It found itself better prepared for Wagner. For Wagner'swas nearer the older music, summed it up, in fact. So Berlioz had toremain uncomprehended and unhoused. And when there finally came a timefor the music of Wagner to retreat, and another to take its place, Berlioz was still half-buried under the misunderstanding of his time. And yet, with the Kassandra of Eulenberg, Berlioz could have said at themoment when it seemed as though eternal night were about to obscure himforever:

 "Einst treibt der Frühling uns in neuer Blüthe Empor ans Licht; Leben, wir scheiden nicht, Denn ewig bleibet, was in uns erglühte Und drängt sich ewig wieder auf zum Licht!"

For the likeness so many of the new men bear him has provided us with awonderful instance of the eternal recurrence of things. 

Franck

Belgian of Liège by birth, and Parisian only by adoption, César Francknevertheless precipitated modern French music. The group of musiciansthat, --at the moment when the great line of composers that has descendedin Germany since the days of Bach dwindled in Strauss and Mahler andReger, --revived the high tradition of French music, created a fresh andoriginal musical art, and at present, by virtue of the influence itexercises on the new talents of other nations, has come well-nigh todominate the international musical situation, could scarcely haveattained existence had it not been for him. He assured the artisticsuccess not only of the men like Magnard and d'Indy and Dukas, whose artshows obvious signs of his influence. Composers like Debussy and Ravel, who appear to have arrived at maturity independently of him, havenevertheless benefited immeasurably by his work. It is possible that hadhe not emigrated from Liège and labored in the heart of France, theywould not have achieved any of their fullness of expression. For whatBerlioz was perhaps too premature and too eccentric and radical to bringabout, --the dissipation of the torpor that had weighed upon the musicalsense of his countrymen for a century, the reawakening of thepeculiarly French impulse to make music, not alone in single andsolitary individuals, but in a large and representative group, therevival of a truly musical life in France, --this man, by virtue of thepeculiarities of his art, and particularly by virtue of his timeliness, succeeded in effecting. 

For César Franck overcame a false musical culture in the land of hisadoption by showing it, at the moment it was prepared to perceive it, the face of a true. The French are not an outstandingly musical race. Music plays a comparatively insignificant rôle in their civilization. The mass of the people does not demand it, has never demanded it asinsistently as do Germans and Russians, and as did the mass of Italiansduring the Renaissance, the mass of English before the Revolution. Something of a prejudice against its own musical impulse must exist inthe race. For though France has a very definite musical feeling, a thingthat varies little with the passing centuries and makes for thesurprising similarities between the work of Claude Le Jeune in thesixteenth century, Rameau in the eighteenth and Debussy in thetwentieth, she has, during her thousand years of culture, and whileproducing a flood of illustrious authors, and painters and sculptors, borne not more than four or five composers of indisputably first rank. Germany in the course of two centuries produced at least eight or nine;Russia three within the last fifty years. In France centuries elapsebetween the appearance of a Josquin des Prés in the fifteenth century, aRameau in the eighteenth, a Debussy in the early twentieth. And wheneverthe French have been given a musical art of their own, whenever acomposer comparable to the Goujons and Montaignes, the Renoirs and theBaudelaires has made his appearance among them, they generally have beenswift to turn from him and to prefer to him not only foreigners, whichwould not necessarily be bad, but oftentimes the least respectable ofmusicians. The triumph of Rameau was of the briefest. Scarcely had hismagnificent lyric tragedies established themselves when the _Guerre desbouffons_ broke out, and popular taste, under the direction of JeanJacques Rousseau and the other Encyclopedists, discovered the lightItalian music of the day more "natural" and infinitely preferable to thesevere and noble forms of the greatest of French composers. Theappearance of Gluck gave Rameau's work a veritable _coup de grâce_, andbanished the master from the operatic stage. And for a century and aquarter, French music, particularly the music of the theater, wascompletely unfaithful to the racial spirit. During the greater part ofthe nineteenth century, Rossini and Meyerbeer dominated the operaticworld. The native operatic composers, Auber and Boieldieu, Adam andHalévy, combined the slacknesses of both without achieving anything atall comparable to their flashy brilliance. As far as the accent of theirmusic went, they floated cheerfully somewhere between Germany and Italy. And when something recognizably indigenous did put in its appearance inthe operas of Thomas and Gounod, it did but the veriest lip-service tothe racial genius, and was a thing that walked lightly, dexterously, warily, and roused no sleeping dogs. 

What the cause of this diffidence is, what sort of rigidity it betokens, one can only guess. But of its presence there can be no doubt. Werethere nothing else to demonstrate it, the survival among the French ofan institution named M. Camille Saint-Saëns would amply do so. For thework of this extraordinary personality, or, more correctly, impersonality, who for twenty-five years of the Third Republic dominatedthe musical situation in his country, got himself acclaimed everywhere, not only in Paris, but also in Berlin, the modern French master, andto-day at the ripe age of one hundred and forty still persists inwriting string-quartets with the same frigid classicism thatdistinguished his first efforts, is obviously a compromise resultingfrom the conflict of two equally strong impulses--that of making musicand that of fending off musical expression. For years this man has beengoing through all the gestures of the most serious sort of compositionwithout adding one iota to musical art. For years he has been writingmusic apparently logical, clear, well-formed. His opus-numbers mountwell toward two hundred. He has written symphonies, concertos for pianoand violin, operas, cantatas, symphonic poems, suites, ballades, fantasies, caprices. He has written large numbers of each. He haswritten "impressions" of Naples, of Algiers, of the Canary Islands, ofevery portion of the globe he has visited. But despite all this apparentactivity, M. Saint-Saëns has really succeeded in effecting nothing atall. His compositions are pretty well outside the picture of musicalart. To-day they are already older than Mendelssohn's, of which pale artthey seem an even paler reflection. Mendelssohn, too, was a personinwardly at war with himself, and perhaps Saint-Saëns may be anotherexample of the same conflict. Still, the latter has achieved a sort ofwaxy coldness from which the amiable Félix was after all saved. Elegant, finished, smooth, classicizing, the music of M. Camille Saint-Saënsleaves us in the completest of objectivity. We are touched and moved notat all by it. Something, we vaguely perceive, is supposed to be takingplace beneath our eyes. Faint frosty lights pass across the orchestra. This, we guess, is supposed to be an inward and musing passage. This isa finale, this a dramatic climax. But we are no more than languidlypleased with the cleverness and urbanity of the orchestration, thepleasant shapeliness of certain melodies, the neatness of composition. In the end, the man bores us thoroughly. He has invented a new musicalennui. It is that of being invariably pretty and impersonal andinsignificant. 

Do you know the "Phaeton" of Saint-Saëns? Oh, never think that thislittle symphonic poem recounts the history of brilliant youth and itssun-chariot, the runaway steeds and the bleeding shattered frame! The"Phaeton" of whom Saint-Saëns sings is not the arrogant son ofPhoebus. Whatever the composer may protest, it is the low, open-wheeled carriage that he is describing. He shows it to us coursingthrough the Bois de Boulogne on a bright spring morning. The new varnishof the charming vehicle gleams smartly, the light, rubber-tired wheelsrevolve swiftly, the silver-shod harnesses glisten in the sunny air. But, alas, the ponies are frightened by something, doubtlessly the reddress of a singer of the Opéra Comique. There is a runaway, and beforethe steeds can be reined the phaeton is upset. No one is hurt, and in afew minutes the equipage is restored. Nevertheless, the composer cannotcontrol in himself a few sighs for the new coat of varnish now so rudelyscratched. 

Franck was of another temper. The impulse that drove him to make musicwas not so weak and pliable. It could not be barbered and dapperlydressed and taught to conduct a clouded cane elegantly in the _rue dela Paix_ or the _allée des Acacias_. It was too hot and wild and shy athing, too passionately set in its course, too homesick for the whitefulgurant heights of Heaven to negate itself at the behest of Frenchsociety and conform to what the academicians declared to be "la vielletradition française. " Franck was too much an artist in the spirit of LaFontaine and Germaine Pillon and Poussin and the others who formed thattradition, and who would be assailed in its name fiercely were they toreappear to-day. Moreover, he was of the race of musicians who come tomake music largely to free themselves of besetting demons, of thesinister brood of doubts and fears and woes, and win their way backagain into the bosom of God. He was the simple, heart-whole believer, the poor little man lost in the shambles, shaken and wounded by the"terrible doubt of appearances" and by the cruelty of things, yearningto cry his despair and loneliness and grief to the ears of the God ofhis childhood, and battling through long vigils for trust and belief andreconciliation. Again and again his music re-echoes the cry, "I will notlet Thee go unless Thou bless me. " Of modern composers Bruckner alonehad affair so steadily with the heights, and Franck is the gentler, sweeter, tenderer of the two. He set himself, quite in the fashion ofthe composers of the dying renaissance, to write an hundred hymns to theVirgin. He sought in his piano compositions to recapture the lofty, spiritual tone, the religious communion that informed the works of Bach. Only once, in the "Variations Symphoniques, " is he brilliant andvirtuosic, and then, with what disarming naïveté and joyousness!Oftentimes it is the gray and lonely air of the organ-loft at St. Clothilde, the church where he played so many melancholy years, thatbreathes through his work. Alone with his instrument and the cloudedskies, he pours out his sadness, his bitterness, strives forresignation. Or, his music is a bridge from the turmoiled present tosome rarer, larger, better plane. In symphony and quartet, in sonata andoratorio, he attains it. The hellish brood is scattered; the great bellsof faith swing bravely out once more; the world is full of Sabbathsunshine and pied with simple field-flowers. And he goes forth throughit released and blessed and joyous, and light and glad of heart. 

How furious a battle the man had to wage to bring such a musical senseto fruition in the Paris of Ambroise Thomas and Gounod and Massenet maybe gauged from the fact that the compositions that assure Franck hisposition were almost all produced during the last ten years of his life, after his fifty-eighth year had been passed. For thirty years the manhad to struggle with his medium and his environment before he was evenable to do his genius justice. Indeed, up to the year 1850, he producedlittle of importance at all. The trios recall Meyerbeer; the cantata"Ruth, " with which this his first period of composition closes, has asweetness of the sort afterward identified with the name of Massenet. The works of the second period, which ends around 1875 with there-editing of the recently composed oratorio "Redemption, " reveal himstill in search of power and a personal manner. No doubt a greatimprovement over the works of the first period is visible. From thistime there date the seraphic "Panis angelicus, " and the noble anddelicate "Prélude, fugue and variation" for harmonium and piano. But itwas only with the composition of his oratorio "Les Béatitudes, "completed in 1879, that Franck's great period commences. The man hadfinally been formed. And, in swift succession, there came from hisworktable the series of compositions, the "Prélude, chorale et fugue"for piano, the sonata, the symphonic poem "Psyche, " the symphony, thequartet and the three chorales for organ that fully disclose his genius. There is scarcely another example in all musical history of so longretarded a flowering. 

And it was a music almost the antithesis of Saint-Saëns' that finallydisclosed itself through Franck. In it everything is felt and necessaryand expressive. It is unadorned. None of the light musical frosting thatconceals the poverty and vulgarity of so many of the other's ideas is tobe found here. The designs themselves are noble and significant. Franckpossessed a rare gift of sensing exactly what was to his purpose. He hadthe artistic courage necessary to suppressing everything superfluous andinsignificant. His music says something with each note, and when it hasno more to say, is silent. He is concise and direct. The Symphony, forinstance, is an unbroken curve, an orderly progression by gentle andscarcely perceptible stages from the darkness of an aching, gnawingintroduction into the clarity of a healthy, exuberant close. And whereasSaint-Saëns' style is over-smooth and glacial, a sort of musicalcounterpart of the sculpture of a Canova or a Thorwaldsen, Franck's issubtle, mottled, rich, full of the play of light and shadow. Thechromatic style that Wagner has developed in "Tristan" and in "Parsifal"is built upon and further developed into a style almost characterized byits rich and subtle and incessant modulations. Old and mixed modes maketheir appearance in it. The thematic material is originally turned, oftentimes broad and churchly and magnificent; the movement of theFranckian themes being a distinct invention. The harmony is full andvaried and brilliant. But it is pre-eminently the seraphic sweetness ofFranck's style that distinguishes his music and sets it over againstthis other that is so hard of edge and thin of substance. Over it thereplays a light and luminous tenderness, an almost naïve and reticent andvirginal quality. The music of "Psyche" is executed with the lightestof musical brushes. It is as sweet and lucent and gracious as a frescoof Raphael's. The lightest, the silkiest of veils floats in the sectionmarked "Le Sommeil de Psyche"; the gentlest of zephyrs carries themaiden to her lord. Small wonder that devout commentators havediscovered in this music, so uncorporeal and diaphanous, a Christianintention, and pretend that in Franck's mind Psyche was the believingsoul and Eros the divine lover! Tenderness, seraphic sweetness were theman's characteristic, permeating everything he touched. Few composers, certainly, have invented music more divinely sweet than that of thethird movement of the quartet, more ecstatic and luminous than the ideasscattered all through his work, that seem like records of some momentwhen the heavens opened over his head and the empyrean resounded withthe hallelujahs of the angelic host. And, certainly, no composer, Mozartalone excepted, has discovered such naïvely and innocently joyous themesas those that fill the close of the sonata and the symphonic variationswith delicious vernal sunshine. 

The career of one fated to serve the art of music in the Paris ofFranck's lifetime, and to wait thirty years for the flowering of hisgenius, was of necessity obscure and sad. The

 "yeux menteurs, l'hypocrisie Des serrements de mains, La masque d'amitié cachant la jalousie, Les pâles lendemains

 De ces jours de triomphe"... 

of which M. Saint-Saëns in his little volume of verse complains somewhatpompously, were unknown to César Franck. For this man, even in the yearsof his prime, there were only the humiliations, the disappointments thatare the lot of uncomprehended genius. He had rich pupils, among them theVicomte Vincent d'Indy, but not one of them seems to have come forwardto help him, to secure him greater time for composition, to save himfrom wasting his precious days in instructing a few amateurs. All hislife, until the very last of his seventy years, César Franck was obligedto arise every morning at five o'clock in order to have a couple ofhours in which to be free to compose before the waxing day obliged himto begin trotting from one end of Paris to the other giving lessons. During his lifetime he had to content himself with half-preparedperformances of his works, had to resign himself to having composers ofoperettas preferred to him when chairs at the _Conservatoire_ becamevacant, to receiving practically no recognition from a governmentpretending with hue and cry to protect and encourage the arts. Had itnot been for the fervor and faithfulness with which Ysaye labored tospread his renown, practically cramming down the throats of an unwillingpublic the violin sonata and the quartet, the man would not have knownany success at all even during the very last years of his career. As itwas, his reputation spread only after he was dead. Then, of course, theinevitable monument was erected to him. 

Still, the future was with César Franck as it has been with few artists. The timeliness of his art was almost miraculous. Without a doubt, duringthe years of his labor, the French were most ready for a musicalrenaissance. The defeat of 1870 had, after all, braced the nation, summoned its dormant energies. It had not been severe enough to destroy, and only fierce enough to force folk to shake off the torpor that hadlain upon them during the two previous régimes. People began to workagain, bellies were somewhat emptier and heads somewhat fuller than theyhad been under Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon. Above all, the vapidand superficial life of the Second Empire was ended. People were moresober and inward and realistic than they had been. There was an unusualactivity in all the arts. Painting, fiction, poetry, sculpture had orwere having new births. A single creative spark was sure to set the veryrecalcitrant musicians ablaze. Vast talents such as those of Bizet andChabrier were making themselves felt. But given a single powerful andconstructive influence, a single classic expression of the Frenchmusical feeling, and a score of gifted musicians were ready to springinto life. And that example was set by Franck. For, Belgian in partthough his music indubitably is, Belgian of Antwerp and Brussels as wellas of Liège and the Walloon country, Flemish almost in its broad andgorgeous passages, it is what the work of the superficially ParisianSaint-Saëns never attains to being. It is representative of the greatclassical tradition of France, deeply expressive of the French spirit. It must have been some profound kinship with the neighboring people, deeper even than that he bore his own countrymen, that sent the youthFranck from Liège to Paris, held him fast in the city all his long andobscure life, and made him flourish in the alien soil. For his music hastraits that are common to the representative French artists and havecome to identify the French genius. Once again, one caught sight in themusic of the French clarity and orderliness, logicality and conciseness. Once again there were great, sonorous edifices in the grand styletemperate in tone. The very diffidence that makes it so difficult forthe race to express itself with ease in music was expressed in thiswork. Moreover, along with the silveriness of Rameau, the simplesolidity of French prose, and some of the old jollity of the medievalFrench artists, is in the music of Franck. Old modes revive in it, oldpeasant rhythms beat the ground once more. 

But, chiefest of all, it expressed the people described in the sectionof "Jean-Christophe" significantly entitled "Dans la Maison. " Itexpressed the essential France hidden by the glare of the ThirdRepublic. The music of César Franck is the music of the people driveninto themselves by the conditions of modern life. It is the music of thefine ones who stand hesitant on the threshold of the world, and haveincessantly to struggle for the power to act, for faith and hope. It isthe music of those who in the midst of millions feel themselves forsakenand alone and powerless, and in whose obscure and laborious existenceFranck himself shared. It is a thing turned away from the market-place, full of the quiet of the inner chamber. Through so much of Franck onefeels the steady glow of the lamp in the warm room. With its songs ofloneliness and doubt and ruth, its self-communings and vigils andprayers, its struggle for the sunlight of perfect confidence andhealthiness and zest, it might come directly out of the lives of ahalf-dozen of the eminent persons whom France produced during theclosing years of the nineteenth century. Romain Rolland himself is ofthis sort. It was for these people, self-distrustful, disillusioned, doubtful, that Charles Péguy wrote, bidding them remember the divineorigin of the life and the institutions that seemed so false to them, bidding them remember that the Republic itself was the result of amystical impulse in the human heart, that the dead of a race live on inthe bodies of the breathing, and that the members of a folk are one. Themysticism and Catholicism of Paul Claudel, the revulsion from thescepticism of Renan and Anatole France that has become so general inrecent French thought, the traditionalism, nay, the intellectualreaction, of the latest France, are all foreshadowed and outlined in themusic of César Franck. He must have pulsed with the very heart of hisadopted country. 

Confronted with such a piece of expression, with such a modern standard, the new generation could not but respond with all its forces, and throngout of the aperture made in the Chinese Wall. And after Franck therefollowed a generation of French musicians such as the world has not seensince the days of the clavecinists. Within ten years, from one of themost moribund, Paris had become the most important and vivid of musicalcenters. Something that had been wanting in the air of Paris a longwhile had swept largely into it again. The musical imagination had beenfreed. After Franck it was impossible for a French musician not to havethe courage to express himself in his own idiom, to dare develop theforms peculiarly French, to break with the foreign German and Italianstandards that had oppressed the national genius so long. For this manhad done so. And with the Debussys and Magnards and Ravels, the d'Indysand Dukas and Schmitts, the Chaussons and Ropartz's and the Milhaudsthat followed immediately on César Franck, an institution like theSociété Nationale de Musique came to have a meaning. Once again, Frenchmusic was. 

Debussy

Debussy's music is our own. All artistic forms lie dormant in the soul, and there is no work of art actually foreign to us, nor can such a oneappear, in all the future ages of the world. But the music of Debussy isproper to us, in our day, as is no other, and might stand before alltime our symbol. For it lived in us before it was born, and after birthreturned upon us like a release. Even at a first encounter the style of"Pelléas" was mysteriously familiar. It made us feel that we had alwaysneeded such rhythms, such luminous chords, such limpid phrases, that weperhaps had even heard them, sounding faintly, in our imaginations. Themusic seemed as old as our sense of selfhood. It seemed but theexquisite recognition of certain intense and troubling and appeasingmoments that we had already encountered. It seemed fashioned out ofcertain ineluctable, mysterious experiences that had budded, ineffablysad and sweet, from out our lives, and had made us new, and set usapart, and that now, at the music's breath, at a half-whispered note, atthe unclosing of a rhythm, the flowering of a cluster of tones out ofthe warm still darkness, were arisen again in the fullness of theirstature and become ours entirely. 

For Debussy is of all musicians the one amongst us most fully. He ishere, in our midst, in the world of the city. There is about him none ofthe unworldliness, the aloofness, the superhumanity that distances somany of the other composers from us. We need not imagine him in exoticsinging robes, nor in classical garments, nor in any strange andoutmoded and picturesque attire, to recognize in him the poet. He is themodern poet just because the modern civilian garb is so naturally his. He is the normal man, living our own manner of life. We seem to know himas we know ourselves. His experiences are but our own, intensified byhis poet's gift. Or, if they are not already ours, they will become so. He seems almost ourselves as he passes through the city twilight, intentupon some errand upon which we, too, have gone, journeying a road whichwe ourselves have traveled. We know the room in which he lives, thewindows from which he gazes, the moments which come upon him there inthe silence of the lamp. For he has captured in his music what isdistinguished in the age's delight and tragedy. All the fine sensuality, all the Eastern pleasure in the infinite daintiness and warmth ofnature, all the sudden, joyous discovery of color and touch that mademen feel as though neither had been known before, are contained in it. It, too, is full of images of the "earth of the liquid and slumberingtrees, " the "earth of departed sunset, " the "earth of the vitreous pourof the full moon just tinged with blue. " It is full of materialloveliness, plies itself to innumerable dainty shells--to the somnolenceof the Southern night, to the hieratic gesture of temple dancers, to thefall of lamplight into the dark, to the fantastic gush of fireworks, tothe romance of old mirrors and faded brocades and Saxony clocks, to thegreen young panoply of spring. And just as it gives again the age'sconsciousness of the delicious robe of earth, so, too, it gives againits sense of weariness and powerlessness and oppression. The nineteenthcentury had been loud with blare and rumors and the vibration ofcolossal movements, and man had apparently traversed vast distances andexplored titanic heights and abysmal depths. And yet, for all the glare, the earth was darker. The light was miasmic only. The life of man seemedas ever a brief and sad and simple thing, the stretching of impotenthands, unable to grasp and hold; the interlacing of shadows; theunclosing, a moment before nightfall, of exquisite and fragile blossoms. The sense of the infirmity of life, the consciousness that it had nomore than the signification of a dream with passing lights, or haltingsteps in the snow, or an old half-forgotten story, had mixed a deepwistfulness and melancholy into the very glamour of the globe, andbecome heavier itself for all the sweetness of earth. And Debussy hasfixed the two in their confusion. 

He has permeated music completely with his impressionistic sensibility. His style is an image of this our pointillistically feeling era. Withhim impressionism achieves a perfect musical form. Structurally, themusic of Debussy is a fabric of exquisite and poignant moments, eachfull and complete in itself. His wholes exist entirely in their parts, in their atoms. If his phrases, rhythms, lyric impulses, do contributeto the formation of a single thing, they yet are extraordinarilyindependent and significant in themselves. No chord, no theme, issubordinate. Each one exists for the sake of its own beauty, occupiesthe universe for an instant, then merges and disappears. The harmoniesare not, as in other compositions, preparations. They are apparently anend in themselves, flow in space, and then change hue, as a shimmeringstuff changes. For all its golden earthiness, the style of Debussy isthe most liquid and impalpable of musical styles. It is forever gliding, gleaming, melting; crystallizing for an instant in some savory phrase, then moving quiveringly onward. It is well-nigh edgeless. It seems toflow through our perceptions as water flows through fingers. Theiridescent bubbles that float upon it burst if we but touch them. It isforever suggesting water--fountains and pools, the glistening spray andheaving bosom of the sea. Or, it shadows forth the formless breath ofthe breeze, of the storm, of perfumes, or the play of sun and moon. Hisorchestration invariably produces all that is cloudy and diaphanous ineach instrument. He makes music with flakes of light, with bright motesof pigment. His palette glows with the sweet, limpid tints of a Monet ora Pissaro or a Renoir. His orchestra sparkles with iridescent fires, with divided tones, with delicate violets and argents and shades ofrose. The sound of the piano, usually but the ringing of flat coloredstones, at his touch becomes fluid, velvety and dense, takes on theproperties of satins and liqueurs. The pedal washes new tint after newtint over the keyboard. "Reflets dans l'eau" has the quality of sheenyblue satin, of cloud pictures tumbling in gliding water. Blue fades togreen and fades back again to blue in the middle section of "Homage àRameau. " Bright, cold moonlight slips through "Et la lune descend sur letemple que fut"; ruddy sparks glitter in "Mouvement" with itsPetruchka-like joy; the piano is liquid and luminous and aromatic in"Cloches à travers les feuilles. "

Yet there is no uncertainty, no mistiness in his form, as there is inthat of some of the other impressionists. His music is classically firm, classically precise and knit. His lyrical, shimmering structures areperfectly fashioned. The line never hesitates, never becomes lost norinvolved. It proceeds directly, clearly, passing through jewels andclots of color, and fusing them into the mass. The trajectory neverbreaks. The music is always full of its proper weight and timbre. Itcan be said quite without exaggeration that his best work omits nothing, neglects nothing, that every component element is justly treated. Hislittle pieces occupy a space as completely as the most massive and grandof compositions. A composition like "Nuages, " the first of the threenocturnes for orchestra, while taking but five minutes in performance, outweighs any number of compositions that last an hour. "L'Après-midid'un faune" is inspired and new, marvelously, at every measure. Thethree little pieces that comprise the first set of "Images" for pianowill probably outlast half of what Liszt has written for the instrument. "Pelléas" will some day be studied for its miraculous invention, itsclassical moderation and balance and truth, for its pure diction andeconomical orchestration, quite as the scores of Gluck are studiedto-day. 

For Debussy is, of all the artists who have made music in our time, themost perfect. Other musicians, perhaps even some of the contemporary, may exhibit a greater heroism, a greater staying power andindefatigability. Nevertheless, in his sphere he is every inch asperfect a workman as the greatest. Within his limits he was as pure acraftsman as the great John Sebastian in his. The difference between thetwo is the difference of their ages and races, not the difference oftheir artistry. For few composers can match with their own Debussy'sperfection of taste, his fineness of sensibility, his poetic raptureand profound awareness of beauty. Few have been more graciously roundedand balanced than he, have been, like him, so fine that nothing whichthey could do could be tasteless and insignificant and without grace. Few musicians have been more nicely sensible of their gift, betteracquainted with themselves, surer of the character and limitations oftheir genius. Few have been as perseverantly essential, have managed tosustain their emotion and invention so steadily at a height. The musicof Debussy is full of purest, most delicate poesy. Perhaps only Bach andMoussorgsky have as invariably found phrases as pithy and inclusive andfinal as those with which "Pelléas" is strewn, phrases that with a fewsimple notes epitomize profound and exquisite emotions, and are indeedthe word. There are moments in Debussy's work when each note opens aprospect. There are moments when the music of "Pelléas, " the fine fluidline of sound, the melodic moments that merge and pass and vanish intoone another, become the gleaming rims that circumscribe vast darklingforms. There are portions of the drama that are like the moments ofhuman intercourse when single syllables unseal deep reservoirs. Thetenderness manifest here is scarcely to be duplicated in musical art. And tenderness, after all, is the most intense of all emotions. 

A thousand years of culture live in this fineness. In these perfectgestures, in this grace, this certainty of choice, this justice ofvalues, this simple, profound, delicate language, there live on thirtygenerations of gentlefolk. Thirty generations of cavaliers and dames whodeveloped the arts of life in the mild and fruitful valleys of "thepleasant land of France" speak here. The gentle sunlight and gentleshadow, the mild winters and mild summers of the Ile de France, theplentiful fruits of the earth, the excitement of the vine, contributedto making this being beautifully balanced, reserved, refined. Theinstruction and cultivation of the classic and French poets andthinkers, Virgil and Racine and Marivaux, Catullus and Montaigne andChateaubriand, the chambers of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the gardens andgalleries of Versailles, the immense drawing-room of eighteenth-centuryParis, helped form this spirit. In all this man's music one catchessight of the long foreground, the long cycles of preparation. In everyone of his works, from the most imposing to the least, from the "StringQuartet" and "Pelléas" to the gracile, lissome little waltz, "Le plusque lent, " there is manifest the Latin genius nurtured and molded anddeveloped by the fertile, tranquil soil of France. 

And in his art, the gods of classical antiquity live again. Debussy ismuch more than merely the sensuous Frenchman. He is the man in whom theold Pagan voluptuousness, the old untroubled delight in the body, warred against so long by the black brood of monks and transformed bythem during centuries into demoniacal and hellish forms, is free andpure and sweet once more. They once were nymphs and naiads andgoddesses, the "Quartet" and "L'Après-midi d'un faune" and "Sirènes. "They once wandered through the glades of Ionia and Sicily, and gladdenedmen with their golden sensuality, and bewitched them with the thought of"the breast of the nymph in the brake. " For they are full of the wonderand sweetness of the flesh, of flesh tasted deliciously and enjoyed notin closed rooms, behind secret doors and under the shameful pall of thenight, but out in the warm, sunny open, amid grasses and scents and thebuzzing of insects, the waving of branches, the wandering of clouds. TheQuartet is alive, quivering with light, and with joyous animality. Itmoves like a young fawn; spins the gayest, most silken, most golden ofspider webs; fills one with the delights of taste and smell and sightand touch. In the most glimmering, floating of poems, "L'Après-midi d'unfaune, " there is caught magically by the climbing, chromatic flute, thedrowsy pizzicati of the strings, and the languorous sighing of thehorns, the atmosphere of the daydream, the sleepy warmth of the sunshotherbage, the divine apparition, the white wonder of arms and breasts andthighs. The Lento movement of "Ibéria" is like some drowsy, disheveledgipsy. Even "La plus que lent" is full of the goodness of the flesh, islike some slender young girl with unclosing bosom. And in "Sirènes, "something like the eternal divinity, the eternal beauty of woman's body, is celebrated. It is as though on the rising, falling, rising, sinkingtides of the poem, on the waves of the glamorous feminine voices, on theaphrodisiac swell of the sea, the white Anadyomene herself, with hergalaxy of tritons and naiads, approached earth's shores once more. 

If any musical task is to be considered as having been accomplished, itis that of Debussy. For he wrote the one book that every great artistwrites. He established a style irrefragably, made musical impressionismas legitimate a thing as any of the great styles. That he had more tomake than that one contribution is doubtful. His art underwent noradical changes. His style was mature already in the Quartet and in"Proses lyriques, " and had its climax in "Pelléas, " its orchestraldeployment in "Nocturnes" and "La Mer" and "Ibéria, " its pianisticexpression in the two volumes of "Images" for pianoforte. Whatever therefinement of the incidental music to "Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien, "Debussy never really transgressed the limits set for him by his firstgreat works. And so, even if his long illness caused the deterioration, the hardening, the formularization, so evident in his most recent work, the sonatas, the "Epigrammes, " "En blanc et noir, " and the "Berceusehéroïque, " and deprived us of much delightful art, neither it nor hisdeath actually robbed us of some radical development which we mightreasonably have expected. The chief that he had to give he had given. What his age had demanded of him, an art that it might hold far from theglare and tumult, an art into which it could retreat, an art which couldcompensate it for a life become too cruel and demanding, he hadproduced. He had essentially fulfilled himself. 

The fact that "Pelléas" is the most eloquent of all Debussy's works andhis eternal sign does not, then, signify that he did not grow during theremainder of his life. A complex of determinants made of his music-dramathe fullest expression of his genius, decreed that he should be livingmost completely at the moment he composed it. The very fact that in itDebussy was composing music for the theater made it certain that hisartistic sense would produce itself at its mightiest in the work. For itentailed the statement of his opposition to Wagner. The fact that it wasmusic conjoined with speech made it certain that Debussy, so full of theFrench classical genius, would through contact with the spoken word, through study of its essential quality, be aided and compelled to acomplete realization of a fundamentally French idiom. And thenMaeterlinck's little play offered itself to his genius as a uniqueauxiliary. It, too, is full of the sense of the shadowiness of thingsthat weighed upon Debussy, has not a little of the accent of the time. This "vieille et triste légende de la forêt" is alive with images, suchas the old and somber castle inhabited by aging people and lying lostamid sunless forests, the rose that blooms in the shadow underneathMélisande's casement, Mélisande's hair that falls farther than her armscan reach, the black tarn that broods beneath the castle-vaults andbreathes death, Golaud's anguished search for truth in the prattle ofthe child, that could not but call a profound response from Debussy'simagination. But, above all, it was the figure of Mélisande herself thatmade him pour himself completely into the setting of the play. For thatfigure permitted Debussy to give himself completely in the creation ofhis ideal image. The music is all Mélisande, all Debussy's love-woman. It is she that the music reveals from the moment Mélisande rises fromamong the rocks shrouded in the mystery of her golden hair. It is shethe music limns from the very beginning of the work. The entire score isbut what a man might feel toward a woman that was his, and yet, like allwomen, strange and mysterious and unknown to him. The music is like thestripping of some perfect flower, petal upon petal. There are momentswhen it is all that lies between two people, and is the fullness oftheir knowledge. It is the perfect sign of an experience. 

And so, since Debussy's art could have no second climax, it was in theorder of things that the works succeeding upon his masterpiece shouldbe relatively less important. Nevertheless, the ensuing poems and songsand piano-pieces, with the exception of those written during those yearswhen Debussy could have said with Rameau, his master, "From day to daymy taste improves. But I have lost all my genius, " are by little lessperfect and astounding pieces of work. His music is like the peaks of amountain range, of which one of the first and nearest is the highest, while the others appear scarcely less high. And they are some of thebluest, the loveliest, the most shining that stretch through the regionof modern music. It will be long before humankind has exhausted theirbeauty. 

Ravel

Ravel and Debussy are of one lineage. They both issue from what isdeeply, graciously temperate in the genius of France. Across the span ofcenturies, they touch hands with the men who first expressed that silvertemperance in tone, with Claude Le Jeune, with Rameau and Couperin andthe other clavecinists. Undiverted by the changes of revolutionarytimes, they continue, in forms conditioned by the modern feeling forcolor, for tonal complexity, for supple and undulant rhythm, the hightradition of the elder music. 

Claude Le Jeune wrote motets; the eighteenth-century masters wrotegavottes and rigadoons, forlanas and chaconnes, expressed themselves incourtly dances and other set and severe forms. Ravel and Debussy composein more liberal and naturalistic fashion. And yet, the genius thatanimates all this music is single. It is as though all these artists, born so many hundred years apart from each other, had contemplated thepageant of their respective times from the same point of view. It is asthough they faced the problems of composition with essentially the sameattitudes, with the same demands and reservations. The new music, likethe old, is the work of men above all reverent of the art of lifeitself. It is the work of men of the sort who crave primarily in allconduct restraint, and who insist on poise and good sense. They regardall things humanly, and bring their regard for the social values to themaking of their art. Indeed, the reaction of Debussy from Wagnerism waschiefly the reaction of a profoundly socialized and aristocraticsensibility outraged by over-emphasis and unrestraint. The men of whomhe is typical throughout the ages never forget the world and itsdecencies and its demands. And yet they do not eschew the large, thegrave, the poignant. The range of human passions is present in theirmusic, too, even though many of them have not had gigantic powers, orentertained emotions as grand and intense as the world-consuming, world-annihilating mysticism of a Bach, for instance. But it is shadowedforth more than stated. If many of them have been deeply melancholy, they have nevertheless taken counsel with themselves, and have said, with Baudelaire:

 "Sois sage, ô ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille. "

All expression is made in low, aristocratic tone, in grisaille. Mostoften it achieves itself through a silvery grace. It is normal for thesemen to be profound through grace, to be amusing and yet artisticallyupright. It is normal for them to articulate nicely. High in theirconsciousness there flame always the commandments of clarity, ofdelicacy, of precision. Indeed, so repeatedly have temperaments of thischaracter appeared in France, not only in her music, but also in herletters and other arts, from the time of the Pléiade, to that of CharlesLouis Philippe and André Gide and Henri de Regnier, that it is difficultnot to hold theirs the centrally, essentially French tradition, and notto see in men like Rabelais only the Frank, and in men like Berlioz onlythe atavism to Gallo-Roman times. 

But it is not only the spirit of French classicism that Ravel andDebussy inherit. In one respect their art is the continuation of themusic that came to a climax in the works of Haydn and Mozart. It issubtle and intimate, and restores to the auditor the great creative rôleassigned to him by so much of the music before Beethoven. The music ofHaydn and Mozart defers to its hearer. It seeks deliberately to enlisthis activity. It relies for its significance largely upon hiscontribution. The music itself carries only a portion of the composer'sintention. It carries only enough to ignite and set functioning theauditor's imagination. To that person is reserved the pleasure offathoming the intention, of completing the idea adumbrated by thecomposer. For Haydn and Mozart did not desire that the listener assume acompletely passive attitude. They had too great a love and respect oftheir fellows. They were eager to secure their collaboration, hadconfidence that they could comprehend all that the music intimated, regarded them as equals in the business of creation. But the musicwritten since their time has forced upon the hearer a more and morepassive rôle. The composers arrogated to themselves, to varying extents, the greater part of the activity; insisted upon giving all, of doing thelarger share of the labor. The old intimacy was lost; with Wagner theintellectual game of the _leit-motif_ system was substituted for thecreative exercise. The art of Ravel and Debussy returns to the earlierstrategy. It makes the largest effort to excite the creativeimagination, that force which William Blake identified with the SaviourHimself. It strives continually to lure it into the most energeticparticipation. And because Ravel and Debussy have this incitementsteadily in view, their music is a music of few strokes, comparableindeed to the pictural art of Japan which it so often recalls. It is themusic of suggestion, of sudden kindlings, brief starts and lines, smallforms. It never insists. It only pricks. It instigates, begins, leavesoff, and then continues, rousing to action the hearer's innate need ofan aim and an order and meaning in things. Its subtle gestures, itsbrief, sharp, delicate phrases, its quintessentiality, are like thethrusting open of doors into the interiors of the conscience, theopening of windows on long vistas, are like the breaking of light uponobscured memories and buried emotions. They are like the unsealing ofsprings long sealed, suffering them to flow again in the night. And fora glowing instant, they transform the auditor from a passive receiverinto an artist. 

And there is much besides that Ravel and Debussy have in common. Theyhave each been profoundly influenced by Russian music, "Daphnis etChloé" showing the influence of Borodin, "Pelléas et Mélisande" that ofMoussorgsky. Both have made wide discoveries in the field of harmony. Both have felt the power of outlying and exotic modes. Both have beenprofoundly impressed by the artistic currents of the Paris about them. Both, like so many other French musicians, have been kindled by thebright colors of Spain, Ravel in his orchestral Rhapsody, in his one-actopera "L'Heure espagnol" and in the piano-piece in the collection"Miroirs" entitled "Alborada del Graciozo, " Debussy in "Ibéria" and insome of his preludes. Indeed, a parallelism exists throughout theirrespective works. Debussy writes "Homage à Rameau"; Ravel "Le Tombeau deCouperin. " Debussy writes "Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien"; Ravelprojects an oratorio, "Saint-François d'Assise. " Ravel writes the"Ondine" of the collection entitled "Gaspard de la nuit"; Debussyfollows it with the "Ondine" of his second volume of preludes. Both, during the same year, conceive and execute the idea of setting to musicthe lyrics of Mallarmé entitled "Soupir" and "Placet futile. "Nevertheless, this fact constitutes Ravel in no wise the imitator ofDebussy. His work is by no means, as some of our critics have made hasteto insist, a counterfeit of his elder's. Did the music of Ravel notdemonstrate that he possesses a sensibility quite distinct fromDebussy's, in some respects less fine, delicious, lucent, in othersperhaps even more deeply engaging; did it not represent a distinctdevelopment from Debussy's art in a direction quite its own, one mightwith justice speak of a discipleship. But in the light of Ravel's actualaccomplishment, of his large and original and attractive gift, of themagistral craftsmanship that has shown itself in so many musical forms, from the song and the sonatine to the string-quartet and the orchestralpoem, of the talent that has revealed itself increasingly from year toyear, and that not even the war and the experience of the trenches hasdriven underground, the parallelism is to be regarded as necessitated bythe spiritual kinship of the men, and by their contemporaneity. 

And, certainly, nothing so much reveals Ravel the peer of Debussy as thefact that he has succeeded so beautifully in manifesting what ispeculiar to him. For he is by ten years Debussy's junior, and were heless positive an individuality, less original a temperament, less fullythe genius, he could never have realized himself. There would havedescended upon him the blight that has fallen upon so many of theyounger Parisian composers less determinate than he and like himselfmade of one stuff with Debussy. He, too, would have permitted the art ofthe older and well-established man to impose upon him. He, too, wouldhave betrayed his own cause in attempting to model himself upon theother man. But Debussy has not swerved nor hampered Ravel any more thanhas his master, Gabriel Fauré. He is too sturdily set in his owndirection. From the very commencement of his career, from the time whenhe wrote the soft and hesitating and nevertheless already very personal"Pavane pour une Infante défunte, " he has maintained himself proudlyagainst his great collateral, just as he has maintained himself againstwhat is false and epicene in the artistic example of Fauré. Within theircommon limits, he has realized himself as essentially as Debussy hasdone. Their music is the new and double blossoming of the classicalFrench tradition. From the common ground, they stretch out each in adifferent direction, and form the greater contrast to each other becauseof all they have in common. 

The intelligence that fashioned the music of Debussy was one completelyaware, conscious of itself, flooded with light in its most secretplaces, set four-square in the whirling universe. Few artists have beenas sure of their intention as Debussy always was. The man could fix withprecision the most elusive emotions, could describe the sensations thatflow on the borderland of consciousness, vaguely, and that most of uscannot grasp for very dizziness. He could write music as impalpable asthat of the middle section of "Ibéria, " in which the very silence of thenight, the caresses of the breeze, seem to have taken musical flesh. Before the body of his work, so clear and lucid in its definition, soperfect in its organization, one thinks perforce of a world created outof the flying chaos beneath him by a god. We are given to know preciselyof what stuff the soul of Debussy was made, what its pilgrimages were, in what adventure it sought itself out. We know precisely wherein it sawreflected its visage, in "water stilled at even, " in the angry gleam ofsunset on wet leaves, in wild and headlong gipsy rhythms, in moonfire, shimmering stuffs and flashing spray, in the garish lights and odors ofthe Peninsula, in rain fallen upon flowering parterres, in themelancholy march of clouds, the golden pomp and ritual of the church, the pools and gardens and pavilions reared for its delight by thedelicate Chinese soul, in earth's thousand scents and shells and colors. For Debussy has set these adventures before us in their fullness. Beforehe spoke, he had dwelt with his experiences till he had plumbed themfully, till he had seen into and around and behind them clearly. And sowe perceive them in their essences, in their eternal aspects. Thedesigns are the very curve of the ecstasy. They are sheerly delimited. The notes appear to bud one out of the other, to follow each other outof the sheerest necessity, to have an original timbre, to fix a matternever known before, that can never live again. Every moment in arepresentative composition of Debussy's is logical and yet new. Fewartists have more faultlessly said what they set out to say. 

Ravel is by no means as perfect an artist. He has not the clearself-consciousness, the perfect recognition of limits. His music has notthe absolute completeness of Debussy's. It is not that he is not amarvelous craftsman, greatly at ease in his medium. It is that Raveldares, and dares continually; seeks passionately to bring his entirebody into play; aspires to plenitude of utterance, to sheerness andrigidity of form. Ravel always goes directly through the center. Butcompare his "Rapsodie espagnol" with Debussy's "Ibéria" to perceive howdirect he is. Debussy gives the circumambient atmosphere, Ravel theinner form. Between him and Debussy there is the difference between theapollonian and the dionysiac, between the smooth, level, contained, perfect, and the darker, more turbulent, passionate, and instinctive. For Ravel has been vouchsafed a high grace. He has been permitted toremain, in all his manhood, the child that once we all were. In him thepowerful and spontaneous flow of emotion from out the depths of beinghas never been dammed. He can still speak from the fullness of hisheart, cry his sorrows piercingly, produce himself completely. Graciousand urbane as his music is, proper to the world of modern things andmodern adventures and modern people, there is still a gray, piercinglyrical note in it that is almost primitive, and reflects the childlikesingleness and intensity of the animating spirit. The man who shaped notonly the deliberately infantine "Ma Mère l'Oye, " but also things asquiveringly simple and expressive and songful as "Oiseaux tristes, " as"Sainte, " as "Le Gibet, " or the "Sonatine, " as the passacaglia of theTrio or the vocal interlude in "Daphnis et Chloé, " has a pureness offeeling that we have lost. And it is this crying, passionate tone, thisdirectness of expression, this largeness of effort, even in tiny formsand limited scope, that, more than his polyphonic style or any other ofthe easily recognizable earmarks of his art, distinguishes his work fromDebussy's. The other man has a greater sensuousness, completeness, inventiveness perhaps. But Ravel is full of a lyricism, a piercingness, a passionateness, that much of the music of Debussy successive to"Pelléas" wants. We understand Ravel's music, in the famous phrase ofBeethoven, as speech "vom Herz--zu Herzen. "

And we turn to it gratefully, as we turn to all art full of the "senseof tears in mortal things, " and into which the pulse of human life haspassed directly. For there are times when he is close to the bourne oflife, when his art is immediately the orifice of the dark, flowering, germinating region where lie lodged the dynamics of the human soul. There are times when it taps vasty regions. There are times when Ravelhas but to touch a note, and we unclose; when he has but to let aninstrument sing a certain phrase, and things which lie buried deep inthe heart rise out of the dark, like the nymph in his piano-poem, dripping with stars. The music of "Daphnis, " from the very moment of theintroduction with its softly unfolding chords, its far, glamorousfanfares, its human throats swollen with songs, seems to thrust opendoors into the unplumbed caverns of the soul, and summon forth the stuffto shape the dream. Little song written since Weber set his hornsa-breathing, or Brahms transmuted the witchery of the German forest intotone, is more romantic. Over it might be set the invocation of Heine:

 "Steiget auf, ihr alten Traüme! Oeffne dich, dur Herzenstor!"

Like the passage that ushers in the last marvelous scene of his greatballet, it seems to waken us from the unreal world to the real, and showus the face of the earth, and the overarching blue once more. 

And Ravel is at once more traditional and more progressive a composerthan Debussy. One feels the past most strongly in him. Debussy, withhis thoroughly impressionistic style, is more the time. No doubt thereis a certain almost Hebraic melancholy and sharp lyricism in Ravel'smusic which gives some color to the rumor that he is Jewish. And yet, for all that, one feels Rameau become modern in his sober, gray, daintystructures, in the dryness of his black. In "Le Tombeau de Couperin, "Ravel is the old clavecinist become contemporary of Scriabine andStrawinsky, the old clavecinist who had seen the projectiles fall atVerdun and lost a dozen friends in the trenches. He finds it easy, as insome of his recent songs, to achieve the folktone. If it is true that heis a Jew, then his traditionalism is but one more brilliant instance ofthe power of France to adopt the children of alien races and make themmore intensely her own than some of her proper offspring. In no otherinstance, however, not in that of Lully nor in that of Franck, has thetransfusion of blood been so successful. Ravel is in no wise treacherousto himself. There must be something in the character of the Frenchnation that makes of every Jew, if not a son, yet the happiest and mostfaithful of stepchildren. 

And as one feels the past more strongly in Ravel, so, too, one finds himin certain respects even more revolutionary than Debussy. For while thepower of the latter flagged in the making of strangely MacDowellesquepreludes, or in the composition of such ghosts as "Gigues" and "Jeux"and "Karma, " Ravel has continued increasingly in power, has developedhis art until he has come to be one of the leaders of the musicalevolution. If there is a single modern composition which can be comparedto "Petruchka" for its picture of mass-movement, its pungent naturalism, it is the "Feria" of the "Rapsodie espagnol. " If there is a singlemodern orchestral work that can be compared to either of the two greatballets of Strawinsky for rhythmical vitality, it is "Daphnis et Chloé, "with its flaming dionysiac pulses, its "pipes and timbrels, " its wildecstasy. The same delicate clockwork mechanism characterizes "L'Heureespagnol, " his opera bouffe, that characterizes "Petruchka" and "LeRossignol. " A piano-poem like "Scarbo" rouses the full might of thepiano, and seems to bridge the way to the music of Leo Ornstein and theage of steel. And Ravel has some of the squareness, the sheerness andrigidity for which the ultra-modern are striving. The liquescence ofDebussy has given away again to something more metallic, more solid andunflowing. There is a sort of new stiffness in this music. And in thefield of harmony Ravel is steadily building upon Debussy. His chordsgrow sharper and more biting; in "Le Tombeau de Couperin" and the minueton the name of Haydn there is a harmonic daring and subtlety and evenbitterness that is beyond anything attained by Debussy, placing thecomposer with the Strawinskys and the Schoenbergs and the Ornsteins andall the other barbarians. 

And then his ironic humor, as well, distinguishes him from Debussy. Thehumor of the latter was, after all, light and whimsical. That of Ravel, on the other hand, is extremely bitter. No doubt, the "icy" Ravel, theartist "à qui l'absence de sensibilité fait encore une personalité, " asone of the quirites termed him, never existed save in the minds of thoseunable to comprehend his reticence and delicacy and essentiality. Nevertheless, besides his lyrical, dreamy, romantic temper, he has avery unsentimental vein, occurring no doubt, as in Heine, as a sort ofcorrective, a sort of compensation, for the pervading sensibleness. Andso we find the tender poet of the "Sonatine" and the string-quartet and"Miroirs" writing the witty and mordant music of "L'Heure espagnol";setting the bitter little "Histoires naturelles" of Jules Renard forchant, writing in "Valses nobles et sentimentales" a slightly ironicaland disillusioned if smiling and graceful and delicate commentary to theseason of love, projecting a music-drama on the subject of Don Quixote. Over his waltzes Ravel maliciously sets a quotation from Henri deRegnier: "Le plaisir délicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupationinutile. " With Casella, he writes a musical "A la manière de, " parodyingWagner, d'Indy, Chabrier, Strauss and others most wittily. Something ofEric Satie, the clown of music, exists in him, too. And probably nothingmakes him so inexplicable and irritating to his audiences as his ironicstreak. People are willing to forgive an artist all, save only irony. 

What the future holds for Maurice Ravel is known only to the threenorns. But, unless some unforeseen accident occur and interrupt hiscareer, it can only hold the most brilliant rewards. The man seemssurely bound for splendid shores. He is only in the forty-fifth year ofhis life, and though his genius was already fresh and subtle in theQuartet, written as early as 1903, it has grown beautifully in powerduring the last two decades. The continued exploration of musical meanshas given his personality increasingly free play, and has unbound him. The gesture of the hand has grown swifter and more commanding. Theinstruments have become more obedient. He has matured, become virile andeven magistral. The war has not softened him. He speaks as intimately asever in "Le Tombeau de Couperin. " Already one can see in him one of themost delightful and original musical geniuses that have been nourishedby the teeming soil of France. It is possible that the future will referto him in even more enthusiastic tone. 

Borodin

Borodin's music is a reading of Russia's destiny in the book of herpast. "I live, " the composer of "Prince Igor" wrote to a friend onesummer, "on a steep and lofty mountain whose base is washed by theVolga. And for thirty _versts_ I can follow the windings of the riverthrough the blue of the immeasurable distance. " And his music, at leastthose rich fragments that are his music, make us feel as though thatsummer sojourn had been symbolic of his career, as though in spirit hehad ever lived in some high, visionary place overlooking the sweep ofcenturies in which Russia had waxed from infancy to maturity. It is asthough the chiming of the bells of innumerable Russian villages, villages living and villages dead and underground a thousand years, hadmounted incessantly to his ears, telling him of the progress of a thinground which sixty generations had risen and fallen like foam. It is asthough he had followed the Volga, flowing eastward, not alone forthirty, but for thirty hundred _versts_ through plains reverberant withthe age-long combat and clashing, the bleeding and fusing of Slav andTartar; had followed it until it reached the zone where Asia, with hercaravans and plagues and shrill Mongolian fifes, comes out of endlesswastes. And it is as though, piercing further into the bosom of theeternal mother, Asia, his eye had rested finally upon a single spot, asingle nucleus; that it had watched that nucleus increase into a tribe;had watched that tribe commence its westward march, wandering, spawning, pushing ever westward, battling and groping, advancing slowly, patiently, steadily into power and manhood, until it had come intopossession of the wildest and fairest land of eastern Europe, until ithad joined with other stocks and swelled into a vast nation, a giganticempire; and that then, in that moment of fulfilment, Borodin had turnedin prophetic ecstasy upon modern Russia and bade it ring its bells andsound its chants, bade it push onward with its old faith and vigor, since the Slavonic grandeur and glory were assured. For through thesavage trumpet-blasts and rude and lumbering rhythms, through thecymbal-crashing Mongol marches and warm, uncouth peasant chants that arehis music, there surges that vision, that sense of immanent glory, thatfortifying asseveration. 

It rises to us for the reason that although his music is an evocation ofpast times, a conjuring up of the buried Muscovy, it is a glad andexuberant one. It has the tone neither of those visions of departed daysinspired by yearnings for greener, happier ages, nor of those out ofwhich there speaks, as there speaks out of the "Salammbô" of Flaubert, for instance, a horror of man's everlasting filth and ferocity. A freshand joyous and inspiriting wind blows from these pages. The music of"Prince Igor, " with its epical movement and counter-movement, itsshouting, wandering, savage hordes, its brandished spears and flashingSlavic helms, its marvelous parade of warrior pride and woman's flesh, its evocation of the times of the Tartar inundations, is full of a rude, chivalric lustiness, a great barbaric zest and appetite, a childlikelaughter. The B-minor symphony makes us feel as though the very paganjoy and vigor that had once informed the assemblies and jousts andfeasting of the boyartry of medieval Russia, and made the guzli andbamboo flute to sound, had waked again in Borodin; and in thismagnificent and lumbering music, these crude and massive forms, liftedits wassail and its gold and song once more. For the composer of suchworks, such evocations, it is patent that the past was the wonderfulwarrant of a wonderful future. For this man, indeed, the reliques, thetrappings, the minaret-crowned monuments, the barbaric chants and goldornaments, all the thousand rich things that recalled Muscovy and theburied empire to him, and that he loved so dearly, were valuable chieflybecause they were the emblems of the time that bore the happy present. 

He was one of the famous "five" who in the decade after 1870 foundRussia her modern musical speech. The group, which comprisedMoussorgsky, Balakirew, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakoff and Borodin, was unifiedby an impulse common to all the members. All were in revolt against thegrammar of classical music. All felt the tradition of western Europeanmusic to be inimical to the free expression of the Russian sensibility, and for the first time opposed to the musical West the musical East. Forthese young composers, the plans and shapes of phrases, the modes, therhythms, the counterpoint, the "Rules, " the entire musical theory andscience that had been established in Europe by the practice ofgenerations of composers, was a convention; the Russian music, particularly that of Rubinstein and Tchaikowsky, which had sought to plyitself in accord with it, an artificial and sophisticated thing, asartificial and sophisticated a thing as the pseudo-Parisian culture ofthe Petrograd _salons_. It was their firm conviction that for theRussian composer only one model existed, and that was the Russianfolk-song. Only in the folk-song were to be found the musicalequivalents of the spoken speech. Only in the folk-song were to be foundthe musical accents and turns and inflections, the phrases and rhythmsand colors that expressed the national temper. And to the popular and tothe liturgical chants they went in search of their proper idiom. But itwas not only to the musical heritage that they went. In search of theirown selves they sought out every vestige of the past, every vestige ofthe fatherland that Peter the Great and Catherine had sought to reform, and that persists in every Russian underneath the coating of convention. Together with the others, Borodin steeped himself in the lore andlegends of the buried empire, familiarized himself with the customs ofthe Slavs of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, searched libraries forthe missals illuminated by the old monks of the Greek church, decipheredepics and ballads and chronicles, assimilated the songs and incantationsof the peasants and savage tribes of the steppes, collected the melodiesof European and Asiatic Russia from the Ukraine to Turkestan. 

And he and his companions were right. Their instincts had not misledthem. The contact with real Russia loosed them all. Through that newmusical orientation, they arose, each full of his own strength. 

It was the contact of like with like that made them expressive. For whatthey inwardly were was close akin to the breath, the spirit, the touch, that had invented those chants, and built those minarets and wroughtthat armor and composed those epics. The accent of Moussorgsky was inthe grave and popular melodies, in the liturgical incantations, beforehe was born. His most original passages resemble nothing so much as therude, stark folk-song bequeathed to the world by medieval Russia. Rimsky-Korsakoff's love of brilliant, gay materials had been ingenerations and generations of peasant-artists, in every peasant who ona holiday had donned a gaudy, beribboned costume, centuries before themusic of "Scheherazade" and "Le Coq d'or" was conceived. So, too, thetemperaments and sensibilities of the others. They had but to touchthese emblems and reliques and rhythms to become self-conscious. 

It must have been in particular the old warrior, the chivalric, perhapseven the Tartar imprint in the emblems of the Russian past thatliberated Borodin. For he is the old Tartar, the old savage boyar, ofmodern music. In very person he was the son of military feudal Russia. His photographs that exhibit the great chieftain head, the mane and thesavage, long Mongolian mustache in all their flat contradiction of theconventional nineteenth-century dress, the black and star and ribbon ofcourt costume, make one half credit the legend that his family was ofpure Circassian descent, and had flowed down into the great Russianmaelstrom from out a Georgian stronghold. His idiom bears strongly theimprint of that body; suggests strongly that heredity. It is patentlythe expression of a personality who desired exuberant bright sound andcolor, needed the brandishing of blades and the shrilling of Tartarfifes and the leaping dance of Tartar archers, had nostalgia for thesavage life that had spawned upon the steppes. And as such it isdistinct from that of the other composers of the group. His music hasnone of the piercingness and poignancy and irony, none of the deephumility and grim resignation, so characteristic of Moussorgsky's. Ithas none of the brilliant Orientalism of Balakirew and Cui, none ofRimsky-Korsakoff's soft felicity and lambency and light sensuousness. Itis rude and robust and male, full of angular movements and vigorousblows and lusty, childlike laughter, and, at the same time, of asingularly fine romantic fervor. It is almost the contrary of that ofthe neurotic, sallow Tchaikowsky of the hysterical frenzies andhysterical self-pity and the habits of morose delectation. If there isany symphony that can be called pre-eminently virile and Russian, it isassuredly Borodin's second, the great one in B-minor. And in "PrinceIgor" and the symphonic poem "On the Steppes, " for the first time, continental Asia, with its sharp beat of savage drums and its oceanicwastes of grass, its strong Kurdish beverages and jerked steaks, comesinto modern music. 

And was not this restatement of the national character Borodin's greatcontribution to his age's life? For has not the most recent time of allbeheld a resurgence of the Russian spirit in the political field, anattempted reconstitution of society in the light of the just andfraternal and religious spirit with which this folk has ever beenendowed, and of which, in all its misery, it has ever been aware? Ifthere is any teacher who dominates Russian thought and Russian affairsto-day, it is Tolstoy. And from whom did Tolstoy learn more than fromthat conserver of the pristine and dominating Russian traits, themoujik? And so men like Borodin who sought out the racial character andreflected it in their music seem to us almost like outriders, like thetribesmen who are sent on ahead of wandering folks to spy out the land, to find the passes, and guide their fellows on. Their art is a summonsto individual life. Borodin in particular came upon the Russian peopleat a moment when, like a tribe that has quit its fields in search ofbetter pasturage, and has wandered far and found itself in barren anddifficult and almost impassable ground, it was bewildered anddespondent, and felt itself lost and like to perish in the wilderness. And while his folk lay prone, he had arisen and mounted the encirclingridge. And with a joyous cry, and the flaunting of a banner, he calledthem to the way they had to traverse, and told them the road was found. 

His work is not large in bulk. In a comparatively long life, long atleast by the side of that of a Mozart or a Moussorgsky, he succeeded inproducing only a single opera, "Prince Igor, " two symphonies and thetorso of a third, a symphonic sketch, "On the Steppes, " two stringquartets, and a score of songs. And many of these works are incomplete. "Prince Igor" is a fragmentary composition, a series of not quitesatisfactorily conjoined numbers, a golden mosaic from which wholegroups of enameled bits are missing. Indeed, Borodin had not evennotated the overture when he died, and we know it thanks only to apupil who had heard him play it on the piano and recollected it wellenough to reconstruct it. Other of his works that are complete arespotty, commingled dross and gold. He was a curiously uneven workman. There appear to have been whole regions of his personality that remainedunsensitized. Part of him seems to have gone out toward a new freeRussian music; part of him seems to have been satisfied with the styleof the Italian operas in vogue in Russia during his youth. He who in thedances from "Prince Igor" wrote some of the most pungent, supple, wildof music could also write airs sweetly Italian and conventional. Themost free and ruddy and brave of his pages are juxtaposed with some ofthe most soft and timid. In his opera a recitative of clear, passionateaccent serves to introduce a pretty cavatina; "Prince Igor's"magnificent scene, so original and contained and vigorous, is followedby a cloying duet worthy of a Tchaikowsky opera. The adagio of theB-minor Symphony, lovely as it is, has not quite the solidity and weightof the other movements. The happy, popular and brilliantly originalthemes and ideas of the first quartet are organized with a distinctunskilfulness, while the artistic value of the second is seriouslydamaged by the cheapness of its cavatina. His workmanship continuallyreminds one that Borodin was unable to devote himself entirely tocomposition; that he could come to his writing table only at intervals, only in hours of recreation; and that the government of the Tsar lefthim to support himself by instructing in chemistry in the College ofMedicine and Surgery in Moscow, and kept him always something of anamateur. Borodin the composer is after all only the composer of a fewfragments. 

But sometimes, amid the ruins of an Eastern city, men find a slab ofporphyry or malachite so gorgeously grained, that not many whole andperfect works of art can stand undimmed and undiminished beside it. Suchis the music of Borodin. 

Rimsky-Korsakoff

The music of Rimsky-Korsakoff is like one of the books, full of gaypictures, which are given to children. It is perhaps the most brilliantof them all, a picture-book illuminated in crude and joyouscolors--bright reds, apple greens, golden oranges and yellows--andexecuted with genuine verve and fantasy. The Slavonic and Orientallegends and fairy tales are illustrated astonishingly, with a certainhumor in the matter-of-fact notation of grotesque and miraculous events. The personages in the pictures are arrayed in bizarre and shimmeringcostumes, delightfully inaccurate; and if they represent kings andqueens, are set in the midst of a fabulous pomp and glitter, and wearcrowns incrusted with large and impossible stones. Framing theillustrations are border-fancies of sunflowers and golden cocks andwondrous springtime birds, fashioned boisterously and humorously in themanner of Russian peasant art. Indeed, the book is executed socharmingly that the parents find it as amusing as do the children. 

More than the loveliest, the gleefullest, of picture-books the music isnot. One must not go to Rimsky-Korsakoff for works of another character. For, at heart, he ignored the larger sort of speech, and was content tohave his music picturesque and colorful. The childish, absurd Tsar in"Le Coq d'or, " who desires only to lie abed all day, eat delicate food, and listen to the fairy tales of his nurse, is, after all, something ofa portrait of the composer. For all its gay and opulent exterior, itspricking orchestral timbres, his work is curiously objective andcrystallized, as though the need that brought it forth had been smalland readily satisfied. None of Rimsky's scores is really lyrical, deeplymoving. The music of "Tsar Saltan, " for instance, for all its evocationsof magical cities and wonder-towers and faëry splendor, impresses one aslittle more than theatrical scenery of a high decorativeness. It sets uslolling in a sort of orchestra-stall, wakes in us the mood in which weapplaud amiably the dexterity of the stage-decorator. How quickly theaërial tapestry woven by the orchestra of "Le Coq d'or" wears thin! Howquickly the subtle browns and saffrons and vermilions fade! How prettyand tame beside that of Borodin, beside that of the "Persian Dances" ofMoussorgsky, beside that of Balakirew, even Rimsky's Orientalismappears! None of his music communicates an experience really high, really poetic. There is no page of his that reveals him straining toformulate such a one. 

His composition is never more than a graceful arrangement of surfaces, the cunning and pleasing presentation of matter chosen for its exoticrhythms and shapes, its Oriental and peasant tang, its pungency. Theform is ever a thing of two dimensions. The musical ideas are passedthrough the dye-vats of various timbres and tonalities, made to undergoa series of interesting deformations, are contrasted, superficially, with other ideas after the possibilities of technical variations havebeen exhausted. There is no actual development in the sense of volumnearincrease. In "Scheherazade, " for instance, the climaxes are purelyvoluntary, are nothing other than the arbitrary thickening anddistention of certain ideas. And it is only the spiciness of thethematic material, the nimbleness and suavity of the composition, and, chiefly, the piquancy of the orchestral speech, that saves the music ofRimsky-Korsakoff from utter brittleness, and gives it a certain limitedbeauty. 

It is just this essential superficiality which makes the place of themusic in the history of Russian art so ambiguous. Intentionally, and toa certain extent, Rimsky's work is autochthonous. He was one of thosecomposers who, in the middle of the last century, felt descend upon themthe need of speaking their own tongue and gave themselves heartily tothe labor of discovering a music entirely Russian. His material, at itsbest, approximates the idiom of the Russian folk-song, or communicatescertain qualities--an Oriental sweetness, a barbaric lassitude andabandon--admittedly racial. His music is full of elements--wild andheadlong rhythms, exotic modes--abstracted from the popular andliturgical chants or deftly molded upon them. For there was alwayswithin him the idea of creating an art, particularly an operatic art, that would be as Russian as Wagner's, for instance, is German. The textsof his operas are adopted from Russian history and folklore, and hecontinually attempted to find a musical idiom with the accent of the oldSlavonic chronicles and fairy tales. Certain of his works, particularly"Le Coq d'or, " are deliberately an imitation of the childish andfabulous inventions of the peasant artists. And certainly none of theother members of the nationalist group associated withRimsky-Korsakoff--not Moussorgsky, for all his emotional profundity; norBorodin, for all his sumptuous imagination--had so firm an intellectualgrasp of the common problem, nor was technically so well equipped tosolve it. None of them, for instance, had as wide an acquaintance withthe folk-song, the touchstone of their labors. For Rimsky-Korsakoff wassomething of a philosophical authority on the music of the many peoplesof the Empire, made collections of chants, and could draw on this fundfor his work. Nor did any of the others possess his technical facility. Moussorgsky, for instance, had to discover the art of music painfullywith each step of composition, and orchestrated faultily all his life, while Rimsky-Korsakoff had a natural sense of the orchestra, wrotetreatises on the science of instrumentation and on the science ofharmony, and developed into something of a doctor of music. Indeed, whenfinally there devolved upon him, as general legatee of the nationalistschool, the task of correcting and editing the works of Borodin andDargomijsky and Moussorgsky, he brought to his labor an eruditeness thatbordered dangerously on pedantry. Nor was his learning only musical. Hehad a great knowledge of the art and customs that had existed in Russiabefore the influences of western Europe repressed them, of the dancesand rites and sun worship that survived, despite Christianity, aspopular and rustic games. And he could press them into service in hissearch for a national expression. Like the Sultana in his symphonicpoem, he "drew on the poets for their verses, on the folk-songs fortheir words, and intermingled tales and adventures one with another. "

Yet there is no score of Rimsky-Korsakoff's, no one of his fifteenoperas and dozen symphonic works, which has, in all its mass, the livingvirtue that informs a single page of "Boris Godounow, " the virtue of athing that satisfies the very needs of life and brings to a race releaseand formulation of its speech. There is no score of his, for all thetang and luxuriousness of his orchestration, for all the incrustation ofbright, strange stones on the matter of his operas, that has the deep, glowing color of certain passages of Borodin's work, with their magicalevocations of terrestrial Asia and feudal Muscovy, their

 "Timbres d'or des mongoles orfevrèries Et vieil or des vieilles nations. "

For he was in no sense as nobly human of stature, as deeply aware of thelife about him, as Moussorgsky. Nor did he feel within himself Borodin'srich and vivid sense of the past. Cui was right when he accused Rimskyof wanting "nerve and passionate impulse. " He was, after all, temperamentally chilly. "The people are the creators, " Glinka had toldthe young nationalist composers, "you are but the arrangers. " It wasprecisely the vital and direct contact with the source of all creativework that Rimsky-Korsakoff lacked. There is a fault of instinct in menlike him, who can feel their race and their environment only through theconscious mind. Just what in Rimsky's education produced hisintellectualism, we do not know. Certainly it was nothing extraordinary, for society produces innumerable artists like him, who are fundamentallyincapable of becoming the instrument every creative being is, and ofdiscovering through themselves the consciousness of their fellows. Whatever its cause, there is in such men a fear of the unsealing of theunconscious mind, the depository of all actual and vital sensations, which no effort of their own can overcome. It is for that reason thatthey have so gigantic and unshakable a confidence in all purelyconscious processes of creation, particularly in the incorporation of _apriori_ theories. So it was with Rimsky. There is patent in all his worka vast love of erudition and a vast faith in its efficacy. He is alwaysattempting to incarnate in the flesh of his music law abstracted fromclassical works. Even Tchaikowsky, who was a good deal of anintellectualist himself, and dubbed "perfect, " in a characteristicallyservile letter, every one of the thirty practice fugues that Rimskycomposed in the course of a single month, complained that the latter"worshiped technique" and that his work was "Full of contrapuntal tricksand all the signs of a sterile pedantry. " It was not that Rimsky waspedantic from choice, out of a wilful perversity. His obsession withintellectual formulas was after all the result of a fear of opening thedark sluices through which surge the rhythms of life. 

If Rimsky-Korsakoff was not absolutely sterile, it was because hisintellectual quality itself was vivacious and brilliant. Though heremained ever a stranger to Russia and his fellows, as he did tohimself, he became the most observant of travelers. Though as theforeigner he perceived only the superficial and picturesque elements ofthe life of the land--its Orientalism, its barbaric coloring--and foundhis happiest expression in a fantasy after the "Thousand Nights and aNight, " he noted his impressions skilfully and vividly, with an almostvirtuosic sense of his material. If he could not paint the spring inmusic, he could at least embroider the score of "Sniegourochka"delightfully with birdcalls and all manner of vernal fancies. If hecould not recreate the spirit of peasant art, he could at least, as in"Le Coq d'or, " imitate it so tastefully that, listening to the music, weseem to have before us one of the pictures beloved by the Russianfolk--a picture with bright and joyous dabs of color, with clumsy butgleeful depictions of battles and cavalcades and festivities andbanqueting tables loaded with fruits, meats and flagons. It is indeedcurious, and not a little pathetic, to observe how keenRimsky-Korsakoff's intelligence ever was. The satirization of thedemoniacal women of "Parsifal" and "Salome" in the figure and motifs ofthe Princess of Samarcand is deliciously light and witty. Indeed, notonly "Le Coq d'or, " but most of his work reveals his dry, real sense ofhumor. And how often does he not point the direction in which Russianmusic has subsequently advanced! His latter style, with its mottledchromatic and Oriental modes, its curious and bewildering intervals, isthe veritable link between the music of the older Russian group to whichhe, roughly, belongs and that of the younger, newer men, of Strawinskyin particular. Indeed, the works of Strawinsky reveal incessantly howmuch the master taught the pupil. 

But if they reveal Rimsky's keenness, they reveal his limitations aswell. They bring into sharpest relief the difference between poetic andsuperficial expressiveness. For Strawinsky has in many instancessuccessfully handled materials which Rimsky not quite satisfactorilyemployed. The former's early works, in particular "L'Oiseau de feu, " andthe first act of the opera "Le Rossignol, " related to Rimsky's in styleas they are, have yet a faëry and wonder and flittergold that the masternever succeeded in attaining. The music of "L'Oiseau de feu" is really afantastic dream-bird. "Petrouchka" has a brilliance and vivacity andmadness that makes Rimsky's scenes from popular life, his utilizationsof vulgar tunes and dances scarcely comparable to it. Nowhere in any ofRimsky's reconstructions of ethnological dances and rites, neither in"Mlada" nor in "Sniegourochka, " is there anything at all comparable tothe naked power manifest in "Le Sacre du printemps. " But it isparticularly in his science of orchestration, the sense of theinstruments that makes him appear to defer to them rather than to imposehis will on them, that Strawinsky has achieved the thing that histeacher failed of achieving. For Rimsky, despite all his remarkablesense of the chemistry of timbres, despite his fine intention to developfurther the science which Berlioz brought so far, was prevented fromminting a really new significant orchestral speech through the povertyof his invention. His orchestration is full of tricks and mannerismsthat pall. One hears the whistling parabolas of the flutes and clarinetsof "Scheherazade" in "Mlada, " in "Sadko, " in a half-dozen works. Theorchestra that paints the night-sky of "Mlada" rolls dangerously likethat which paints the sea of "Scheherazade" and "Tsar Saltan. " Thefamous "Chanson indou" seems to float vaguely through half his Orientalevocations. But the originality and fecundity and inventiveness that helacked, Strawinsky to great degree possesses. And so it was given to thepupil to enter the chamber outside of which the master stood all hislife, and could not enter, and saw only by peering furtively through thechinks of the door. 

Rachmaninoff

It was in an interview given at the beginning of his recent Americantour that M. Sergei Rachmaninoff styled himself a "musicalevolutionist. " The phrase, doubtless uttered half in jest, is scarcelynice. It is one of those terms that are so loose that they are well-nighmeaningless. Nevertheless, there was significance in M. Rachmaninoff'suse of it. For he employed it as an apology for his work. His music isevidently wanting in boldness. On the whole it is cautious andtraditional. Even those who are not professionally on the side of themusical anarchs find it somewhat unventuresome, too smooth and soft andelegantly elegiac, too dull. And in substituting for revolutionism aformula for musical progress less suggestive of violent change, moresuggestive of a process like the tranquil, gradual and orderly unfoldingof bud into blossom, was not M. Rachmaninoff very lightly and cleverlydiscrediting the apparently revolutionary work of certain of hisfellows, and seeking to reveal a hitherto unsuspected solidity in hisown?

However, it is questionable whether he was successful, whether theimplications of the phrase do quite manage to manoeuver his work intogenuine importance. No doubt, music does not invariably reform itselfthrough the process we call revolutionary. It is a commonplace thatthere have been many composers of primary rank who have originated nonew syntax, no new system of chords and key-relationships. It is saidthat J. S. Bach himself did not invent a single harmony. There have beencomposers of genius who have done little to enlarge the physicalboundaries of their art, have accepted the grammar of music from others, and have rounded an epoch instead of initiating a new one. Nevertheless, M. Rachmaninoff cannot quite be included in their company. There is asgreat a difference between him and composers of this somewhatconservative type as there is between him and the radical sort. Forthough the recomposition of music does not necessarily consist in theestablishment of a new system, and can be fairly complete without it, itdoes consist in the impregnation of tone with new character and virtue. 

Doubtless, M. Rachmaninoff is an accomplished and charming workman. Heis almost uniformly suave and dexterous. The instances when he writesbadly are not frequent. The C-sharp minor Prélude is, after all, something of a sport. No doubt, there are times, as in so many of thepassages of the new version of his first piano concerto, when he seeksto dazzle with the opulence and clangor and glare of tones. However, asa rule, he writes politely. If the second concerto is a trifle too softand elegiac and sweet, a little too much like a mournful banqueting onjam and honey, it is still most deftly and ingratiatingly made. On thewhole, even though his music touches us only superficially it rarelyfails to awaken some gratitude for its elegance. But there is anessential that his music wants. It wants the imprint of a decided andimportant individuality. In all the elaborate score of "The Island ofthe Dead, " in the very one of M. Rachmaninoff's works that is generallydeemed his best, there are few accents that are either very large orvery poignant or very noble. The music lacks distinction, lacksvitality. The style is strangely soft and unrefreshing. Emotion iscommunicated, no doubt. But it is emotion of a second or even thirdorder. Nor is the music of M. Rachmaninoff ever quite completelynew-minted. Has it a melodic line quite properly its own? One doubts it. Many of the melodies of M. Rachmaninoff have a Mendelssohnian cast, forall their Russian sheen. Others are of the sort of sweet, spiritlesssilken tune generally characteristic of the Russian salon school. Norcan one discover in this music a distinctly original sense of eitherrhythm of harmony or tone-color. The E-minor Symphony, for all itscompetence and smoothness, is full of the color and quality andatmosphere of Tchaikowsky. It is Tchaikowsky without the hysteria, perhaps, but also without the energy. In all the music of M. Rachmaninoff there is something strangely twice-told. From it thereflows the sadness distilled by all things that are a little useless. 

There are to be found in every picture gallery canvases attributed, notto any single painter, but to an atelier, to the school of some greatmaster. One finds charming pieces among them. Nor are they invariablythe work of pupils who painted under the direction of some famous man. Quite as often they are the handiwork of artists who appearedindependent enough to their patrons and to themselves. Their names andtheir persons were familiar to those who ordered pictures from them. Itis only that in the course of time their names have come to beforgotten. For there is in their canvases little trace of the substancethat causes people to cherish an individuality, and makes a name to beremembered. Other personalities have transpired through theirbrush-strokes, and have made it evident that behind the man who held thebrush in his hand there was another who directed the strokes--the manupon whom the artist had modeled himself, the personality he preferredto his own. It is this reflectiveness that has caused the attribution ofthe work to ateliers. 

And had M. Rachmaninoff instead of being a musician been a painter, would not a like destiny await his compositions? For do they not proceedfrom the point of departure of the entire brilliant school ofpiano-compositions? Are they not a sort of throwback to the salonschool, the school of velocity, of effect, of whatever Rubinstein andLiszt could desire? Are not the piano-pieces of M. Rachmaninoff theresult of a relationship to the instrument that is fast becomingoutmoded? There was some slight justification for the pompous and emptywork of his models. The concerti, the often flashy and tinsellypianoforte compositions of Liszt and Rubinstein were the immediate andsurface result of that deeper sense of the instrument which arrivedduring the nineteenth century, and intoxicated folk with the pianotimbres, and made them eager to hear its many voices in no matter howcrude a form. A whole school of facile virtuosi arose in response to thedemand. Since then, however, we have gotten a subtler sense of theinstrument. We no longer require so insensitive a display. And togetherwith those rather gross piano-works the piece _par excellence_characteristic of the period, the brilliant piano-concerto with itsprancing instrument embedded in the pomp and clangor and ululation ofthe band, has lost in favor steadily. The modern men no longer writeconcerti. When they introduce a pianoforte into the orchestra, theyeither, like Brahms, treat it as the premier instrument, and writesymphonies, or, like Scriabine and Strawinsky, reduce it to the commonlevel. But M. Rachmaninoff has not participated in this change ofattitude. He is still content with music that toys with the pianoforte. And he writes concerti of the old type. He writes pieces full of the oldastounding musical dislocation. Phrases of an apparent intensity andlyricism are negated by frivolous and tinkling passage-work. Take awaythe sound and fury signifying nothing from the third concerto, and whatis left? There was a day, perhaps, when such work served. But anotherhas succeeded to it. And so M. Rachmaninoff comes amongst us like a verycharming and amiable ghost. 

For that, however, let us not fail to be duly grateful. Let us not failto give thanks for the fact that setting forever is the conception ofmusic as an after-dinner cordial, a box of assorted bonbons, bric-à-brac, a titillation, a tepid bath, a performance that amuses andcaresses and whiles away a half-hour, an enchantment for boarding-schoolmisses, an opportunity for virtuosi to glorify themselves. 

One of the curious things about M. Rachmaninoff's season is the factthat it has not only brought him into prominence amongst us, but that ithas brought into relief other composers through him. It has brought intorelief the entire group of Russian musicians to which he belongs. It hasevaluated the pretensions of the two conflicting schools of Russianmusic nicely. The school of which M. Rachmaninoff is perhaps the chiefliving representative, and which was represented at various times byRubinstein and Tchaikowsky and Arensky, is usually dubbed "universal"by its partisans. It is supposed to have its traditions in generalEuropean music, and to be a continuation of the art of the romanticists, in particular of the art of Chopin and Schumann. But for the men of theopposing faction, the men who accepted only the Russian folk-song astheir touchstone, and sought in their work to find a modern equivalentfor it, the music of this school was alien and sophisticated, assophisticated as the pseudo-French culture of the Petrograddrawing-rooms. For them, the music of Tchaikowsky, even, was the resultof the manipulation of themes of Slavic color according to formulasabstracted from classical music. Without regard, however, for anyquestion of musical theory; apart from all question of the value for usof the science of the classical masters, one finds oneself of thisopinion. For the music brought forward by the visit of the composer whois at present in this country as envoy of his school, convinces us thatthe work of the men of his party, elegant and brilliant as it often is, is the work of men essentially unresponsive to the appeal of theircompatriots. For them, as it is for every Russian musician, Russia waswithout their windows, appealing dumbly for expression of its wild, ungoverned energy, its misery, its rich and childish laughter, its deep, great Christianity. It wanted a music that would have the accents of itsrude, large-hearted speech, and that would, like its speech, expressits essential reactions, its consciousness. And some men there were, Moussorgsky and Borodin, who were quick enough of imagination to becomethe instruments of their folk and respond to its need. And so, when wewould hear Russian speech, we go to them as we go to Dostoievsky and toTolstoy. It is in "Boris" and "Prince Igor" as richly as it is in anywork. But the men of the other school did not hear the appeal. They satin their luxurious and Parisian houses behind closed windows. 

Scriabine

There are solemn and gorgeous pages in the symphonic poems of Scriabine. And yet, despite their effulgence, their manifold splendors, theirhieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual andsignificant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus, " they each reveal tosome degree the influence of Wagner. The "Idyl" of the Second Symphony, for instance, is dangerously close to the "Waldweben" in "Siegfried, "although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest is rather more the perfumed androse-lit woodland, Wagner's the fresh primeval wilderness. The "Poème del'extase, " with its oceanic tides of voluptuously entangled bodies, is asort of Tannhäuser "Bacchanale" modernized, enlarged, and intenselysharpened. For, in spite of the fact that at moments he handled it withrare sympathy, the orchestra was not his proper medium. The piano washis instrument. It is only in composition for that medium that heexpressed indelibly his exquisite, luminously poetic, almost disquietingtemper, and definitely recorded himself. 

There have been few composers more finely conscious of the piano. Therehave been few who have more fully plumbed its resources, few who haveheld it in greater reverence, few who have hearkened more solicitouslyto its voice that is so different from the voices of other instruments. Of all piano music, only that of Debussy and Ravel seems as thoroughlysteeped in the essential color of the medium, seems to lie as completelyin the black and white keys, part of them, not imposed on them. AndScriabine, the barbarian and romanticist, is even more free of the huesof the keyboard than they, the Latins, the classicists. His works makeone keenly aware of the rhythmical, the formalistic limitations ofChopin's piano pieces, of the steeliness of much of Brahms', of theshallow brilliancy, the theatricality, of Liszt's. They even make usfeel at moments as though in them had been realized the definitivepianistic style, that the hour of transition to the new keyboard ofquarter tones was nigh. For Scriabine appears to have wakened in thepiano all its latent animality. Under his touch it loses its oldmechanical being, cries and chants like a bird, becomes at instants cat, serpent, flower, woman. It is as if the currents of the man's life hadset with mysterious strength toward the instrument, till it became forhim an eternally fresh and marvelous experience, till between him andthe inanimate thing there came to be an interchange of life. There isthe rarest of science in his style, especially in that of his lastperiod, when his own individuality broke so marvelously into flower. Hewrote for it as one of two persons who had shared life together mightaddress the other, well aware with what complexity and profundity asmile, a gesture, a brief phrase, would reverberate. No one has caressedit more lightly, more tenderly, more voluptuously. No one has made ofthe piano-trill, for instance, more luminous and quivering a thing. Andbecause he was so sensitive to his medium, the medium lured from out himhis creative strength. 

He grew to his high poetic stature from an elegant and aristocraticcraftsman of the school of Chopin. More than that of any modern master, his art is rooted in the great romantic tradition as it comes to usthrough Chopin, Wagner, Liszt and Strauss; and develops almost logicallyout of it. And in the compositions of his first period, the period thatends, roughly, with the piano concerto, the allegiance is marked, thediscipleship undeniable. The influence of Chopin is ubiquitous. Scriabine writes mazurkas, preludes, études, nocturnes and waltzes inhis master's cool, polite, fastidious general manner. These pieces, too, might seem to have been written in order to be played in noble salonslit by massive candelabra, to countesses with bare shoulders. Thetwenty-four preludes Opus 11, for instance, are full of Chopinesqueturns, of Chopinesque morbidezza, of Chopinesque melodies. The harmonicscheme rarely transgresses the limits which Chopin set himself. Thepieces are obviously the work of one who in the course ofconcert-playing has come to discover the finesses of the Pole'sworkmanship. And yet, César Cui's caustic description of the preludes as"Bits filched from Chopin's trousseau, " is eminently unjust. For even inthose days, when Scriabine was a member of the Russian salon school, there were attractive original elements in his compositions. There isreal poetry and freshness in these soft-colored pieces. The treatment ofthe instrument is bold, and, at moments, more satisfactory thanChopin's. Scriabine, for instance, gives the left hand a greaterindependence and significance than does as a rule his master. Nor doeshe indulge in the repetitions and recapitulations that mar so many ofthe latter's works. His sense of form is already alert. And through thesilken melodic line, the sweet, rich harmonies, there already makesitself felt something that is to Chopin's spirit as Russian iron is toPolish silver. 

It is perhaps only in the compositions subsequent to Opus 50 thatScriabine emerges in the fullness of his stature. For it is only in themthat he finally abandoned the major-minor system to which he hadhitherto adhered, and substituted for it the other that permitted hisexquisite delicious sense of pianistic color, his infinitely delicategift of melody, his gorgeous, far-spreading harmonic feeling, free play. And it is only in these later pieces that he achieved the perfection ofform, particularly of the sonata form, of which the Ninth Sonata is themagistral example, and which makes his craft comparable to Bach's inits mastery of a medium, and enables one to mention the "ChromaticFantasy and Fugue" and the Ninth Sonata justly in a single breath. Andyet, the compositions of the middle period, the one that followsimmediately the early, immature, Chopinesque period, are scarcely lessrich and refined, scarcely less important. No doubt the influence ofScriabine's masters, though considerably on the wane, is still evident. The "Poème satanique" refines on Liszt. The Third Sonata, despite itslambent andante, is patently the work of one who has studied his Lisztand loves his Chopin. And yet, these works are characteristically maleand raging and proud. And in all the works of this period there appearssomething new and magnificent that has scarcely before informed pianomusic. There is a truly Russian depth and vehemence and largeness inthis now languid, now mystical, now leonine music, that lifts itentirely out of the company of the works of the Petrograd salon schoolinto that of those composers who made orchestra and opera speak in thenational tongue. The rhythms are joyously, barbarically, at times almostfrenetically, free. They are finely various and depart almost entirelyfrom the one-two, one-two, the one-two-three, one-two-three that makesmonotonous so much of Chopin. At moments, the tones of the piano marchwith some of the now festive, now majestic, now solemn, movement of theorchestral processionals of a Moussorgsky and a Borodin. And one hasthe sense of having encountered only in sumptuous Eastern stuffs, insilken carpets and golden mosaics, or in the orchestral faëry of some ofthe Russian composers, in the orchestral chemistry of, say, aRimsky-Korsakoff, such brimming, delicious colors. Nevertheless, thevoluptuousness and vehemence are held in fastidious restraint. Scriabineis always the fine gentleman, intolerant, for all the splendor of hisstyle, of any excess, of any exaggeration, of any breach of taste. Andthroughout the work, there is evidence of the steady, restlessbourgeoning of the exquisite, disquieting, almost Chinese delicacy whichin the work of the last period attains its marvelous efflorescence. 

These final works, these last sonatas and poems and preludes ofScriabine are but the essentialization of the personal traits adumbratedby the compositions of the earlier periods. It is as if in adopting thesystem based on the "mystic chord" that persisted in his imagination, the chord built up in fourths from the tones c, d, e, f-sharp, a, b, hehad managed to rid himself of all the influence of the classic masters, to give every note that he employs an intense, poignant, new value, andthrough that revolution to achieve form comparable to the most eminent. His fantasy ranges over the keyboard with complete freedom; he createsnew rhythms, new combinations of tones that cause the hands of theperformer to become possessed of a new and curious intelligence, tomake significant gestures, and to move with a delightful life. And theselatter compositions are entirely structure, entirely bone. There is acomplete economy. There is not a note in the Ninth Sonata, for instance, that is not necessary, and does not seem to have great significance. Here everything is speech. The work actually develops out of thequavering first few bars. The vast resonant peroration only gathers intoa single, furious, tragic pronouncement the material deployed in thebody of the work. Scarcely ever has the binary form, the combat betweentwo contradictory themes, been more essentialized. Scarcely ever has theprelude-form been reduced to simpler terms than in the preludes ofScriabine. These works are indeed radical. For they give us a freshglimpse of the archetype of their forms. 

And yet, how strange, how infinitely complex and novel a thing they are. There is indeed little music that throws into sharper relief the miracleof communication through material form. A few sounds, broken andelusive, are struck out of an instrument, die away again. And yet, through those vibrations, life for an instant is made incandescent. Itis as though much that has hitherto been shy and lonely experience hasundergone a sudden change into something clarified and universal. It isas though performer and auditor have themselves been transformed intomore sensitive instruments, and prepared to participate more graciouslyin the common experience. It is as though in each one the ability tofeel beauty has been quickened, that each for an instant becomes the manwho has never before seen the spring come over the land, and who, glancing upward, for the first time beholds an apple-bough floweringagainst the blue. And Scriabine fills one with the need of makingwonderful and winged gestures. It is as if for instants he transformsone into strange and radiant and ecstatic beings, into new and wonderfulthings. 

For this music is full of the wizardry of perhaps the most exquisitesensibility that has for a long while disclosed itself in music. Perhapsonly in the Far East, perhaps only among the Chinese, have moredelicious and dainty and ecstatic tempers uttered themselves in music. Beside this man, with his music that is like clustering flowers breakingsuddenly from the cool and shadowy earth, or like the beating ofluminous wings in the infinite azure, or like the whispers of onesinking from the world in mortal illness, Debussy, even, seems cool, silvered by the fine temperance of France. For Scriabine must havesuffered an almost inordinate subjugation to the manifestations ofbeauty, must have been consumed with a passion for communicating hisburningly poignant adventures. There are moments when he seems scarcelyable to speak, so intense, so enrapturing, is his voluptuous sensation. Indeed, the sensuality is at times so intensely communicated that italmost excites pain as well as pleasure. If there is any music thatseems to hover on the borderland between ecstasy and suffering, it isthis. One shrinks from it as from some too poignant revelation. Onecannot breathe for long in this ether. Small wonder that Scriabinesought all his life to flee into states of transport, to invent areligion of ecstasy. For one weighed with the terrible burden of sovibrant a sensibility, there could be no other means of existence. 

And the gesture of flight is present throughout his music. Throughoutit, one hears the beating of wings. Sometimes, it is the light flutterof glistening ephemeridæ that wheel and skim delightfully through thelimpid azure. Sometimes it is the passionate fanning of wings preparingthemselves for swift sharp ascents. Sometimes, it is the drooping ofpinions that sink brokenly. For all these pieces are "Poèmes ailés, "flights toward some island of the blest. They are all aspirations "versla flamme, " toward the spiritual fire of joy, toward the paradise ofdivine pleasure and divine activity. The Fifth Sonata is like themarshaling of forces, the mighty spring of some radiant flyer launchinghimself into the empyrean. White gleaming pinions wheel and hover in thegodlike close of the "Poème divine. " Impotent caged wings poisethemselves for flight in the mystic Seventh Sonata, beat for an instant, are ominously still. Sometimes, as in the Eighth Sonata, Scriabine islike a gorgeous tropical bird preening himself in the quivering riverlight. Sometimes he is a seraphic creature outspreading his mightypinions to greet some tremendous spirit sunrise. And in those last, bleeding, agonizing preludes, there is still the breath of flight. Butthis time it is another motion. Is it "the wind of death's imperishablewing"? Is it the blind hovering of the spirit that has quit its earthlyhabitation in the moment of dissolution? One cannot tell. 

And it was the flight of ecstasy that he sought to achieve in hissymphonic poems. He had made for himself a curious personal religion, abizarre mixture of theosophy and neoplatonism and Bergsonian philosophy, a faith that prescribed transport; and these works were in partconceived as rituals. They were planned as ceremonies of elevation anddeification by ecstasy, in which performers and auditors engaged asactive and passive celebrants. Together they were to ascend from planeto plane of delight, experiencing divine struggle and divine bliss anddivine creativity. The music was to call the soul through the gate ofthe sense of hearing, to lead it, slowly, hieratically, up throughcircle after circle of heaven, until the mystical gongs boomed and themass emotion reached the Father of Souls, and was become God. With JulesRomains, Scriabine would have cried to his audiences:

 "Tu vas mourir tantot, sous le poids de tes heures: Les hommes, delies, glisseront par les portes, Les ongles de la nuit t'arracheront la chair. Qu'importe! Tu es mienne avant que tu sois morte; Les corps qui sont ici, la ville peut les prendre; Ils garderont au front comme une croix de cendre Le vestige du dieu que tu es maintenant!"

In "Prometheus" he introduces a _clavier à lumière_ into his orchestra, vainly hoping to induce the ecstasy through color as well as sound, andafter his death there was found among his papers a sketch for a"Mysteria" in which the music was to be conjoined not only with light, but with dance and perfume as well. It is a pity it was not granted himto achieve this work. The theosophic programs of his orchestral worksare, after all, innocuous. Much of the half-mystical, half-sensualcoloration of his orchestra is due them. And had the score of the"Mysteria" been as much an improvement over that of "Prometheus" as"Prometheus" is over the other symphonic works, Scriabine might indeedhave proved himself as eminent a writer for the orchestra as for thepiano. 

It is indeed likely that to-morrow the world will find in hispiano-works its new Chopin, that Scriabine will shortly be given theplace once occupied by the other. For not only is he in many ways theartistic superior of the man who once was his master. He is, as well, one of the beings in which the age that is slowly expiring about usbecame conscious and articulate. Russia bore him, it is true, elementedhim, gave him her childlike tenderness and barbaric richness and mysticlight. But in developing out of the Russian "universal" school intoperfect liberty and individuality, he became indeed a universalexpression, the first really produced by the group. He became, like theintensely "national" Strawinsky, one of those men into whom an ageenters. He is symbolic of his time. He seems to have felt his age's lifein its intensest form. The hour that created him was an hour in whichthe power of feeling had waxed inordinately, almost to the point ofhampering action, when an Asiatic delicacy had begun to be manifest inWestern character, when the fusion of Europe and Asia was commencing tomake itself felt. And in Scriabine, that new intensity of sensationattained something near to heroic supernatural stature. What wasbeautiful and sick in his age entered into his art. Through it, welearn, not a little, how we feel. 

His music was a thing created in the flesh of a man, out of his agony. "Eine Entwicklung ist ein Schicksal, " Thomas Mann once wrote. ForScriabine, the awakening of that aërial palpitant sensibility was such. It devoured him like a fire. One shudders as well as marvels at thedestiny of one who came to feel life as it is felt in those lastquivering poems--"Guirlandes, " "Flammes sombres, " he entitles them, --orin the mysterious Tenth Sonata, that glows with the feverish light ofthe dream, or in those last haunted preludes. Existence for the man whocould write such music, in which unearthly rapture contrasts withunearthly suffering, must have been a sort of exquisite martyrdom. Theman must have been indeed a nerve exposed. And, like a fragile thingsuddenly ignited, he flared up, fiercely, magnificently, and went out. 

Strawinsky

The new steel organs of man have begotten their music in "Le Sacre duprintemps. " For with Strawinsky, the rhythms of machinery enter musicalart. With this his magistral work a new chapter of music commences, thespiritualization of the new body of man is manifest. Through Debussy, music had liquified, become opalescent and impalpable and fluent. It hadbecome, because of his sense, his generation's sense, of the infirmityof things, a sort of symbol of the eternal flux, the eternalmomentariness. It had come to body forth all that merges and changes anddisappears, to mirror the incessant departures and evanescences of life, to shape itself upon the infinitely subtle play of light, the restless, heaving, foaming surface of the sea, the impalpable racks of perfume, upon gusts of wind and fading sounds, upon all the ephemeral wonder ofthe world. But through Strawinsky, there has come to be a musicstylistically well-nigh the reverse of that of the impressionists. Through him, music has become again cubical, lapidary, massive, mechanistic. Scintillation is gone out of it. The delicate, sinuousmelodic line, the glamorous sheeny harmonies, are gone out of it. Theelegance of Debussy, the golden sensuality, the quiet, classic touch, are flown. Instead, there are come to be great, weighty, metallicmasses, molten piles and sheets of steel and iron, shining adamantinebulks. Contours are become grim, severe, angular. Melodies are sharp, rigid, asymmetrical. Chords are uncouth, square clusters of notes, stoutand solid as the pillars that support roofs, heavy as the thuds oftriphammers. Above all, there is rhythm, rhythm rectangular and sheerand emphatic, rhythm that lunges and beats and reiterates and danceswith all the steely perfect tirelessness of the machine, shoots out anddraws back, shoots upward and shoots down, with the inhuman motion oftitanic arms of steel. Indeed, the change is as radical, as complete, asthough in the midst of moonlit noble gardens a giant machine had arisenswiftly from the ground and inundated the night with electrical glareand set its metal thews and organs and joints relentlessly whirring, relentlessly functioning. 

And yet, the two styles, Debussy's and Strawinsky's, are related. Indeed, they are complementary. They are the reactions to the samestimulus of two fundamentally different types of mind. No doubt, betweenthe two men there exist differences besides those of their generalfashions of thinking. The temper of Debussy was profoundly sensuous andaristocratic and contained. That of Strawinsky is nervous and ironic andviolent. The one man issued from an unbroken tradition, was produced bygenerations and generations of gentlemen. The other is one of thosebeings who seem to have been called into existence solely by the modernway of life, by express trains and ocean greyhounds, by the shrinkage ofcontinents and the vibration of the twentieth-century world. But thechief difference, the difference that made "Le Sacre du printemps"almost antithetical to "Pelléas et Mélisande, " is essentially thedivergence between two cardinal manners of apprehending life. Debussy, on the one hand, seems to be of the sort of men in whom the center ofconscience is, figuratively, sunken; one of those who have withinthemselves some immobility that makes the people and the things aboutthem appear fleeting and unreal. For such, the world is a far distantthing, lying out on the rims of consciousness, delicate and impermanentas sunset hues or the lights and gestures of the dream. The music ofDebussy is the magistral and classic picture of this distant andglamorous procession, this illusory and fantastical and transparentshow, this thing that changes from moment to moment and is never twicethe same, and flows away from us so quickly. But Strawinsky, on theother hand, is in the very midst of the thing so distant from the otherman. For him, the material world is very real, sharp, immediate. Heloves it, enjoys it, is excited by its many forms. He is vividlyresponsive to its traffic. Things make an immediate and bitingimpression on him, stimulate in him pleasure and pain. He feels theiredge and knows it hard, feels their weight and knows it heavy, feelstheir motion in all its violence. There is in Strawinsky an almostfrenetic delight in the processes that go on about him. He goes throughthe crowded thoroughfares, through cluttered places, through factories, hotels, wharves, sits in railway trains, and the glare and tumult andpulsation, the engines and locomotives and cranes, the whole madphantasmagoria of the modern city, evoke images in him, inflame him toreproduce them in all their weight and gianthood and mass, theirblackness and luridness and power. The most vulgar things and eventsexcite him. The traffic, the restlessness of crowds, the noise ofvehicles, of the clatter of horses on the asphalt, of human cries andcalls sounding above the street-bass, a couple of organ grinders tryingto outplay each other, a brass band coming down the avenue, the thunderof a railway train hurling itself over leagues of steel, the sirens ofsteamboats and locomotives, the overtones of factory whistles, the roarof cities and harbors, become music to him. In one of his earlyorchestral sketches, he imitates the buzzing of a hive of bees. One ofhis miniatures for string-quartet bangs with the beat of the woodenshoes of peasants dancing to the snarling tones of a bagpipe. Anotherreproduces the droning of the priest in a little chapel, recreates thescene almost cruelly. And the score of "Petruchka" is alive marvelouslywith the rank, garish life of a cheap fair. Its bubbling flutes, seething instrumental caldron, concertina-rhythms and bright, gaudycolors conjure up the movement of the crowds that surge about theamusement booths, paint to the life the little flying flags, thegestures of the showmen, the bright balloons, the shooting-galleries, the gipsy tents, the crudely stained canvas walls, the groups ofcoachmen and servant girls and children in their holiday finery. Atmoments one can even smell the sausages frying. 

For Strawinsky is one of those composers, found scattered all along thepathway of his art, who augment the expressiveness of music throughdirect imitation of nature. His imagination seems to be free, bound innowise by what other men have adjudged music to be, and by what theirpractice has made it seem. He comes to his art without prejudice orpreconception of any kind, it appears. He plays with its elements ascapriciously as the child plays with paper and crayons. He amuseshimself with each instrument of the band careless of its customary uses. There are times when Strawinsky comes into the solemn conclave ofmusicians like a gamin with trumpet and drum. He disports himself withthe infinitely dignified string-quartet, makes it do light and acrobaticthings. There is one interlude of "Petruchka" that is written forsnare-drums alone. His work is incrusted with cheap waltzes andbarrel-organ tunes. It is gamy and racy in style; full of musicalslang. He makes the orchestra imitate the quavering of an oldhurdy-gurdy. Of late he has written a ballet for eight clowns. And he isreported to have said, "I should like to bring it about that music beperformed in street-cars, while people get out and get in. " For he findshis greatest enemy in the concert-room, that rut that limits the play ofthe imagination of audiences, that fortress in which all of theintentions of the men of the past have established themselves, and fromwhich they dominate the musical present. The concert-room has succeededin making music a drug, a sedative, has created a "musical attitude" infolk that is false, and robbed musical art of its power. For Strawinskymusic is either an infection, the communication of a lyrical impulse, ornothing at all. And so he would have it performed in ordinary places ofcongregation, at fairs, in taverns, music-halls, street-cars, if youwill, in order to enable it to function freely once again. His art ispointed to quicken, to infect, to begin an action that the listener mustcomplete within himself. It is a sort of musical shorthand. On paper, ithas a fragmentary look. It is as though Strawinsky had sought to reducethe elements of music to their sharpest and simplest terms, had hopedthat the "development" would be made by the audience. He seems to feelthat if he cannot achieve his end, the communication of his lyricalimpulse, with a single strong _motif_, a single strong movement oftones, a single rhythmic start, he cannot achieve it at all. So we findhim writing songs, the three Japanese lyrics, for instance, that areepigrammatic in their brevity; a piece for string-quartet that is playedin fifty seconds; a three-act opera that can be performed in thirtyminutes. 

But it is no experiment in form that he is making. He seems to bringinto music some of the power of the Chinese artists who, in the paintingof a twig, or of a pair of blossoms, represent the entire springtide. Hehas written some of the freshest, most rippling, delicate music. Scarcely a living man has written more freshly or humorously. April, theflowering branches, the snowing petals, the clouds high in the blue, arereally in the shrilling little orchestra of the Japanese lyrics, in thegreen, gurgling flutes and watery violins. None of the innumerableSpring Symphonies, Spring Overtures, Spring Songs, are really morevernal, more soaked in the gentle sunshine of spring, are more reallythe seed-time, than the six naïve piping measures of melody thatintroduce the figure of the "Sacre" entitled "Rondes printanières. " Nodoubt, in venturing to write music so bold and original in esthetic, Strawinsky was encouraged by the example of another musician, anotherRussian composer. Moussorgsky, before him, had trusted in his owninnocence instead of in the wisdom of the fathers of the musical church, had dared obey the promptings of his own blood and set down chords, melodies, rhythms, just as they sang in his skull, though all the worldrise up to damn him. But the penning of music as jagged, cubical, barbarous as the prelude to the third act of Strawinsky's little opera, "The Nightingale, " or as naked, uncouth, rectangular, rocklike, polyharmonic, headlong, as some of that of "Le Sacre du printemps"required no less perfect a conviction, no less great a self-reliance. The music of Strawinsky is the expression of an innocence comparableindeed to that of his great predecessor. "Le Sacre du printemps" is whatits composer termed it. It is "an act of faith. "

And so, free of preconceptions, Strawinsky was able to let nature movehim to imitation. Just as Picasso brings twentieth-century nature intohis still lives, so the young composer brings it into his music. It isthe rhythm of machinery that has set Strawinsky the artist free. All hislife he has been conscious of these steel men. Mechanical things haveinfluenced his art from the beginning. It is as though machinery hadrevealed him to himself, as though sight of the functioning of thesemetal organisms, themselves but the extension of human bones and musclesand organs, had awakened into play the engine that is his proper body. For, as James Oppenheim has put it in the introduction to "The Book ofSelf, " "Man's body is just as large as his tools, for a tool is merelyan extension of muscle and bone; a wheel is a swifter foot, a derrick agreater hand. Consequently, in the early part of the century, the racefound itself with a new gigantic body. " It is as though the infection ofthe dancing, lunging, pumping piston-rods, walking beams, drills, hasawakened out of Strawinsky a response and given him his power to beatout rhythm. The machine has always fascinated him. One of his firstoriginal compositions, written while he was yet a pupil ofRimsky-Korsakoff's, imitates fireworks, distinguishes what is human intheir activity, in the popping, hissing, exploding, in the hystericalweeping of the fiery fountains, the proud exhibitions and suddencollapses of the pin-wheels. It is the machine, enemy of man, that ispictured by "The Nightingale, " that curious work of which one act datesfrom 1909, and two from 1914. Strawinsky had the libretto formed on thetale of Hans Christian Andersen which recounts the adventures of thelittle brown bird that sings so beautifully that the Emperor of Chinabids it to his court. Strawinsky's nightingale, too, comes to the palaceand sings, and all the ladies of the entourage fill their mouths withwater in the hopes of better imitating the warbling of the songster. Butthen there enter envoys bearing the gift of the Emperor of Japan, amechanical nightingale that amuses the court with its clockwork antics. Once more the emperor commands the woodland bird to sing. But it isflown. In his rage the emperor banishes it from his realm. Then Deathcomes and sits at the emperor's bedside, and steals from him crown andscepter, till, of a sudden, the Nightingale returns, and sings, andmakes Death relinquish his spoils. And the courtiers who come into theimperial bedchamber expecting to find the monarch dead, find him welland glad in the morning sunshine. 

And in his two major works, "Petruchka" and "Le Sacre du printemps, "Strawinsky makes the machine represent his own person. For the actionsof machinery woke first in the human organism, and Strawinskyintensifies consciousness of the body by referring these motions totheir origin. "Petruchka" is the man-machine seen from without, seenunsympathetically, in its comic aspect. Countless poets beforeStrawinsky have attempted to portray the puppet-like activities of thehuman being, and "Petruchka" is but one of the recent of innumerablestage-shows that expose the automaton in the human soul. But thepuppet-show of Strawinsky is singular because of its musicalaccompaniment. For more than even the mimes on the stage, the orchestrais full of the spirit of the automaton. The angular, wooden gestures ofthe dolls, their smudged faces, their entrails of sawdust, are in themusic ten times as intensely as they are upon the stage. In the score of"Petruchka" music itself has become a little mannikin in parti-coloredclothes, at which Strawinsky gazes and laughs as a child laughs at afunny doll, and makes dance and tosses in the air, and sends sprawling. The score is full of the revolutions of wheels, of delicate clockworkmovements, of screws and turbines. Beneath the music one hears alwaysthe regular, insistent, maniacal breathing of a concertina. And what init is not purely mechanistic nevertheless completes the picture of theworld as it appears to one who has seen the man-machine in all itscomedy. The stage pictures, the trumpery little fair, the tinsel andpathetic finery of the crowds, the dancing of the human ephemeridæ amoment before the snow begins to fall, are stained marvelously deeply bythe music. The score has the colors of crudely dyed, faded bunting. Ithas indeed a servant girl grace, a coachman ardor, a barrel-organ, tintype, popcorn, fortune-teller flavor. 

"Le Sacre, " on the other hand, is the man-machine viewed not fromwithout, and unsympathetically, but from within. So far, it isStrawinsky's masterwork, the completest and purest expression of hisgenius. For the elements that make for the originality of style of"Petruchka" and the other of Strawinsky's representative compositions, in this work attain a signal largeness and powerfulness. The rhythmicelement, already fresh and free in the scherzo of "L'Oiseau de feu" andthroughout "Petruchka, " attains virile and magistral might in it, surgesand thunders with giant vigor. The instrumentation, magical with allthe magic of the Russian masters in the earlier ballets, here isinformed by the sharpness, hardness, nakedness which is originallyStrawinsky's. Besides, the latter work has the thing hitherto lackingsomewhat in the young man's art--grandeur and severity and ironness oflanguage. In it he stands completely new, completely in possession ofhis powers. And in it the machine operates. Ostensibly, the action ofthe ballet is laid in prehistoric times. Ostensibly, it figures theritual with which a tribe of stone-age Russians consecrated the spring. Something of the sort was necessary, for an actual representation ofmachines, a ballet of machines, would not have been as grimlysignificant as the angular, uncouth gestures of men, would by no meanshave as nakedly revealed the human engine. Here, in the choreography, every fluid, supple, curving motion is suppressed. Everything isangular, cubical, rectilinear. The music pounds with the rhythm ofengines, whirls and spirals like screws and fly-wheels, grinds andshrieks like laboring metal. The orchestra is transmuted to steel. Eachmovement of the ballet correlates the rhythms of machinery with thehuman rhythms which they prolong and repeat. A dozen mills pulsate atonce. Steam escapes; exhausts breathe heavily. The weird orchestralintroduction to the second scene has all the oppressive silence ofmachines immobile at night. And in the hurtling finale the music and thedancers create figure that is at once the piston and a sexual action. For Strawinsky has stripped away from man all that with whichspecialization, differentiation, have covered him, and revealed himagain, in a sort of cruel white light, a few functioning organs. He hasshown him a machine to which power is applied, and which labors in blindobedience precisely like the microscopic animal that eats and parturatesand dies. The spring comes; and life replenishes itself; and man, likeseed and germ, obeys the promptings of the blind power that created him, and accomplishes his predestined course and takes in energy and pours itout again. But, for a moment, in "Le Sacre du printemps, " we feel themotor forces, watch the naked wheels and levers and arms at work, seethe dynamo itself. 

The ballet was completed in 1913, the year Strawinsky was thirty-oneyears old. It may be that the work will be succeeded by others even moreoriginal, more powerful. Or it may be that Strawinsky has alreadywritten his masterpiece. The works that he has composed during the warare not, it appears, strictly new developments. Whatever enlargement ofthe field of the string quartet the three little pieces which theFlonzaleys played here in 1915 created, there is no doubt that it wasnothing at all to compare with the innovation in orchestral musiccreated by the great ballet. And, according to rumor, the newest ofStrawinsky's work, the music-hall ballet for eight clowns, and the workfor the orchestra, ballet and chorus entitled "Les Noces villageoises, "are by no means as bold in style as "Le Sacre, " and resemble "Petruchka"more than the later ballet. But, whatever Strawinsky's futureaccomplishment, there can be no doubt that with this one work, if notalso with "Petruchka, " he has secured a place among the true musicians. It is doubtful whether any living composer has opened new musical landmore widely than he. For he has not only minted music anew. He hasreached a point ahead of us that the world would have reached withouthim. That alone shows him the genius. He has brought into musicsomething for which we had long been waiting, and which we knew must oneday arrive. To us, at this moment, "Le Sacre du printemps" appears oneof those compositions that mark off the musical miles. 

Mahler

Almost simultaneously with the rise of Russian music and the new birthof French music, that of Germany has deteriorated. The great line ofcomposers which descended from Bach and Haendel for two centuries haswavered and diminished visibly during the last three decades. The proudtradition seems to have reached a temporary halt in Wagner and Brucknerand Brahms. It may be that modern Germany is a difficult terrain, thatthe violent change in conditions of life, the furious acceleration, hascreated, for the time being, a soil unusually inimical to the disclosureof perfect works of art. The blight on the entire new generation ofcomposers would seem to point to some such common cause. There is, nodoubt, a curious coincidence in the fact that in each of the four chiefGerman musicians of the recent period there should be manifest in somedegree a failure of artistic instinct. The coarsening of thecraftsmanship, the spiritual bankruptcy, of the later Strauss, thegrotesque pedantry of Reger, the intellectualism with which the art ofSchoenberg has always been tainted, and by which it has been corruptedof late, the banality of Mahler, dovetail suspiciously. And yet, it isprobable that the cause lies otherwhere, and that the conjunction ofthese four men is accidental. There have been, after all, fewenvironments really friendly to the artist; most of the masters have hadto recover from a "something rotten in the state of Denmark, " and manyof them have surmounted conditions worse than those of modernBismarckian Germany. The cause of the unsatisfactoriness of much of themusic of Strauss and Schoenberg, Reger and Mahler, is doubtless to befound in the innate weakness of the men themselves rather more than inthe unhealthiness of the atmosphere in which they passed their lives. 

Still, the case of Mahler makes one hesitate a while before passingjudgment. Whereas it is probable that Richard Strauss would havedeteriorated no matter how friendly the age in which he lived, thatReger would have been just as much a pedant had he been born in Parisinstead of in Bavaria, that Schoenberg would have developed into hismathematical frigidity wherever he resided, it is possible that Mahler'sfate might have been different had he not been born in the Austria ofthe 1860's. For if Mahler's music is pre-eminently a reflection ofBeethoven's, if he never spoke in authentic accents, if out of his vastdreams of a great modern popular symphonic art, out of his honesty, hissincerity, his industry, his undeniably noble and magnificent traits, there resulted only those unhappy boring colossi that are his ninesymphonies, it is indubitably, to a great extent, the consequence ofthe fact that he, the Jew, was born in a society that made Judaism, Jewish descent and Jewish traits, a curse to those that inherited them. The destiny that had made him Jew decreed that, did he speak out fully, he would have to employ an idiom that would recall the harsh accents ofthe Hebrew language quite as much as that of any tongue spoken by thepeoples of Europe. It decreed that, whatever the history of the art hepractised, whatever the character of the age in which he lived, he couldnot impress himself upon his medium without impregnating it with thetraits he inherited from his ancestors. It decreed that in speaking hewould have to suffuse musical art with the qualities and characteristicsengraved in the stock by the history and vicissitudes of his race, byits age-long sojourn in the deserts of Arabia and on the barren hills ofSyria, by the constraint of its religion and folkways, by its titanicand terrible struggle for survival against the fierce peoples of Asia, by the marvelous vitality and self-consciousness and exclusiveness thatcarried it whole across lands and times, out of the eternal Egyptthrough the eternal Red Sea. But it was just the racial attributes, theracial gesture and accent, that a man in Mahler's position foundinordinately difficult to register. For Austrian society put a greatprice on his suppression of them. It permitted him to participate in itsactivities only on the condition that he did not remind it continuallyof his alienhood, of his racial consciousness. It permitted him thesense of equality, of fraternity, of citizenship, only on the conditionthat he should seek to suppress within himself all awareness of hisdescent and character and peculiarities, and attempt to identify himselfwith its members, and try to feel just as they felt and speak just asthey spoke. 

For if Austro-German society had admitted the Jews to civil rights, ithad made them feel as never before the old hatred and malediction andexclusion. The walls of the ghettos had, after all, prevented the Jewfrom feeling the full force of the disability under which he labored, insomuch as they had repressed in him all desire to mingle in the lifeof the country in which he found himself. But in exciting hisgregariousness, in appearing to allow him to participate in the publiclife, in both inviting and repelling him, a community like that ofAustria, still so near the Middle Ages, made him feel in all itsterrible might the handicap of race, the mad hatred and contempt withwhich it punished his descent. And it is but natural that amongst thosevery Jews best fitted to take part in affairs, and consequently mostsensitive to the ill-will that barred them from power and success, thereshould be aroused, despite all conscious efforts neither to surrendernor to shrink, an unconscious desire to escape the consequences of thething that stamped them in the eyes of the general as individuals of aninferior sort; to inhibit any spiritual gesture that might arousehostility; and to ward off any subjective sense of personal inferiorityby convincing themselves and their fellows that they possessed thetraits generally esteemed. 

So a ruinous conflict was introduced into the soul of Gustav Mahler. Inthe place of the united self, there came to exist within him two men. For while one part of him demanded the free complete expressionnecessary to the artist, another sought to block it for fear that in thefree flow the hated racial traits would appear. For Mahler would havebeen the first to have been repelled by the sound of his own harsh, haughty, guttural, abrupt Hebrew inflection. He would have been thefirst to turn in contempt from his own gestures. There was in him thefrenetic unconscious desire to rid himself of the thing he had come tobelieve inferior. And rather than express it, rather than speak in hisproper idiom, he made, unaware to himself, perhaps, the choice ofspeaking through the voices of other men, of the great German composers;of imitating them instead of developing his own personality; ofaccepting sterility and banality and impotence rather than achieving apower of speech. 

And so his work became the doubtful and bastard thing it is, a thing oflofty and original intentions unrealized, of large powers misapplied, ofgreat and respectable creative efforts that did not succeed in bringinginto being anything really new, really whole. Of what Mahler might haveachieved had he not been the divided personality, his symphonies, evenas they stand, leave no doubt. If Mahler is not a great man, he is atleast the silhouette of one. The need of expression that drove him tocomposition was indubitably mighty. The passion with which he addressedhimself to his labor despite all discouragement and lack of success, theloftiness and nobleness of the task which he set for himself, thesplendor of the intentions, reveal how fierce a fire burnt in the man. He was not one of those who come to music to form little jewels. On thecontrary, in gesture he was ever one of the eminently faithful. He cameto music to create a great, simple, popular symphonic art for theselatter days, a thing of broad lines and simple contours and spiritualgrandeur. He sought to express sincerely his deep, real sorrow, hischoking homesickness for the something which childhood seems to possessand maturity to be without; to dream himself into childlike, paradisaicjoys and wake himself to faith and action once again. He attempted tocreate a musical language that would be gigantic and crude and powerfulas Nature herself; tried to imbue the orchestra with the Dionysiac mightof sun and winds and teeming clay; wished to be able to say of hissymphonies, "Hier rörht die Natur. " To a friend who visited him at hiscountry house in Toblach and commented upon the mountains surroundingthe spot, Mahler jestingly replied, "Ich hab' sie alle fortcomponiert. "And he had large and dramatic programs for his symphonies. The Firstshould have been a sort of Song of Youth, a farewell to the thing thatis alive in us before we meet the world, and is shattered in thecollision. The Second should have been the Song of Death, the music ofthe knowledge of death. The Third was conceived as a Song of the GreatPan--his "gaya scienza, " Mahler would have liked to call it. In theFourth he sought to open the heart of a child; in the Sixth, to voicehis desolation and loneliness and hopelessness; in the Eighth, toperform a great religious ceremony; in "Das Lied von der Erde" to writehis "Tempest, " his epilogue. 

And in general plan, his symphonies are original enough. Mahler wascompletely emancipated of all the old prejudices concerning the natureof the symphony. He conceived the form anew. "Mir heiszt Symphonic, " heis reported to have said, "mit allen mitteln der vorhändenen Technik mireine Welt aufbauen. " He conceived the form particularly with referenceto the being, the exigencies, the frame, of the modern concert hall. Herealized that the shortness of the classic symphonies handicaps themseverely in the present day. For modern audiences require an hour and ahalf or two hours of musical entertainment. In order to fill the concertprograms, the symphony has to be associated with other works. Inconsequence it loses in effectiveness. So, taking hints from the Ninthof Beethoven and the "Roméo" of Berlioz, Mahler boldly plannedsymphonies that could stand alone and fill an evening. Beginning withhis Second, he increased the number of movements, dropping theinevitable suite of allegro, andante, scherzo, rondo; prescribedintermissions of a certain length; and added choruses and vocal solos togive the necessary relief to the long orchestral passages. In theSecond, he placed between an allegretto and a scherzo a soprano settingof one of the lyrics out of "Des Knaben Wunderhorn, " and concluded thework with a choral setting of one ode of Klopstock's. In the ThirdSymphony, he preceded the orchestral finale with an alto solo composedon "Das Trunkene Lied" of Nietzsche, and with a chorus employing thewords of another of the naïve poems in the anthology of Arnim andBrentano. The Eighth is simply a choral setting of the "Veni, Creator"and the closing scene of Goethe's "Faust. " And in the Fifth Symphony, one of those in which he called for no vocal performers, he neverthelessmanaged to vary and expand the conventional suite by preceding the firstallegro with a march, and separating and relieving the gargantuanscherzo and rondo with an adagietto for strings alone. 

His material he organized fairly independently of the old rules. He wasone of those who seem to have learned from Liszt that the content of apiece must condition its form. Mahler's symphonies resemble symphonicpoems. They are essentially dramatic in character. Although he strovecontinually for classic form, his works nevertheless reveal theirprogrammatic origin. He was at heart one of the literary composers. Buthe was a better craftsman than most of them are. He was a finer workmanthan Strauss, for instance. His scores are much more bony. They are freeof the mass of insignificant detail that clutters so many of Strauss's. He could asseverate with some justice, "I have never written aninsincere note. " And although his orchestration is not revolutionary, and is often commonplace enough, he nevertheless oftentimes employed aninstrumental palette distinctly his own. He utilized instead of theviolin the trumpet as premier instrument of the band; achieved allmanner of brilliant effects with it. He increased the variety andusefulness of the instruments of percussion, forming out of them a newfamily of instruments to balance the families of the strings, brass, andwood-wind. In the score of the Second Symphony he calls for six timpani, bass and snare-drums, a high and a low tam-tam, cymbals, a triangle, glockenspiel, three deep-toned bells, in the chief orchestra; besides abass-drum, triangle and cymbals in the supplementary. In the EighthSymphony, the instruments of percussion form a little band bythemselves. And he utilized the common instruments in original fashion, made the harps imitate bells, the wood-wind blow fanfares, the hornshold organ-points; combined piccolos with bassoons and contrabasses, wrote unisons for eight horns, let the trombones run scales----

But there is not one of poor Mahler's nine symphonies, honest anddignified as some of them are, that exists as fresh, new-minted, vividmusic. His genius never took musical flesh. His scores are lamentablyweak, often arid and banal. There is surely not another case in musicalhistory in which indubitable genius, a mighty need of expression, adistinctly personal manner of sensation, a respectable musical science, a great and idealistic effort, achieved results so unsatisfactory. Onewonders whether Mahler the composer was not, after all, the greatestfailure in music. If there is any music that is eminentlyKapellmeistermusik, eminently a routine, reflective, dusty sort ofmusical art, it is certainly Mahler's five latter symphonies. Themusical Desert of Sahara is surely to be found in these unhappycompositions. They are monsters of ennui, and by their verypretentiousness, their gargantuan dimensions, throw into cruelest reliefMahler's essential sterility. They seek to be colossal and achievevacuity chiefly. They remind one of nothing so much as the huge, ugly, misshapen "giants" that stand before the old Palace in Florence, work ofthe obscure sculptor who thought to outdo Michelangelo by sheer bulk. And the first four of his symphonies, though less utterly banal andpedantic, are still amorphous and fundamentally second-hand. For Mahlernever spoke in his own idiom. His style is a mongrel affair. Thethematic material is almost entirely derivative and imitative, of anunequaled mediocrity and depressingness. One wonders whether indeedthere has ever been a respectable composer who has utilized ideas asplatitudinous as the ones employed in the first movement of the FirstSymphony, or the brassy, pompous theme that opens the Eighth, or thetune to which in the latter work the mystic stanza beginning

 "Alles vergängliche Ist nur ein Gleichnisz"

is intoned. One wonders whether any has used themes more saccharine andcharacterless than those of the last movement of the Third Symphony, orthe adagio of the Fourth. Once in a while, no doubt, a vague personaltone, a flavor of the Bohemian countryside where Mahler was born, doesmanage to distinguish itself from the great inchoate masses of hissymphonies. The strolling musician plays on his clarinet; peasants sitat tables covered with red cloths and drink beer; Hans and Gretel dance;evening falls; the brooks run silvered; from the barracks resound theAustrian bugle calls; old soldier songs, that may have been sung in theSeven Years' War, arise; the watchman makes his sleepy rounds. 

But, for the most part, it is precisely the personal tone that his musiccompletely lacks. For he was never himself. He was everybody and nobody. He was forever seeking to be one composer or another, save only notGustav Mahler. The fatal assimilative power of the Jew is revealednowhere in music more sheerly than in the style of Mahler. RomainRolland discovers alone in the Fifth Symphony reminiscences of Beethovenand Mendelssohn, Bach and Chabrier. Schubert flits persistently throughMahler's scores, particularly through that of the Third Symphony, whoseintroductory theme for eight horns recalls almost pointedly the openingof the C-major of Schubert, without, however, in the least recapturingits effectiveness. Bruckner, Mahler's teacher, is also incessantlyreflected by these works, by the choral themes which Mahler is so fondof embodying in his compositions, and, more particularly, by the lengthand involutions of so many of the themes of his later symphonies. For, like Bruckner's, they appear chosen with an eye to their serviceabilityfor contrapuntal deformation and dissection. Wagner, Haydn, Schumann andBrahms, the sentimental _Wienerwald_ Brahms, also pass incessantlythrough these scores. But it was Beethoven whom Mahler sought chiefly toemulate. Over his symphonies (and it is a curious fact that Mahler, likethe three men that he most frequently imitated, Schubert, Bruckner, andBeethoven, wrote just nine symphonies), over his entire work, his songsas well as his orchestral pieces, there lies the shadow of the Master ofBonn. Mahler was undoubtedly Beethoven's most faithful disciple. All hislife he was seeking to write the "Tenth Symphony, " the symphony thatBeethoven died before composing. He was continually attempting toapproximate the other's grand, pathetic tone, his broad andself-righteous manner. His music is full of but slightly disguisedquotations. The trumpet-theme that ushers in Mahler's Fifth Symphony, for instance, appears the result of an attempt to cross the theme of thefuneral march of the "Eroica Symphony" with the famous four raps ofBeethoven's Fifth. In the first movement of the Second Symphony, justbefore the appearance on the oboe of the scarcely disguised "Sleep"motif from "Die Walküre, " a theme almost directly lifted out ofBeethoven's violin concerto is announced on the 'cellos and horns. Andthe andante of the same symphony derives from both the allegretto ofBeethoven's Eighth and the andante of his "Pastoral Symphony"; might, indeed, figure as a sort of "Szene am Bach" through which there flow theyellowish tides of the Danube. Beethoven is recalled by some of Mahler'striumphant finales, particularly by those of the Fifth and SeventhSymphonies, and by many of Mahler's adagio passages. "Es sucht derBruder seinen Bruder, " oh, how often and at what length throughMahler's symphonies, and with what persistency on the tenor trumpet! Andhow often in them does not the German family man take his childrenwalking in the woods of a Sunday afternoon and bid them worship theirCreator for having implanted the Love of Virtue in the Human Heart!

Just as it was inevitable that Mahler, instead of developing his ownartistic individuality, should seek all his life to identify himselfwith certain other composers, so, too, it was inevitable that it shouldbe Beethoven whom he would most sedulously emulate. For not only wasBeethoven the great classic presence of the German concert hall, anddeemed, in the words of Lanier, the "dear living lord of tone, " the"sole hymner of the whole of life. " He was also, of all the masters, theone spiritually most akin to Mahler. For Beethoven was also one of thosewho wish to endow their art with moral grandeur, give it power to rousethe noblest human traits, to make it communicate ethical andphilosophical conceptions. He, too, came to his art with a magnanimoushope of invigorating and consoling and redeeming his brothers, ofhealing the wounds of life and binding all men in the bonds offraternity. Torn between desire of self-expression, and fear ofself-revelation, Mahler found the solution of his conflict in thisparticular piece of self-identification. 

And had Mahler been able really to be himself alone, to develop his ownindividuality, he would no doubt have been the thing he most desired tobe, and given the world a new Beethoven. But, as imitator, he is farfrom being Beethoven! Whatever Beethoven's limitations (and they weremany, for all that the worshiping crowd may say), he nevertheless had inextraordinary degree two things which Mahler eminently lacked--inventivegenius and a giant peasant strength. He was able to cope vigorously withthe gigantic programs he set for himself. At moments, no doubt, as inthe C-minor Symphony and so many of his piano-sonatas, one is repelledby a certain indefinable pompousness and self-righteousness andexasperated by the obviousness and dullness and heaviness of his art. The finale of the Ninth Symphony with its blare and crash, its chorusscreaming on high C, its Turkish March with cymbals and bass-drum, isnot entirely inspired, most folk will agree. And yet, for all hisshortcomings, the wonders of Beethoven are innumerable. There are themany quartets with their masterly invention and composition, the Firstand Sixth Symphonies with their immortal youth and freshness, theirhearty strength and simplicity, the deeply beautiful passages andmovements to be found in nearly every one of his works. There is all thewonderful solidity that Mahler, for instance, never achieved. For inpoor Mahler's work we feel only the intention, rarely the achievement. We feel him agonizedly straining, pushing and laboring, trying tomanufacture his banal thematic material into music by the application ofall the little contrapuntal formulas. We find him relying finally uponphysical apparatus, upon sheer brute force. His symphonies abound insenseless repetitions, in all sorts of eye-music. And in the EighthSymphony, the apotheosis of his reliance on the physical, he calls for achorus of a thousand men, women and children, and at the end, I believe, the descent of the Holy Ghost. But the ultimate effect is exactly thereverse of what Mahler planned. The very size of the apparatus throwsinto crudest relief his weariness and uncreativeness. For a moment, awork like the Eighth Symphony stuns the auditor with its sheer physicalbulk. After all, one does not hear a thousand voices singing togetherevery day, and the brass and the percussion are very brilliant. Soon, nevertheless, there insinuates itself the realization that there is inthis work neither the all-creating spirit the composer so magniloquentlyinvokes, nor the heaven he strives so ardently to attain. They are inthe music of a score of other composers. For these men had lived. And itwas to real life that Mahler never attained. 

If his music expresses anything at all, it expresses just thecharacteristics that Mahler was most anxious to have it conceal. Life isthe greatest of practical jokers, and Mahler, in seeking to escape hisracial traits, ended by representing nothing so much as the Jew. For ifthere is anything visible behind the music of Mahler, it is the Jew asWagner, say, describes him in "Das Judentum in der Musik, " the Jew whothrough the superficial assimilation of the traits of the people amongwhom he is condemned to live, and through the suppression of his ownnature, becomes sterile. It is the Jew consumed by malaise andhomesickness, by impotent yearning for the terrain which will permit himfree expression, and which he conceives as an otherwheres, or as adream-Palestine. It is the Jew unable to feel faith or joy or contentbecause he is unable to live out his own life. It is the Jew consumed bybitterness because he is perpetually untrue to himself. It is the Jewafraid to die because he has never really lived himself out. It is theJew as he is when he wants most to cease being a Jew. Mahler could haveseemed no more the Jew had he expressed himself in all his Hebraicfervor instead of singing about Saint Peter in Heaven and seeking toreconcile Rhabanus Maurus and Goethe in a "higher synthesis. " Only, itwould have been good music instead of a nondescript and mongrel thingthat he composed. All that he really attained by hampering himself wassterility. 

And, in the end, we are forced to conclude that it was not solely theenvironment, however much that favored it, that condemned Mahler tosterility. Did we have no example of a Jewish musician attainingcreativity through the frank expression of his Semitic characteristics, we might presume that no choice existed for Mahler, and that it isinevitable that the Jew, whenever he essays the grand style, becomesjust what Wagner called him in his brilliant and brutal pamphlet, apretender. But, fortunately, such an example does exist. Geneva, "laville Protestante, " that saw unclose the art of Ernest Bloch, was, afterall, not much more eager to welcome a Jewish renaissance than was theVienna of Gustav Mahler. But some inner might that the elder man lackedgave the young Genevese composer the courage to speak out, and to attainsalvation. It was, after all, a sort of intelligence, a sense ofreality, a real overwhelming spiritual strength that Mahler lacked. Forall his immense capacities, he was a weak man. He permitted hisenvironment to ruin him. 

Reger

The copies of most of Max Reger's compositions are ornamented with acover design representing Beethoven's death-mask wreathed with laurel. It was in all sincerity that his publishers placed that decorationthere. For there was a moment when Reger excited high hopes. At the timewhen he appeared, the cause of "absolute" music seemed lost. Musicalmodernity and the programmatic form had come to seem inseparable. Theold classical forms were being supplanted by those of Wagner, Liszt andStrauss. Not that there was a paucity of bespectacled doctors of musicwho felt themselves called to compose "classical" works. But the contentof their work was invariably formal. Reger, however, seemed able toeffect a union between the modern spirit and the forms employed by themasters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He, the troubled, nervous, modern man, wrote with fluency fugues and double fugues, chaconnes and passacaglie, concerti grossi and variations. He seemed tohave mastered the secrets of the old composers, to be continuing theirwork, developing their thought and style. He excelled in the control ofwhat appeared to be the technicalities of composition. Had he not, inhis "Contributions to the Theory of Harmony, " proposed one hundredexamples of cadences modulating from the common chord of C-major throughevery possible key and transpository sequence? Had he not written twobooks of canons displaying the most amazing technical ingenuities; foundit simple, as in his "Sinfonietta, " to keep five or six strands ofcounterpoint going? And so, believing that he was about to do for themusic of the post-Wagnerian period what Brahms had done for that of theromantic period, the musical conservatives and traditionalists ralliedto him. He was acclaimed by a large public lineal successor of the threegreat "B's" of music. Quite in the manner that they had once opposedBrahms to the composer of "Parsifal, " the partisans of musicalabsolutism elevated Reger as a sort of anti-pope to Richard Strauss. Whole numbers of musical reviews were devoted to the study anddiscussion of his art in all its ramifications. Reger seemed on theverge of gaining a place among the immortals. And his publishers placedon the covers of his compositions the design that symbolized the greatthings they thought the man achieving, and the high heavens for whichthey believed him bound. 

The success was momentary only. Long before he died, the world had foundin Max Reger its musical _bête noire_. Closer acquaintance with his arthad not ingratiated him with his public. Indeed, concert-audiences hadbecome bored to the point of exasperation with his classicizingcompositions. To most folk, it appeared as though the man saw no otherend in composition than the attainment of the opus-number One Thousand. And although his works are rife with the sort of technical problems andsolutions which those initiated into musical science are supposed torelish, few musicians found them really attractive. Reger made variousattempts to regain the favor he had lost. They were unavailing. Evenwhen he turned his back on the absolutists and wrote programmatic music, romantic suites that begin with Debussy-like low flutes and end withtrumpet blasts that recall the sunrise music of "Also SprachZarathustra, " ballet suites that seek to rival the "Carnaval" ofSchumann and the waltzes in "Der Rosenkavalier, " "Böcklin" suites thatpretend to translate into tone some of the Swiss painter's canvases, heonly intensified the general ill-will. People who knew him whisper thathe realized his failure, and in consequence took to emptying the vats ofbeer that finally drowned him. And on the occasion of his death, valediction went no further than frigidly applauding his creditable workfor the organ, his erudition and productivity that almost rival those ofthe eighteenth-century composers. The final attempt to interest thepublic in his work, made during the succeeding season, brought but fewpeople to repent of their former indifference. A revival of interest isscarcely to be expected. 

For it was not a Brahms the world had gotten again. Indeed, it was apersonality of just the sort that Brahms was not. The resemblance was ofthe most superficial. Both men went to school to Bach and the polyphonicmasters. Both were traditionalists. There the kinship ends. For the onewas a poet, a sturdily living, rich and powerful person. The other wasessentially a harsh and ugly being, eminently wanting the divine flame. For Brahms, erudition was only a means to his end, a fortification ofhis personal mode of expression. He saw that the weaknesses of many ofthe romantic composers, his kin, of Schumann his spiritual father inparticular, were due their want of organizing power, their helplessnessin the larger forms. And eager to achieve large, solid, resisting formin his own work, he went to the great masters of musical science, toBeethoven and Haydn and in particular to Bach, to learn of them, that hemight do for his day something of what they had done for theirs. And hewas able to assimilate vast quantities of his learning, and make it partof his flesh and bone. At times, no doubt, one is painfully aware of hiserudition, painfully aware that he is applying principles learned fromBeethoven and Bach, manipulating his music out of no inner necessity. Attimes, his music does smell of the lamp. And yet, how completely thosejuiceless moments are outbalanced by the mass of his living, fragrant, robust song! With what rareness the pedant in Brahms emerges! Behindthis music there is almost always visible the great, grave, passionate, resigned creature that was Brahms, the man who sought with all his mightto hold himself firm and erect and unyielding before the hideousonslaughts of life, the man who lived without hope of fulfilment, lovedwithout hope of consummation, and yet knew that it was enoughfulfilment, enough consummation to have loved, to have been touched witha radiant dream; the man who prayed only that his heart might notwither, and that he might never cease to long and dream and feel thehurt and solace of beauty and have the power to sing. And in his musicthere is almost always the consolation of the great forests, the healingof the trees and silences, the cooling hands of the earth, theeverlasting yea-saying to love and beauty, the manly resignation, theleave-taking from dreams and life. All this music says, "Song isenough. "

But no such goodly presence glimmers through the music of Max Reger. Nosturdy bardic spirit vibrates in it. This Reger is a sarcastic, churlishfellow, bitter and pedantic and rude. He is a sort of musical Cyclops, astrong, ugly creature bulging with knotty and unshapely muscles, an ogreof composition. He has little delicacy, little finesse of spirit. Inlistening to these works with their clumsy blocks of tone, their eternalsunless complaining, their lack of humor where they would be humorous, their lack of passion where they would be profound, their sardonic andmonotonous bourdon, one is perforce reminded of the photograph of Regerwhich his publishers place on the cover of their catalogue of his works, the photograph that shows something that is like a swollen, myopicbeetle with thick lips and sullen expression crouching on anorgan-bench. There is something repulsive as well as pedantic in thisart. The poetry, the nobility, the moderation and cleanness of line ofBrahms is absent. Instead, there is a sort of brutal coldness, thecoldness of the born pedant, a prevalence of bad humor, a poverty ofinvention and organizing power that conceals itself under an elaborateand complex and erudite surface. The strong, calm, classic beauty ofBrahms is wanting. For all its air of subtlety and severity andprofundity, its learned and classicizing manner, the music of Reger isreally superficial. The man only seldom achieves form. Generally, forall the complex and convulsive activity of his music, nothing reallyprogresses, develops, happens in it. Above all, the stylistic severityof Brahms in Reger has become a confusion of styles; an absence ofstyle. The classic has become the baroque. 

Reger is one of the men who develop muscles that hamper all grace andfreedom of activity. One cannot help feeling that he went to the classicmasters for their formulas in order to make of composition chiefly amental exercise, that he accepted so many rules and manners and turns inorder to free himself of the necessity of making free and full andspontaneous movements. With Reger, creation becomes routine. His worksare stereotyped; stale terribly quickly. There are moments when onewonders whether he understood at all what creation is. For certainly, three-quarters of his compositions seem written out of no innernecessity, bring no liberation in their train. They are likemathematical problems and solutions, sheer brain-spun and unlyricalworks. One is ever conscious in Reger that he is solving contrapuntalproblems in order to astonish the vulgar herd of the professors. Regercertainly knew the art of talking with an astonishing show of logic, andyet saying nothing. Perhaps he talked continuously in order not to haveto reflect. And for all his erudition, he understood his mastersintellectually only. He felt himself called upon to continue the work ofthe three great "B's, " and yet never understood the grand spirit thatanimated their art. Strauss, with his fine conduct of instrumentsthrough the score of "Salome, " is nearer the spirit of Bach than Regerwith all his fugues and double fugues ever got. 

No doubt, Reger loved the mathematical solidity and balance of the oldermusic, and therefore sought to assimilate it. But he did more than justlearn of it, as Brahms had done. He sought to rival the great men ofthe past on their own ground, to do what they did better than they haddone it, to be able to say, "See, I can do the trick, too!" So we findhim writing counterpoint for the sake of the learnedness and presumablerespectability, rather than as a piece of expression. His compositionsare overburdened and cluttered and marred by all sorts of erudite turnsand twists and manoeuvers. The man's entire attention seems to havebeen set on making his works astonish the learned and make mad thesimple. Even a slight song like "Wenn die Linde blüht" is decked withcontrapuntal felicities. He copies the mannerisms of the composers ofthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contorts his compositions withall manner of outmoded turns. He appears to have come to his worktableinevitably with his mind full of the compositions he had been studying. His impulse seems always a reflected thing, a desire to compete withsome one on that person's terms. He writes fugues for organs and sonatasfor violin solo under the influence of Bach, concerti grossi under theinfluence of Haendel, variations under that of Mozart, sonatas underthat of Brahms. In vain one searches for a perfectly individual stylethroughout his works. The living man is buried under the mass of badlyassimilated learning. Even at best, in the Hiller variations, in some ofthe string trios and organ fugues, some of his grave adagios, even insome of his sardonic and turbulent scherzi (perhaps his most originalcontributions), his art is rather more a refinement on another art thana fresh and vital expression. In him, education had produced the typicalpedant, a pedant of Cyclopean muscularity, perhaps, but nevertheless apedant. 

And so, instead of being Brahms's successor, Reger is to-day seen as thevery contrary of Brahms. It is not that fugues and concerti in the oldenstyle cannot be written to-day, that modern music and the antique formsare incompatible. It is that Reger was very little the artist. Hemistook the material vesture for the spirit, thought that there wereformulas for composition, royal roads to the heaven of Bach and Mozart. Something more of humanity, sympathy for man and his experiences, innerfreedom, might have saved him. But it was just the poetic gift that theman was lamentably without. And so, freighted with too much eruditionand too little wisdom, Reger went aground. 

Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg of Vienna is the great troubling presence of modernmusic. His vast, sallow skull lowers over it like a sort of North Cape. For with him, with the famous cruel five orchestral and nine pianopieces, we seem to be entering the arctic zone of musical art. None ofthe old beacons, none of the old stars, can guide us longer in thesefrozen wastes. Strange, menacing forms surround us, and the light isbleak and chill and faint. The characteristic compositions of Strawinskyand Ornstein, too, have no tonality, lack every vestige of a pure chord, and exhibit unanalyzable harmonies, and rhythms of a violent novelty, inthe most amazing conjunctions. But they, at least, impart a certainsense of liberation. They, at least, bear certain witness to theemotional flight of the composer. An instinct pulses here, an instinctbarbarous and unbridled, if you will, but indubitably exuberant andvivid. These works have a necessity. These harmonies have color. Thismusic is patently speech. But the later compositions of Schoenbergwithhold themselves, refuse our contact. They baffle with theirapparently wilful ugliness, and bewilder with their geometric crueltyand coldness. One gets no intimation that in fashioning them thecomposer has liberated himself. On the contrary, they seem icy andbrain-spun. They are like men formed not out of flesh and bone andblood, but out of glass and wire and concrete. They creak and groan andgrate in their motion. They have all the deathly pallor of abstractions. 

And Schoenberg remains a troubling presence as long as one persists inregarding these particular pieces as the expression of a sensibility, aslong as one persists in seeking in them the lyric flight. For though oneperceives them with the intellect one can scarcely feel them musically. The conflicting rhythms of the third of the "Three Pieces forPianoforte" clash without generating heat, without, after all, reallysounding. No doubt, there is a certain admirable uncompromisingness, acertain Egyptian severity, in the musical line of the first of the"Three. " But if there is such a thing as form without significance inmusic, might not these compositions serve to exemplify it? Indeed, it isonly as experiments, as the incorporation in tone of an abstract andintellectualized conception of forms, that one can at all comprehendthem. And it is only in regarding him as primarily an experimenter thatthe later Schoenberg loses his incomprehensibility, and comes somewhatnearer to us. 

There is much in Schoenberg's career that makes this explanationsomething more than an easy way of disposing of a troublesome problem, makes it, indeed, eminently plausible. Schoenberg was never the mostinstinctive and sensible, the least cerebral and intellectualizing ofmusicians. For just as Gustav Mahler might stand as an instance ofmusicianly temperament fatally outweighing musicianly intellect, soArnold Schoenberg might stand as an example of the equally excessiveoutbalancing of sensibility by brain-stuff. The friendship of the twomen and their mutual admiration might easily be explained by the factthat each caught sight in the other of the element he wanted most. Nodoubt, the works of Schoenberg's early period, which extends from thesongs, Op. 1, through the "Kammersymphonie, " Op. 9, are full of afervent lyricism, a romantic effusiveness. "Gurrelieder, " indeed, openswide the floodgates of romanticism. But these compositions are somewhatuncharacteristic and derivative. The early songs, for instance, mighthave proceeded from the facile pen of Richard Strauss. They have much ofthe Straussian sleepy warmth and sweet harmonic color, much of theStraussian exuberance which at times so readily degenerates into thewindy pride of the young bourgeois deeming himself a superman. It wasonly by accident that "Freihold" was not written by the Munichtone-poet. The orchestral poem after Maeterlinck's "Pelléas" is alsoultra-romantic and post-Wagnerian. The trumpet theme, the "Pelléas"theme, for instance, is lineally descended from the "Walter vonStolzing" and "Parisfal" motives. The work reveals Schoenberg strivingto emulate Strauss in the field of the symphonic poem; striving, however, in vain. For it has none of Strauss's glitter and point, and israther dull and soggy. The great, bristling, pathetic climax is of thesort that has become exasperating and vulgar, rather than exciting, since Wagner and Tchaikowsky first exploited it. On the whole, the workis much less "Pelléas et Mélisande" than it is "Pelleas _und_Melisanda. " And the other works of this period, more brilliantly madeand more opulently colored though they are, are still eminently of theromantic school. The person who declared ecstatically that assisting ata performance of the string sextet, "Verklärte Nacht, " resembled"hearing a new 'Tristan, '" exhibited, after all, unconscious criticalacumen. The great cantata, "Gurrelieder, " the symphonic setting of JensPeter Jacobsen's romance in lyrics, might even stand as the grand finaleof the whole post-Wagnerian, ultra-romantic period, and represent themoment at which the whole style and atmosphere did its last heroicservice. And even the "Kammersymphonie, " despite all the signs oftransition to a more personal manner, despite the increasedscholasticism of tone, despite the more acidulous coloration, despitethe distinctly novel scherzo, with its capricious and fawn-like leaping, is not quite characteristic of the man. 

It is in the string quartet, Opus 7, that Schoenberg first speaks hisproper tongue. And in revealing him, the work demonstrates howtheoretical his intelligence is. No doubt, the D-minor Quartet is animportant work, one of the most important of chamber compositions. Certainly, it is one of the great pieces of modern music. It gives anunforgettable and vivid sense of the voice, the accent, the timbre, ofthe hurtling, neurotic modern world; hints the coming of a free andsubtle, bitter and powerful, modern musical art. As a piece ofconstruction alone, the D-minor Quartet is immensely significant. Thepolyphony is bold and free, the voices exhibiting an independenceperhaps unknown since the days of the madrigalists. The work is unifiednot only by the consolidation of the four movements into one, but aswell by a central movement, a "durchführung" which, introduced betweenthe scherzo and the adagio, reveals the inner coherence of all thethemes. There is no sacrifice of logic to the rules of harmony. Indeed, the work is characterized by a certain uncompromisingness and sharpnessin its harmonies. The instrumental coloring is prismatic, all theregisters of the strings being utilized with great deftness. Exclusiveof the theme of the scherzo, which recalls a little overmuch theTeutonic banalities of Mahler's symphonies, the quality of the music is, on the whole, grave and poignant and uplifted. It has a scholarlydignity, a magistral richness, a chiaroscuro that at moments recallsBrahms, though Schoenberg has a sensuous melancholy, a delicacy and anHebraic bitterness that the other has not. Like so much of Brahms, thismusic comes out of the silence of the study, though the study in thiscase is the chamber of a Jewish scholar more than that of a German. Werethe entire work of the fullness and lyricism of the last two movements;were it throughout as impassioned as is the broad gray clamant germinaltheme that commences the work and sweeps it before it, one might easilyinclude the composer in the company of the masters of musical art. 

Unfortunately, the magnificent passages are interspersed with unmusicalones. It is not only that the work does not quite "conceal art, " that itsmells overmuch of the laboratory. It is that portions of it arescarcely "felt" at all, are only too obviously carpentered. The work isfull of music that addresses itself primarily to professors of theory. It is full of writing dictated by an arbitrary and intellectualconception of form. There is a great deal of counterpoint in it thatexists only for the benefit of those who "read" scores, and thatclutters the work. There are whole passages that exist only in obedienceto some scholastic demand for thematic inversions and deformations. There is an unnecessary deal of marching and countermarching ofinstruments, an obsession with certain rhythms that becomes purelymechanical, an intensification of the contrapuntal pickings and peckingsthat annoy so often in the compositions of Brahms. It is Schoenberg theintellectualist, Schoenberg the Doctor of Music, not Schoenberg theartist, who obtains here. 

And it is he one encounters almost solely in the music of the thirdperiod, the enigmatical little pieces for orchestra and piano. It is hewho has emerged victorious from the duel revealed by the D-minorQuartet. Those grotesque and menacing little works are lineallydescended from the intellectualized passages of the great preceding one, are, indeed, a complete expression of the theoretical processes whichcalled them into being. For while in the quartet the scholasticismappears to have been superimposed upon a body of musical ideas, in theworks of the last period it appears well-nigh the generative principle. These latter have all the airlessness, the want of poetry, the frigidityof things constructed after a formula, daring and brilliant though thatformula is. They make it seem as though Schoenberg had, through aprocess of consideration and thought and study, arrived at theconclusion that the music of the future would, in the logic of things, take such and such a turn, that tonality as it is understood was doomedto disappear, that part-writing would attain a new independence, thatnew conceptions of harmony would result, that rhythm would attain a newfreedom through the influence of the new mechanical body of man, and hadproceeded to incorporate his theories in tone. One finds theexperimental and methodical at every turn throughout these compositions. Behind them one seems invariably to perceive some one sitting before asheet of music paper and tampering with the art of music; seeking todiscover what would result were he to accept as harmonic basis not themajor triad but the minor ninth, to set two contradictory rhythmsclashing, or to sharpen everything and maintain a geometric hardness ofline. One always feels in them the intelligence setting forthdeliberately to discover new musical form. For all their apparentfreedom, they are full of the oldest musical procedures, abound incanonic imitations, in augmentations, and diminutions, in all sorts ofgrizzled contrapuntal manoevers. They are head-music of the mostuncompromising sort. The "Five Orchestral Pieces" abound in purelytheoretical combinations of instruments, combinations that do not at allsound. "Herzgewächse, " the setting of the poem of Maeterlinck madecontemporaneously with these pieces, makes fantastic demands upon thesinger, asks the voice to hold high F _pppp_, to leap swiftly across thewidest intervals, and to maintain itself over a filigree accompanimentof celesta, harmonium and harp. But it is in the piano-music that thesonorities are most rudely neglected. At moments they impress one asnothing more than abstractions from the idiosyncrasies and mannerisms ofthe works of Schoenberg's second period made in the hope of arriving atdefiniteness of style and intensity of speech. They smell of thesynagogue as much as they do of the laboratory. Beside the Doctor ofMusic there stands the Talmudic Jew, the man all intellect and nofeeling, who subtilizes over musical art as though it were the Law. 

The compositions of this period constitute an artistic retrogressionrather than an advance. They are not "modern music" for all theirapparent stylistic kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine andOrnstein. Nor are they "music of the past. " They belong rather more tothe sort of music that has no more relation with yesteryear than it haswith this or next. They belong to the sort that never has youth andvigor, is old the moment it is produced. Their essentialinexpressiveness makes almost virtueless the characteristics whichSchoenberg has carried into them from out his fecund period. Theseverity and boldness of contour, so biting in the quartet, becomesalmost without significance in them. If there is such a thing asrhythmless music, would not the stagnant orchestra of the "FiveOrchestral Pieces" exemplify it? The alternately rich and acidulouscolor is faded; an icy green predominates. And, curiously enough, throughout the group the old romantic allegiance of the earliestSchoenberg reaffirms itself. Wotan with his spear stalks through theconclusion of the first of the "Three Pieces for Pianoforte. " And thesecond of the series, a composition not without its incisiveness, aswell as several of the tiny "Six Piano Pieces, " Op. 19, recall atmoments Brahms, at others Chopin, a Chopin of course cadaverous andturned slightly green. 

It may be that by means of these experiments Schoenberg will girdhimself for a new period of creativity just as once indubitably by theaid of experiments which he did not publish he girded himself for theperiod represented by the D-minor Quartet. It may be that after thecloud of the war has completely lifted from the field of art, and anormal interchange is re-established it will be seen that the monodrama, Op. 20, "Die Lieder des 'Pierrot Lunaire, '" which was the latest of hisworks to obtain a hearing, was in truth an earnest of a new loosing ofthe old lyrical impulse so long incarcerated. But, for the present, Schoenberg, the composer, is almost completely obscured by Schoenberg, the experimenter. For the present, he is the great theoreticiancombating other theoreticians, the Doctor of Music annihilatingdoctor-made laws. As such, his usefulness is by no means small. Hespeaks with an authority no less than that of his adversaries, the otherand less radical professors. He, too, has invented a system and amethod; his "Harmonielehre, " for instance, is as irrefragable as theirs;he can quote scripture with the devil. He is at least demolishing theold constraining superstitions, and in so doing may exercise anincalculable influence on the course of music. It may be that many amusician of the future will find himself the better equipped because ofSchoenberg's explorations. He is undoubtedly the most magistral theoristof the day. The fact that he could write at the head of his treatise onharmony, "What I have here set down I have learned from my pupils, "independently proves him a great teacher. It is probable that his latermusic, the music of his puzzling "third period, " will shortly come to beconsidered as simply a part of his unique course of instruction. 

Sibelius

Others have brought the North into houses, and there transmuted it tomusic. And their art is dependent on the shelter, and removed from it, dwindles. But Sibelius has written music innocent of roof and inclosure, music proper indeed to the vasty open, the Finnish heaven under which itgrew. And could we but carry it out into the northern day, we would findit undiminished, vivid with all its life. For it is blood-brother to thewind and the silence, to the lowering cliffs and the spray, to the harshcrying of sea-birds and the breath of the fog, and, set amid them, wouldwax, and take new strength from the strengths of its kin. 

Air blows through the music of Sibelius, quickens even the slightest ofhis compositions. There are certain of his songs, certain of hisorchestral sketches, that would be virtueless enough were it not for thewindy freshness that pervades them. Out of all his works, even out ofthe most commonplace, there proceeds a far and resonant space. Songslike "To the Evening, " "Call, " "Autumn Sundown, " whatever their ultimatemusical value, seem actually informed by the northern evening, seem toinclude within their very substance the watery tints of the sky, thenaïve fragrance of forests and meadows, the tintinnabulation driftingthrough the still air of sunset. It is as though Sibelius were sosensible to the quality of his native earth that he knows precisely inwhat black and massive chords of the piano, say, lie the silence ofrocks and clouds, precisely what manner of resistance between chant andpiano can make human song ring as in the open. But it is in hisorchestral works, for he is determined an orchestral writer, that he hasfixed it most successfully. There has been no composer, not Brahms inhis German forest, nor Rameau amid the poplars of his silver France, notBorodin on his steppes, nor Moussorgsky in his snow-covered fields underthe threatening skies, whose music gives back the colors and forms andodors of his native land more persistently. The orchestral compositionsof Sibelius seem to have passed over black torrents and desolatemoorlands, through pallid sunlight and grim primeval forests, and becomedrenched with them. The instrumentation is all wet grays and blacks, relieved only by bits of brightness wan and elusive as the northernsummer, frostily green as the polar lights. The works are full of thegnawing of bassoons and the bleakness of the English horn, full ofshattering trombones and screaming violins, full of the sinister rollingof drums, the menacing reverberation of cymbals, the icy glittering ofharps. The musical ideas of those of the compositions that are finelyrealized recall the ruggedness and hardiness and starkness of thingsthat persist in the Finnish winter. The rhythms seem to approach thewild, unnumbered rhythms of the forest and the wind and the nickeringsunlight. Music has forever been a movement "up to nature, " andSchoenberg's motto is but the precision of a motive that has governedall composers. But Sibelius has written music that seems to come as thevery answer to the call, and to be the North indeed. 

Such a discovery of nature was necessarily a part of hisself-revelation. For Sibelius is essentially the Norseman. For all hispersonal accomplishment, his cultural position, he is still the Finnishpeasant, preserving intact within himself the racial inheritance. Othermusicians, having found life still a grim brief welter of bloody combatsand the straining of high, unyielding hearts and the falling of sureinalienable doom, have fancied themselves the successors of the Skalds, and dreamt themselves within the gray primeval North. But, in thepresence of Sibelius, they seem only too evidently men of a gentler, later generation. Beside his, their music appears swathed in romanticglamour. For there are times when he comes into the concert-room likesome man of a former age, like some spare, knotted barbarian from theworld of the sagas. There are times when he comes amongst us like onewho might quite conceivably have been comrade to pelted warriors whofought with clubs and hammers, like one who might have beaten out arude music by black, smoking hearthsides quite as readily as madetone-poems for the modern concert-room. And his music with its vikingblows and wild, crying accents, its harsh and uncouth speech, sets uswithout circumstance in that sunken world, sets us in the very midst ofthe stark men and grave, savage women for whom the sagas were made, sothat we can see them in all their hurtling strength and rank barbarity, can well-nigh touch them with the fingers of our hands. And becauseSibelius is so fundamentally man as combat with the North has made him, only vision of his native earth could bring him rich self-consciousness. For his individuality is but the shape of soul given his race by itscentury-long adjustment. It is the North that has given him his profoundexperience. Its rhythms have distinguished him. Its color, and the colorof his spirit, are twin. And so he turns toward it as to a mirror. Likethat of the hero of his tone-poem, his life is a long journey towardFinland. Contact with Finnish earth gives him back into his own hands. It is the North, the wind and the moorland and the sea, that gathers thefragments of his broken soul, and makes him whole again. 

It was with the sanction of a people that Sibelius came to his task. Forcenturies before his birth the race that bore him had lain prone uponits inclement coasts. But now a new vigor was germinating within it. Youth had overtaken it once more, and filled it with the desire ofindependence. Chained to the Russian Empire, it was reaching out towardall that could give it the strength to persist and endure, toward allthat could give it knowledge of its proper soul. And so Sibelius, in thesearch for the expression of his own personality, so much at one withthat of his fellows, was traveling in the common way. The word that hewas seeking, the word that should bring fulfilment to his proper soul, was deeply needed by his fellows. Inarticulate thousands, unaware thoughthey were of his existence, awaited his work, wanted the sustenance itcould give. And, certainly, the sense of the needfulness of his work, the sense of the large value set upon his best and purest attainments bylife itself, must have been with Sibelius always, must have supplied himwith a powerful incentive and made enormously for his achievements. Hemust have felt all the surge of the race driving him. He must have hadcontinually the marvelous stimulus of feeling about him, for all thenight and the cold, the forms of comrades straining toward a singlelofty goal, felt himself one of an army of marching men. This folk, farin its past, had imagined the figure of a hero-poet, Vainemunden, andplaced in his hands an instrument "shaped out of very sorrow, " andattributed magical power to his song. And Sibelius, bowed over hismusic-paper, must have felt the dream stir within him, must have feltincarnate within himself, however incompletely, that mysterious image, and so proceeded with his work everlastingly assured that all heactually accomplished woke from out of the heart of the people, andresponded to its immemorial need. 

Out of such an impulse his art has come. No doubt, some of it is not theresponse entirely worthy of so high a stimulus. Few modern composers ofeminence are as singularly uneven as Sibelius. Moods like that whichmothered the amiable elegance of the "Valse Triste" and that whichproduced the hard and naked essentiality of the Fourth Symphony arealmost foreign to each other. The creative power itself isextraordinarily fitful in him. It is as if, for all his physicalrobustness, he has not quite the spiritual indefatigability of the majorartist. He has not that inventive heat that permits the composer ofindisputably the first rank to realize himself unflaggingly in all hisindependence and intensity. Too often Sibelius's individuality iscluttered and muffled by that of other men. No doubt every creativeartist passes through a period of submission to alien faiths. But inSibelius there appear to exist two distinct personalities, the onestrong and independent, the other timid and uninventive, who dominatehim alternately. Even some of the music contemporaneous with themagnificent Fourth Symphony is curiously ineffectual and pointless. True, the color, the air and tone of the North are never entirelyabsent from his work. His songs invariably recapture, sometimes almostmiraculously, the dark and mourning accents of the Scandinavianfolk-song. For all the modernity of medium they are simple and sober. Moreover, in those of his compositions that approach banality mostclosely, there is a certain saving hardness and virility and honesty. Unlike his neighbor, Grieg, he is never mincing and meretricious. Wenever find him languishing in a pretty boudoir. He is always out underthe sky. It is only that he is not always free and resourceful anddeeply self-critical. Even through the bold and rugged and splendidViolin Concerto there flit at moments the shadows of Beethoven andWagner and Tchaikowsky. The first theme of the quartet "Voces intimæ"resembles not a little a certain theme in "Boris. " The close of"Nightride and Sunrise" is watered Brahms and watered Strauss. And thereare phrases in his tone-poem that commence with all his proper rhythmicardor and then suddenly degenerate. There are moments when his harmonicsense, generally keen and true, abandons him completely. And even workslike the "Finlandia" and "Karelia" overtures, for all their generosityof intention, for all their suggestion of peasant voices lifted in song, disappoint because of the substitution of a popular lyricism, a certaineasy sweetness, for the high poetry one might have anticipated. 

And yet, one has but to turn to the symphonies of Sibelius to encountermusic of another intensity, and gauge the richness of response that, attimes, it is given him to make. It is as if the very dignity andgrandeur of the medium itself sets him free. Just as the form of theconcerto seems to have given his sense of the violin a play apparentlydenied it by the smaller mediums, so these larger orchestral forms seemto have liberated his imagination, his orchestral genius, and made himpoet of his folk indeed. His personal quality, spread more thinly in hissongs and tone-poems, is essentialized and developed in these otherworks. The symphonies themselves are in a sense the stages of theessentialization. In the first of them his language emerges, to anextent imparting its unmistakable coloration to a matter perhaps notentirely distinguished. There is a looseness and lushness, a romanticismand balladry, in the work, that is not quite characteristic. Still, thehonesty, the grimness and savagery and lack of sensuality, areSibelius's own. The adagio is steeped in his proper pathos, the pathosof brief, bland summers, of light that falls for a moment, gentle andmellow, and then dies away. Something like a memory of a girl sittingamid the simple flowers in the white northern sunshine haunts the lastfew measures. The crying, bold finale is full of the tragedy of northernnature. And in the Second Symphony the independence is complete. Theorchestra is handled individually, sparingly, and with perfect point. Often the instruments sound singly, or by twos and threes. What had beenbut half realized in the earlier work is distinct and important in this. It is as if Sibelius had come upon himself, and so been able to rid hiswork of all superfluity and indecision. And, curiously, through speakinghis own language in all its homeliness and peasant flavor, he seems tohave moved more closely to his land. The work, his "pastoral" symphony, for all its absolute and formal character, reflects a landscape. It isfull of home sounds, of cattle and "saeters, " of timbered houses andsparse nature. And through it there glances a pale evanescent sunlight, and through it there sounds the burden of a lowly tragedy. 

But it is only with his Fourth Symphony, dubbed "futuristic" because ofthe unusual boldness and pithiness of its style, the absence of ageneral tonality, the independence of the orchestral voices, thatSibelius's gift attains absolute expression. There are certain worksthat are touchstones, and make apparent what is original and virtuous inall the rest of the labors of their creator, and give his personality aunique and irrefragable position. The Fourth Symphony of Sibelius issuch a composition. It is a very synthesis of all his work, thereduction to its simplest and most positive terms of a thing that hasbeen in him since first he began to write, and that received heretoforeonly fragmentary and indecisive expression. In its very form it isessence. The structure is all bone. The style is sharpened to a bitingterseness. The coloring is the refinement of all his color; the rhythmshave a freedom toward which Sibelius's rhythms have always aspired; themournful melody of the adagio is well-nigh archetypical. All his lifeSibelius has been searching for the tone of this music, desiring tospeak with its authority, and concentrate the soul and tragedy of apeople into a single and eternal moment. All his life he had beenseeking the prophetic gestures of which this work is full. For thesymphony is like a summary and a conclusion. It carries us into somehigh place before which the life of man is spread out and made apparent. The four movements are the four planes that solidify a single concept. The first sets us in a grim forest solitude, out in some great unlimitedloneliness, beneath a somber sky. There is movement, a climax, a singlecry of passion and despair, and then, only the soughing of wind throughhoary branches. The scherzo is the flickering of mad watery lights, afantastic whipping dance, a sudden sinister conclusion. In the adagio, ableak lament struggles upwards, seems to push through some vast inertmass, to pierce to a momentary height and largeness, and then sinks, broken. And through the finale there quivers an illusory light. Themovement is the march, the oncoming rush, of vast formless hordes, thepassage of unnamed millions that surge for an instant with their criesand banners, and vanish into nothingness. It is possible that Sibeliuswill create another work similarly naked and intense. More definitive, it cannot be. 

Loeffler

Legend records of Inez de Castro, Queen of Castile, that she wasdethroned and driven into exile by a rival, and that before her husbandand her partisans could restore her to kingdom, she had died. But herhusband caused her body to be embalmed and borne with him wherever hewent. And when finally he had vanquished the pretender, he had thecorpse decked in all the regal insignia, had it set upon the throne inthe great hall of the palace of the kings of Castile, and vassals andliegemen summoned to do the homage that had been denied the unhappyqueen in her lifetime. 

The music of Charles Martin Loeffler is like the dead Inez de Castro onher throne. It, too, is swathed in diapered cloths and hung with goldand precious stones. It, too, is set above and apart from men in a sortof royal state, and surrounded by all the emblems of kingdom. Andbeneath its stiff and incrusted sheath there lies, as once there laybeneath the jeweled robes and diadem of the kings of Castile, not aliving being, but a corpse. 

For Loeffler is one of those exquisites whose refinement isunfortunately accompanied by sterility, perhaps even results from it. But for his essential uncreativeness, he might well have become thecomposer uniquely representative of the artistic movement in which thelate nineteenth-century refinement and exquisiteness manifested itself. No musician, not Debussy even, was better prepared for bringing thesymbolist movement into music. Loeffler is affiliated in temper, if notexactly in achievement, with the brilliant band of belated romanticistswho adopted as their device the sonnet of Verlaine's beginning. 

 "Je suis l'empire à la fin de la décadence. "

One finds in him almost typically the sensibility to the essences andcolors rather more than to the spectacle, the movement, the adventure ofthings. The nervous delicacy, the widowhood of the spirit, the horror ofthe times, the mystic paganism, the homesickness for a tranquil andsequestered and soft-colored land "where shepherds still pipe to theirflocks, and nun-like processions of clouds float over bluish hills andfathomless age-old lakes" are eminently present in him. He is in almostheroic degree the spirit forever searching blindly through the loud andgarish city, the hideous present, for some vestige, some message fromits homeland; finding, some sundown, in the ineffable glamour of roseand mauve and blue through granite piles, "le souvenir avec lecrépuscule. " He, too, one would guess, has dreamt of selling his soul tothe devil, and called upon him, ah, how many terrible nights, toappear; and has sought a refuge from the world in Catholic mysticism andecstasy. Had it been given him to realize himself in music, we shouldundoubtedly have had a body of work that would have been the veritablemilestones of the route traversed by the entire movement. Would not the"Pagan Poem" have been the musical equivalent of the mystic andsorrowful sensuality of Verlaine? Would not the two rhapsodies "L'Etang"and "La Cornemuse" have transmuted to music the macabre and sinisternote of so much symbolist poetry? Would we not have had in "LaVillanelle du Diable" an equivalent for the black mass and "Là-bas"; in"Hora mystica" an equivalent for "En route"; in "Music for Four StringedInstruments" a musical "Sagesse"? Does not Charles Martin Loeffler, who, after writing "A Pagan Poem, " makes a retreat in a Benedictinemonastery, and who, at home in Medford, Massachusetts, teaches thechoristers to sing Gregorian chants, recall Joris Karl Huysmans, the"oblat" of La Trappe?

To a limited extent, of course, he has succeeded in fixing the color ofthe symbolist movement in music. Some of his richer, dreamier songs, some of his finer bits of polishing, his rarer drops of essence, areindeed the musical counterpart of the goldsmith's work, the preciosity, of a Gustave Kahn or a Stuart Merrill. But a musical Huysmans, forinstance, it was never in his power to become. For he has neverpossessed the creative heat, the fluency, the vein, the felicity, thepower necessary to the task of upbuilding out of the tones ofinstruments anything as flamboyant and magnificent as the novelist'sblack and red edifices. He has never been vivid and ingenuous andspontaneous enough a musician even to develop a personal idiom. He hasalways been hampered and bound. His earlier compositions, the quintet, the orchestral "Les Vieillées de l'Ukraine" and "La bonne chanson, " forinstance, are distinctly derivative and uncharacteristic in style. Theidiom is derived in part from Fauré, in part from Wagner and other ofthe romanticists. The string quintet has even been dubbed "A Musical'Trip Around the World in Eighty Days. '" Nor is the idiom of his laterand more representative period primarily and originally any morecharacteristic. It never seems to surge quite wholly and cleanly andfairly. The chasing to which it has evidently been subjected cannotquite conceal its descent. The setting of "La Cloche fêlée" ofBaudelaire, for instance, is curiously Germanic and heavy, for all thesubtlety and filigree of the voice and the accompanying piano and viola. It is a fairly flat waltz movement that in "A Pagan Poem" is chosen torepresent the sublunary aspect of Virgil's genius. And "Hora mystica"and "Music for Four Stringed Instruments, " which have a certainstylistic unity, nevertheless reveal the composer hampered by theGregorian and scholastic idiom which he has sought to assimilate. 

Nor has he ever had the power to express and objectify himselfcompletely, and achieve vital form. In performance, most of his worksshrink and dwindle. The central and sustaining structure, the cathedralwhich is behind every living composition and manifests itself throughit, is in these pieces so vague and attenuated that it fades into thebackground of the concert-hall, is like gray upon gray. The gems andgold thread and filigree with which this work is sewn tarnish in thegloom. Something is there, we perceive, something that moves and swaysand rises and ebbs fitfully in the dim light. But it is a wraithlikething, and undulates and falls before our eyes like flames that haveneither redness nor heat. Even the terrible bagpipe of the secondrhapsody for oboe; even the caldron of the "Pagan Poem, " thattranscription of the most sensual and impassioned of Virgil's eclogues, with its mystic, dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of "LaVillanelle du Diable, " and the sundown fires that beat through the closeof "Hora mystica" are curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial. Pages of sustained music occur rarely enough in his music. The lofty, almost metaphysical, first few periods, the severe and pathetic secondmovement of the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments"; certain songslike "Le Son du cor, " that have atmosphere and a delicate poetry, aredistinctly exceptional in this body of work. What chiefly lives in itare certain poignant phrases, certain eloquent bars, a glowing, wineybit of color here, a velvety phrase for the oboe or the clarinet, asharp, brassy, pricking horn-call, a dreamy, wandering melody for thevoice there. His music consists of scattered, highly polished phrases, hard, exquisite, and cold. He is pre-eminently the _precieux_. 

Of the scrupulousness, the fastidiousness, the distinction, even, ofLoeffler's work, there can be no question. He is not one of themusic-making herd. The subtlety and originality of intention which hiscompositions almost uniformly display, the unflagging effort to inclosewithin each of his forms a matter rare and novel and rich, set himforever apart, even in his essential weakness, from the academic andconforming crew. The man who has composed these scores makes at leastthe gesture of the artist, and comes to music to express a temperoriginal and delicate and aristocratic, disdainful of the facile and thecommonplace, a sensibility often troubled and shadowy and fantastic. Heis eminently not one of the pathetic, half-educated musicians so commonin America. He knows something of musical science; knows how a tonaledifice should be unified; has a sense of the chemistry of theorchestra. He appears familiar with the plainsong, and has based asymphony and portions of a quartet on Gregorian modes. Even at a periodwhen the sophisticated and cultivated composer is becoming somewhat lessa rarity, his culture is remarkable, his knowledge of literatureeclectic. Gogol as well as Virgil has moved him to orchestral works. Above all, he is one of the company of composers, to which a good numberof more gifted musicians do not belong, who are ever respectful of theirmedium, and infinitely curious concerning it. 

It is only that, in seeking to compensate himself for his infecundity, he has fallen into the deep sea of preciosity. In seeking by main forceto be expressive, to remedy his cardinal defect, to eschew whatever istrite and outworn in the line of the melody, the sequence of theharmonies, to rid himself of whatever is derivative and impersonal andundistinguished in his style, he has become over-anxious, over-meticulous of his diction. Because his phraseology was colorless, he has become a stainer of phrases, a sort of musical euphuist. All hisenergy, one senses, has gone into the cutting and polishing and shiningup and setting of little brightly colored bits of music, little sharp, intense moments. One feels that they have been caressed and stroked andsmoothed and regarded a thousand times; that Loeffler has dwelt uponthem and touched them with a sort of narcissistic love. Indeed, it musthave been a great labor that was expended on the darkening and spicingand sharpening of the style in certain of his orchestral poems; theeffort to create a new idiom based on the Gregorian modes, to which"Hora mystica" and the recent work for string quartet bear witness, mustin itself have been large. But though in result of all the chasing andhammering on gold, the filing and polishing, the vessel of his art hasperhaps become richer and finer, it has not become any fuller. Hissecond period differs from his first only in the fact that in it he hasgone from one form of uncreativity to another somewhat more dignifiedand unusual. The compositions of both periods have, after all, theselfsame lack. His destiny seems to have been inevitable. 

And so, in its confused argentry and ghostliness, its crystallizationand diaphinity, his music resembles at times nothing so much as theprecious remains and specimens of an extinct planet; things transfixedin cold eternal night, icy and phosphorescent of hue. No atmospherebathes them. Sap does not mount in them. Should we touch them, theywould crumble. This, might have been a flower. But now it glistens withcrystals of mica and quartz. These, are jewels. But their fires arequenched. These candied petals are the passage from "Music for FourStringed Instruments" glossed in the score "un jardin plein des fleursnaïves, " while this vial of gemmy green liquid is that entitled "une prétoute émeraude. " The petrified saurian there, whose bones have suffered

 "a sea-change Into something rich and strange"

is the Spanish rhapsody for 'cello; the string of steely beads, thesetting of the "To Helen" of Poe. And the objects that float preservedin those little flasks are some of the popular ditties with whichLoeffler is so fond of incrusting his work. Once they were "à LaVillette, " and the Malagueña, and the eighteenth-century marching songof the Lorraine soldiery, and flourished under the windy heaven. Butwhen Loeffler transplanted them respectively into "La Villanelle duDiable, " into the 'cello rhapsody and into "Music for Four StringedInstruments, " they underwent the fate that befalls everything subjectedto his exquisite and sterilizing touch. 

One comes to the conclusion that perhaps the most significant andsymbolic thing in the career of Charles Martin Loeffler is his place ofresidence. For this Alsatian, French in culture, temperamentally relatedto the _décadents_, writing music at first resembling that of Fauré andthe Wagnerizing Frenchmen, later that of Dukas, and last that of d'Indyand Magnard, has lived the greater portion of his life in no other citythan Boston. Coming originally to America for the purpose of playingfirst violin in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he has found theatmosphere of the New England capital so pleasant that he has remainedthere practically ever since. He whom one might suppose almost nativeto the Paris of Debussy and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and GustaveKahn and Huysmans, has found comfortable an environment essentiallytight and illiberal, a society that masks philistinism with toryism, andmanages to drive its radical and vital and artistic youth, in increasingnumbers every year, to other places in search of air. And his owncareer, on the spiritual plane, seems just such an exchange, thepreference of a shadowy and frigid place to a blazing and quivering one, the exchange of the eternal Paris for the eternal Boston. His musicseems some psychic banishment. His art is indeed, in the last analysis, a flight from the group of his kinsmen into, if not exactly the circle, at least the dangerous vicinity of those amiable gentlemen the Chadwicksand the Converses and all the other highly respectable and sterile"American Composers. "

Ornstein

Ornstein is a mirror held up to the world of the modern city. The firstof his real compositions are like fragments of some cosmopolis of cavesand towers of steel, of furious motion and shafts of nitrogen glarebecome music. They are like sensitive surfaces that have been laid inthe midst of the New Yorks; and record not only the clangors, but allthe violent forms of the city, the beat of the frenetic activity, theintersecting planes of light, the masses of the masonry with the tiny, dwarf-like creatures running in and out, the electric signs staining theinky nightclouds. They give again the alarum of dawn breaking upon thecrowded, swarming cells; seven o'clock steam whistles on a winter morn;pitiless light filtering over hurrying black droves of humanity;thousands of shivering workers blackening Fourteenth Street. Theypicture the very Niebelheim, the hordes of slaves herded by giants oftheir own creation, the commands and cries of power in the bells, whistles, signals. The grinding and shrieking of loaded trains in thetubes, cranes laboring in the port, rotary engines drilling, turbineschurning are woven through them. Blankets of fog descend upon the river;menacing shapes loom through it; rays of red light seek to cut the mist. Flowers that are gray and black blossom on the ledges of tenementwindows giving on bare walls. And human souls and songs that are grayand black like them bloom in the blind air, open their velvet petals, their lustrous, soft corollas, from crannies and windows into thismetal, this dun, this unceasing roar. 

For Ornstein is youth. He is the one striving to adjust himself to allthis thunder and welter and glare. He is the spring as it comes upthrough the pavements, the aching green sap. In part, no doubt, he isthe resurrection of the most entombed of spirits, that of the outlawEuropean Jew. He is the breaking down of the walls with which the Jewhad blotted out the hateful world. He is Lazarus emerging in his graveclothes into the new world; the Jewish spirit come up into the day fromout the basement and cellar rooms of the synagogue where it had beenseated for a thousand years drugging itself with rabbinical lore, refining almost maniacally upon the intention of some obscure phrase orparable, negating the lure of the world and of experience with a mass ofrites and observances and ceremonials, losing itself in the gray desertstretches of theory, or wasting itself in the impossible dream of Zionrestored in modern Palestine and Solomon's temple rebuilt in aprovincial capital of the Turkish Empire. And Ornstein's music is themusic of a birth that is the tearing away of grave clothes grown to thebody, the clawing away, stone by stone, of the wall erected against thecall of experience which was sure to be death-dealing. The oldprohibitions are still active in it in the terror with which life isviewed, in the menace and cruelty of things, the sharpness of edgesencountered, the weight of the masses that threaten to fall andoverwhelm, the fury and blackness and horror of nature once againregarded. Again and again there passes through it the haggard, shroudedfigure of the Russian Jew. The "Poems of 1917" are full of the wailingsand rockings of little old Ghetto mothers. Again and again Ornsteinspeaks in accents that resemble nothing quite so much as the savage andwoeful language of the Old Testament. 

But the music of Ornstein is much besides. It is a thing germane to allbeings born into the age of steel. It is the expression of all the menwho have tried to embrace and love the towering piles, the strange, black, desolate pathways that are the world to-day. The figure that onediscerns in the compositions beginning with the "Dwarf Suite, " Opus 16, is one that we all have known intimately a space. These pieces are notyouth seen through the golden haze of retrospection. They are theexpression of groping, fumbling youth as it feels and as it feels, itself to be. They are music young in all its excess, its violence, itssharp griefs and sharper joys, its unreflecting, trembling strength. Thespring comes up hot and cruel in them. There is all the loneliness ofyouth in this music, all the mysterious dreams of a world scarceunderstood, all the hesitancies and blind gropings of powers untried. Always, one senses the pavements stretching between steel buildings, theblack, hurrying tides of human beings; and through them all, theoppressed figure of one searching out the meaning of all this convulsiveactivity into which he has been born. It is such solitude that speaks inthe first "Impression of Notre-Dame" with its gray mounting masses, itscloisteral reverberation of bells, its savage calls of the city to onestanding alone with the monument of a dead age. Violent, uncontrolledpassions cry out in the "Three Moods, " with their youthful surrender tothe moment. The energy of adolescence, unleashed, rejoicing in puremuscular activity, disports itself in the "Shadow Dances, " and in the"Wild Man's Dance, " with its sheer, naked, beating rhythm. Thebitterness of adolescence mocks in the "Three Burlesques, " in the "Danceof the Gnomes, " with its parodying of clumsy movements. What revolt inthe first "Piano Sonata"! And other emotions, timid and uncertain ofthemselves, uneasy with the swelling sap of springtide, speak theirpoetry and their pain, tell their tales and are silent, make us rememberwhat once we felt. 

The city, the birth into the new world, youth, exist in the music ofOrnstein with all the sharpness of shock because of an imagination of awonderful forcefulness. There is no indirectness in Ornstein, novagueness. His tension is always of the fullest, the stiffest. What hefeels, what he hears, he sets down, irrespective of all the canons andrules and procedures. Harmony with him is something different than it iswith any other composer. Piano colors of a violence and garishness arehurled against each other. The lowest and highest registers of theinstrument clash in "Improvisata. " Rhythms battle, convulsively, almost. In portions of the "Sinfonietta, " five rhythms are to be found warringagainst each other. Melodic curves, lines, sing ecstatically overturbulent, mottled counterpoint in the piano and violin sonatas. Theviolin sonata is something of an attempt to exhaust all thepossibilities of color-contrast contained in the little brown box. Inthe first "Impression de Notre-Dame, " the piano is metallic with thebooming bells. In the second, it is stony, heavy with the congested, peering, menacing forms of gargoyles. In the accompaniment to the song"Waldseligkeit, " it seems to give the musical equivalent for thesubstance of wood. No doubt, to one who, like Ornstein, regarded musiconly as a means of communication, as speech of man to man, and occupiedhimself only with the communication of his sensations and experience inbriefest, directest, simplest form, there must have come moments of themost terrible self-doubt, when all the anathemas of the fathers of themusical church thundered loud in his ears, and other men's forms andproportions seemed to make his shrivel. It was doubtless thankfulness toWilliam Blake, that other "mad" inventor of wild images and designs, that other "rager in the wilds, " for fortification and sustenance, thatmade him preface his violin sonata with the Argument of "The Marriage ofHeaven and Hell, " and defend himself with the verses:

 "Once meek, and in a perilous path, The just man kept his course along The vale of death. Roses are planted where thorns grew, And on the barren heath Sing the honey bees.... 

 "Till the villain left the paths of ease, To walk in perilous paths, and drive The just man into barren climes. 

 "Now the sneaking serpent walks In mild humility, And the just man rages in the wilds Where lions roam. "

And certainly, for us, whatever the pundits claim, the wilds of LeoOrnstein are not so raging and lion-infested. For while one speculateswhether these pieces are music or not, one discovers that one hasentered through them into the life of another being, and through himinto the lives of a whole upgrowing generation. 

At present, however, some of those qualities that were so clearlyvisible in Leo Ornstein during the first years in which he disclosedhimself are somewhat obscured. Something not entirely reassuring hashappened to the man. A great deal of the music that he has beencomposing of late wants the bite his earlier work had. The colors arenot so piping hot. The outlines are less bold and jagged and clear-cut. Some of the convulsive intensity, the fury, has passed out of therhythmic element. The melodies are less acidulous, the moods lessunbridled. No doubt, something happier has entered into his music, something more voluptuous and smooth. The 'cello chants passionately anddreamily in the two sonatas Ornstein has written of late for it. Theracial element is softened, become gentler and duskier and moreromantic. The Jew in it no longer wears his gaberdine. If he wears aprayer-shawl at all, it is one made of silk. The Jeremiah of the deserthas given way to the young, amorous, dream-filled poet, a poet of thesort that arose among the Jews in Spain during the years of the Moorishascendency. Yet, a certain intensity, a certain originality, a certainvein of genius, has undergone eclipse in the change. Something a littlebrilliant, a little facile, a little undistinguished, has introduceditself, even into the best of the newest pieces. The texture is thinner, the tension slacker. Ornstein does not seem to be putting himself intothem with the same directness and completeness with which he puthimself into his earlier work. Moreover, occasionally there come fromhis pen works into which he is not putting himself at all. A choralsociety of New York a year or two ago produced two small _a capella_choruses of his that might have been the work of some obscure pupil ofTchaikowsky's. The piano sonatina of the Funeral March, although by nomeans as insignificant, is nevertheless uncharacteristic in theresemblances it bears the music of Ravel. One thing the earliercompositions are not, and that is, derivative. Ornstein, they makeplain, had benefited by the achievements of Debussy and Moussorgsky andScriabine. But they made plain as well that he had developed a style ofhis own, a style that was, for all its crudeness and harshness, personal. In becoming again a disciple he reverts to something that heseemed to have left behind him when he wrote his clangorous "DwarfSuite. "

What this new period of Ornstein's composition represents it is not easyto say. Probably, it is a period of transition, a time of the marshalingof forces to a new and fiercer onslaught. Such a time of gestation mightwell be necessary to Ornstein's genius. It is possible that he has hadto give up something in order to gain something else, to try for less inorder to establish himself upon a footing firmer than that upon which hestood. His genius during his first years of creation was lyricalpurely. It was a thing that expressed itself in picturing moods, inmaking brief flights, in establishing _moments musicaux. _ He is at hisbest in his piano preludes, in his small forms. The works composedduring this period in the larger forms, the violin sonata excepted, arescarcely achieved. The outer movements of the Grand Sonata forpianoforte, for instance, are far inferior to the central ones. Whateverthe merit of some of the individual movements of "The Masqueraders, "Opus 36, and the "Poems of 1917, " and at times it is not small, theworks as a whole lack form. They have none of the unity and variety andsolidity of the "Papillons" and the "Carnaval" of Schumann or the"Valses nobles et sentimentales" of Ravel, for instance, works to whichthey are in certain other respects comparable. As he grew a littleolder, Ornstein's nature probably began to demand other forms besidethese smaller, more episodic ones. It probably began to strive forgreater scope, duration, development, complexity. And so, in order togain greater intellectual control over his outflow, to learn to buildpiles of a bulk that require an entirely different workmanship andsupervision than do preludes and impressions, Ornstein doubtlessly hasbeen withholding himself, diminishing the intensity of his fire. Inorder to learn to organize his material, he has doubtlesslyunconsciously lessened its density and vibrancy for the time being. 

And, too, it may be the result of a change from a pain-economy to apleasure-economy. The adolescent has grown into the young man. Theadjustment may have been made. The poet is no longer forced to mint hismiseries and pains alone into art; he is learning to be glad. He mayagain be seeking to find himself in a world grown different. 

At the same time, there is a distinct possibility that the presentperiod of Ornstein's composition is not a time of preparation for a newflight. There is a distinct possibility that it represents anunwholesome slackening. After all, may it not be that he has flinched?Stronger men than he have succumbed to a hostile world. And Ornstein hasfound the world very hostile. He has found America absolutely unpreparedfor his art, possessed with no technique to cope with it. He has verylargely been operating in a void. It is not so much that he has beentried and found wanting. He has not even been heard. Because the musicalworld has been unable to follow him, it has dismissed him entirely fromits consciousness. Scarcely a critic has been able to express what it isabout his music that he likes or dislikes. They have either ridiculedhim or written cordially about him without saying anything. There isnothing more demoralizing for the artist. At present they are evenclassing him with Prokofief. The virtuosi have shown a like timidity. Scarcely a one has dared perform his music. Many have refrained out ofpolicy, unwilling to forfeit any applause. Others have no doubt quitesincerely refused to perform any music that sounded cacophonous to them. For the army of musicians is almost entirely composed of rearguard. Nota single one of the orchestral conductors in New York has dared considerperforming his "Sinfonietta, " to say nothing of the early andcomparatively accessible "Marche funèbre" and "A la chinoise. " Of thePhilharmonic Society, of course, one expects nothing. But one mightsuppose that the various organizations allegedly "friendly" to music, eager for the cause of the "new" and the "modern, " would see to it thatthe musician whom such an authority as Ernest Bloch has declared to bethe single composer in America who displays positive signs of genius, was given his opportunity. The contrary has been the case. D'Indy'sfoolish war symphony, the works of Henry Hadley, of Rachmaninoff, ofDavid Stanley Smith, even of Dvorsky, that person who exists as littlein the field of composition as he does in Biarritz, have received and doreceive the attention of our powerful ones. It would be small wonder, then, if an artist like Ornstein, who, like every real artist, requiresthe contact of other minds and cannot go on producing, hopeless ofattaining performance and exhibition, had finally flinched and weariedof his efforts, and suddenly found himself writing such music as theintelligences of his fellow-craftsmen can reasonably be expected tocomprehend. 

There are other reasons that might lead one to presume that these recentworks represent a slump. For Ornstein has been devoting too much of hisenergy to concertizing. He has been traveling madly over the UnitedStates and Canada for the last few years, living in Pullman sleepers andplaying to audiences of all sorts. During the first years that he was inAmerica after the outbreak of war in Europe, he at least played themusic that he loved. But no one was ready for programs beginning withKorngold and Cyril Scott and ending with Ravel and Scriabine andOrnstein himself. So little by little Ornstein began adulterating hisprograms, adding a popular piece here, another there. Recently, he hasbeen playing music into which he cannot put his heart at all, Liszt andRubinstein as well as Beethoven and Schumann. He has been performing itnone too brilliantly. Such an existence cannot but dull the man's edge. No one can play the Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody or the transcription ofthe Mendelssohn Wedding March or the Rigoletto Fantasy continuallywithout being punished. No one who does not love them can play theSonata Appassionata or the _Etudes symphoniques_ or the waltzes ofChopin long without becoming dulled and spoiled. So with compositionbecome an interval between two trains, and expression an attempt toplease audiences and to establish oneself with the public as a popularpianist, it is not the most preposterous of thoughts that Leo Ornsteinhas lost something he once possessed in beautiful and superabundantform. 

Still, it is fairly incredible. It is impossible that great andpermanent harm should have been done him already. He was too vital andsane a being to be so easily corrupted. For those who knew him in thefirst years of his return from Paris, he was nothing if not the genius. If he was less accomplished, less resourceful and magistral an artistthan Strawinsky, for instance, whom he resembles in a certain generalway, he was at least a more human, a more passionate being. It is thisgreat vitality, this rich temperament, that makes one sure that we arenot going to have in Leo Ornstein another Richard Strauss, anotherStrauss who has never had the many fertile years vouchsafed the other. It makes us sure that he will finally come to terms with his managersand audiences, and that the harm already done him by his way of lifewill grow no greater. It convinces us that his present mood is but theresult of a necessary process of transition from one basis to another;that the man is really summoning himself for the works that will expresshim in his manhood. And we are positive that there will shortly comefrom him weighty musical forms with colors as burning and deep as thoseof his first pieces, and of like intensity and boldness; and that LeoOrnstein is sure of reaching the high heaven of art for which he seemedand still seems bound. 

Bloch

Once before, East and West have met and merged. On the plains where thesoldiers of Darius and Alexander slaughtered one another, and where theMacedonian phalanxes recoiled before the castellated elephants of Porus, a marriage was consummated. Hovering over the heads of the opposingarmies, the angel of Europe and the angel of Asia embraced, and senttheir lifebloods coursing through each other. Passage was made to India. The two continents slowly faced about. Two reservoirs that had beenaccumulating for eons the precious distillations of two great centers ofthe human race began mingling their essences. In whatever the East did, there was evident the hand of the West. In whatever the West thoughtthere was visible the prismatic intelligence of the East. The gods ofGreece showed their smooth foreheads on the banks of the Ganges. Oriental systems refracted the blonde Mediterranean light into anhundred subtle tints. But the empire of Alexander crumbled, Parthiansannihilated the legions of Crassus. Persians and Seljuks and Ottomansbarred Europe from the East. Steady communication ceased. Asia withdrewunder her cloudy mysterious curtains. Legendary fumes, Cathay, Zipango, the Indias of the Great Ocean, arose. Once again, the two basins werecut off. Once again, each began secreting a substance radicallydifferent from the other's, a substance growing more individual witheach elapsing century. For almost two thousand years, East and Westdeveloped away one from the other. 

And now, a second time, in our own hour, the two have drawn close andconfronted each other. Once again, a fusion has taken place. We areto-day in the midst of a movement likely to surpass the period ofHellenization in duration and extent. This time, perhaps, no dramaticmarch of Macedonians to the banks of the Indus has served to make theconnection. Nevertheless, in the image of Amy Lowell, guns have againshown themselves keys. For a couple of centuries, great gates have beenswinging throughout the East at the behest of frigates and armedmerchantmen. And slowly, once again, Asia has been seeping into Europe. Warm spicy gusts have been drifting over the West, steadily permeatingthe air. At first, there appeared to be nothing serious in theinfiltration. The eighteenth century was apparently coquetting only withEastern motifs. If Chinese palaces put in their appearance atDrottningholm and Pillnitz, in all portions of the continent; ifChippendale began giving curious delicate twists to his furniture, itseemed nothing more than a matter of caprice. The zest for Persianletters, Oriental nouvelles, Turkish marches, arose apparently onlyfrom the desire for masquerade. Grétry, Mozart, Wieland, scarcely tooktheir seraglios, pashas, bulbuls earnestly. But, gradually, with thearrival of the nineteenth century, what had hitherto seemed play only, began to assume a different shape. The East was indeed dawning upon theWest again. The mists were being burned away. Through Sir William Jonesand Friedrich Schlegel, the wisdom of the dangerous slippery Indies wasopened to Europe. Goethe, as ever the outrider, revealed the neworientation in his "West-Oestlicher Divan" and his "Chinesich-DeutscheJahres-und-Tages-Zeiten. " In 1829, Victor Hugo published "LesOrientales"; in 1859, Fitzgerald his "Omar. " If Weber little more thantoyed with Chinese and Turkish musical color in "Turandot" and in"Oberon, " Félicien David in his songs and in his "Le Désert" attemptedseriously to infiltrate into European music the musical feeling of theLevant. In the corner of Schopenhauer's apartment there sat an effigy ofthe Buddha; volumes of the Upanishads lay on his table. In 1863 for thefirst time, a Paris shop offered for sale a few Japanese prints. Manet, Whistler, Monet, the brothers De Goncourt came and bought. But thoughthe craze for painting Princesses du Pays de la Porcelaine endedrapidly, European painting was revolutionized. Surfaces once more cameinto being. Color was born again under the brushes of the impressionistsand the post-impressionists. The sense of touch was freed. In all thearts the art of Japan became powerful. De Maupassant wrote a prose thatis full of the technique of the Japanese prints; that works chieflythrough means of sharp little lines and dainty spotting. All five senseswere being born again. People listened with new keenness to the soundsof instruments. The Russian sons of Berlioz with their new orchestralchemistry arrived. The orchestral machine expanded and grew subtle. Huysmans dreamt of symphonies of liqueurs, concertos of perfumery. 

And the new century, when it came, showed that it was no deliberatelyassumed thing, this fusion of Oriental and Occidental modes of feeling, showed that it was a thing arising deep in the being. Something that hadlong lain inert had been reborn at the contact in Western men. A part ofpersonality that had lain dead had of a sudden been suffused with bloodand warmth; light played over a hemisphere of the mind long dark. Thevery hand that drew, the very mouth that matched words, the very bodythat beat and curved and swayed in movement, were Western and Eastern atthe same time. It was no longer the Greek conception of form thatprevailed on the banks of the Seine, or wherever art was produced. Artwas become again, what the Orientals had always known it to be, significant form. It was as though Persia had been born again in HenriMatisse, for instance. A sense of design and color the like of whichhad hitherto been manifest only in the vases and bloomy carpets ofTeheran dictated his exquisite patterns. Hokusai and Outamaro got inVincent Van Gogh a brother. The sultry atmosphere and animal richness ofHindoo art reappeared in Gauguin's wood-cuts. One has but to go to anyreally modern art, whether produced in Paris or in Munich or in NewYork, to see again the subtle browns and silvers and vermilions, thedelicate sensuous touch, the infinitely various patterns, the forms thatcarry with them the earth from Arabia to Japan. 

As in the plastic arts, so in poetry. The imagists, Ezra Pound inparticular, were Chinese long before they discovered Cathay in the worksof Ernest Fennellosa. And in music, certainly, the East is on us; hasbeen on us since the Russian five began their careers and expressedtheir own half-European, half-Mongol, natures. The stream has commencedsetting since the Arabian Nights, the Persian odalisques, the Tartartribesmen became music. And the Chinese sensibility of Scriabine, theOriental chromatics of the later Rimsky-Korsakoff, the sinuous scalesand voluptuous colors and silken textures of Debussy, the shrillfantastic Japanese idiom of Strawinsky, have shown us the fusion wasnear. 

But in the music of no composer is it as plainly evident as it is inthat of Ernest Bloch. In a work like this composer's suite for violaand piano, one has a sense of a completeness of fusion such as no othergives. Here, the West has advanced furthest east, the East furthestwest. Two things are balanced in the work, two things developed througha score of centuries by two uncommunicating regions. The organizingpower of Europe is married to the sensuousness of Asia. The virileformative power of the heirs of Bach is here. An extended form is solidas mountains, projects volumes through time. One four-square movement isset atop another. There is no weakening, no slackening, no drop. One canput one's hand around these brown-gold blocks. And at the same time, this organizing power makes to live a dusky sensuality, a velvetyrichness of texture, a sultriness and wetness that sets us amid thebronzed glowing wood-carvings of Africans, the dark sunsets of Ceylon, the pagodas in which the Chinaman sits and sings of his felicity, hisfamily, his garden. The lyric blue of Chinese art, the tropical forestswith their horrid heat and dense growths and cruel animal life, thePolynesian seas of azure tulle, the spice-laden breezes, chant here. Themonotony, the melancholy, the bitterness of the East, things that hadhitherto sounded only from the darkly shining zither of the Arabs, orfrom the deathly gongs and tam-tams of the Mongolians, speak throughWestern instruments. It is as though something had been brought out froma steaming Burmese swamp and exposed to the terrible beat of a New Yorkthoroughfare, and that out of that transplantation a matter utterly newand sad and strange, favoring both father and mother, and yet of acharacter distinctly individual, had been created. 

For no composer was better fitted by nature to receive the stimulus ofthe onrushing East. As a Jew, Bloch carried within himself a fragment ofthe Orient; was in himself an outpost of the mother of continents. Andhe is one of the few Jewish composers really, fundamentallyself-expressive. He is one of the few that have fully acceptedthemselves, fully accepted the fate that made them Jewish andstigmatized them. After all, it was not the fact that they were"homeless" as Wagner pretended, that prevented the company of Meyerbeersand Mendelssohns from creating. It was rather more the fact that, inwardly, they refused to accept themselves for what they were. Theweakness of their art is to be understood only as the result of thespiritual warfare that threatens to divide every Jew against himself. There was operative in them, whether they were aware of it or no, asecret desire to escape their stigmata. They were deliberately deaf tothe promptings of the beings that were so firmly planted in the racialsoil. They were fugitive from the national consciousness. The bourn ofimpulse was half stopped. It was not that they did not write "Jewish"music, utilize solely racial scales and melodies. The artist of Jewishextraction need not do so to be saved. The whole world is open beforehim. He can express his day as he will. One thing, however, isnecessary. He must not seek to inhibit any portion of his impulse. Hemust not attempt to deny his modes of apprehension and realizationbecause they are racially colored. He must possess spiritual harmony. The whole man must go into his expression. And it was just the "wholeman" who did not go into the work of the composers who have hithertorepresented "Judaism in Music. " An inhibited, harried impulse ismanifest in their art. 

For, like Meyerbeer, convinced of the worthlessness of their feelings, they manufactured spectacles for the operatic stage, and pandered to ataste which they least of all respected. Or, like Mendelssohn, theytried to adapt themselves to the alien atmosphere of Teutonic romance, and produced a musical jargon that resembles nothing in the world somuch as Yiddish. Or, with Rubinstein, they gloved themselves in a prettysalon style in order to conceal all vestiges of the flesh, or tried, with Gustav Mahler, to intone "Ave Maria. " Some, no doubt, would havepreferred to have been true to themselves. Goldmark (the uncle) is anexample. But his desire remained intention, largely. For his method wasa trifle childish. He conceived it as a lying on couches amid cushions, sniffing Orient perfumes in scent-bottles. He did not realize that thecouch was the comfortable German _canapé, _ the cushions the romanticstyle of Weber and the early Wagner, and that through the

 "Sabæan odors from the spicy shore Of Araby the blest"

there drifted the doubtlessly very appetizing smell of Viennese cookery. 

But there is music of Ernest Bloch that is a large, a poignant, anauthentic expression of what is racial in the Jew. There is music of histhat is authentic by virtue of qualities more fundamentally racial thanthe synagogical modes on which it bases itself, the Semitic pomp andcolor that inform it. There are moments when one hears in this music theharsh and haughty accents of the Hebrew tongue, sees the abrupt gesturesof the Hebrew soul, feels the titanic burst of energy that created therace and carried it intact across lands and times, out of the eternalEgypt, through the eternal Red Sea. There are moments when this musicmakes one feel as though an element that had remained unchangedthroughout three thousand years, an element that is in every Jew and bywhich every Jew must know himself and his descent, were caught up in itand fixed there. Bloch has composed settings for the Psalms that are thevery impulse of the Davidic hymns incarnate in another medium; make itseem as though the genius that had once flowered at the court of theking had attained miraculous second blooming. The setting of the 114thPsalm is the very voice of the rejoicing over the passage of the RedSea, the very lusty blowing on ox horns, the very hieratic dance. Thevoice of Jehovah, has it spoken to those who throughout the ages havecalled for it much differently than it speaks at the close of Bloch's22nd Psalm?

And it is something like the voice of Job that speaks in the desolationof the third of the "Poèmes juives. " Once again, the Ecclesiast uttershis disillusion, his cruel disappointment, his sense of the utter vanityof existence in the soliloquy of the 'cello in the rhapsody "Schelomo. "Once again, the tent of the tabernacle that Jehovah ordered Moses toerect in the wilderness, and hang with curtains and with veils, liftsitself in the introduction to the symphony "Israel. " The great kinglylimbs and beard and bosom of Abraham are, once again, in the firstmovement of the work; the dark, grave, soft-eyed women of the OldTestament, Rebecca, Rachel, Ruth, re-appear in the second, with itsflowing voices. 

Racial traits abound in this body of work. These ponderous forms, thesesudden movements, these imperious, barbaric, ritual trumpet blasts, bring to mind all one knows of Semitic art, recall the crowned wingedbulls of the Assyrians as well as Flaubert's Carthage, with itspyramided temples and cisterns and neighing horses in the acropolis. Bloch's themes oftentimes have the subtle, far-flung, monotonous lineof the synagogic chants. Many of his melodic bits, although pureinventions, are indubitably hereditary. The mode of a race is, afterall, but the intensified inflection of its speech. And Bloch's melodicline, with its strange intervals, its occasional quarter notes, approximates curiously to the inflections of the Hebrew tongue. Like somuch of the Gregorian chant, which it oftentimes recalls, one canconceive this music as part of the Temple service in Jerusalem. And likethe melodic line, so, too, the phrases assigned to the trumpets in thesetting of the three Psalms and in the symphony "Israel. " They, also, might once have resounded through the courts of Herod's temple. Theunusual accents, the unusual intervals, give the instruments a timbre atonce imperious, barbaric, ritual. And how different from the theatricOrientalism of so many of the Russians are the crude dissonances ofBloch, the terrible consecutive fourths and fifths, the impetuousrhythms, savage and frenetic in their emphasis. This music is shrill andtawny and bitter with the desert. Its flavor is indeed new to Europeanmusic. Certainly, in the province of the string quartet, nothing quitelike the salty and acrid, the fruity, drugging savor of Bloch's work, has ever before appeared. 

And it was not until the Jewish note appeared in his work that Blochspoke his proper language. The works that precede the "Trois Poèmesjuives, " the first of his compositions in which the racial gesture isconsciously made, do not really represent the man as he is. No doubt, the brilliant and ironic scherzo of the C-sharp minor Symphony, whoseverve and passion and vigor make the composer of "L'Apprenti sorcier"seem apprentice indeed, is already characteristic of the composer of thestring quartet and the suite for viola and piano. But much of thesymphony is derivative. One glimpses the influence of Liszt andTchaikowsky and Strauss in it. So too with the opera "Macbeth, " writtena few years after the composition of the symphony, when the composer wastwenty-four. Despite the effectiveness of the setting it gives themelodrama cleverly abstracted from Shakespeare's tragedy by EdmondFlegg, the score bears a still undecided signature. One feels that thecomposer has recently encountered the personalities of Moussorgsky andDebussy. No doubt, one begins to sense the proper personality of Blochin the delicate coloring of the two little orchestral sketches"Hiver-Printemps, " in the mournful English horn against the harp in"Hiver, " in the chirruping hurdy-gurdy commencement of "Printemps. "Unfortunately, the cantilena in the second number still points backward. But with the "Trois Poèmes juives, " the original Bloch is at hand. Thesecompositions were conceived at first as studies for "Jezabel, " the operaBloch intended composing directly after he had completed the scoring of"Macbeth" in 1904. To-day, "Jezabel" still exists only in the librettoof Flegg and in the series of sketches deposited in the composer'sportfolio. The moment in which Bloch is to find it possible for him torealize the work has not yet arrived. Planned at first to followdirectly upon "Macbeth, " "Jezabel" promises fairly to become the goal ofhis first great creative period. But out of the conception of the operaitself, out of the desire of creating a work around this OldTestamentary figure, out of the train of emotion excited by the project, there have already flowed results of a first magnitude for Bloch and formodern music. For in the process of searching out a style befitting thisbiblical drama, and in the effort to master the idiom necessary to it, Bloch executed the compositions that have placed him so eminently in thecompany of the few modern masters. The three Psalms, "Schelomo, ""Israel, " portions of the quartet, have but trodden further in thedirection marked out by the "Trois Poèmes juives. " "Jezabel" has turnedout to be one of those dreams that lead men on to the knowledge ofthemselves. 

And yet, the "Jewish composer" that the man is so often said to be, hemost surely is not. He is too much the man of his time, too much theuniversal genius, to be thus placed in a single category. His artsucceeds to that of Moussorgsky and Debussy quite as much as does thatof Strawinsky and Ravel; he rests quite as heavily on the greatEuropean traditions of music as he does on his own hereditary strain. Indeed, he is of the modern masters one of those the most conscious ofthe tradition of his art. He falls heir to Bach and to Haydn and toBeethoven quite as much as any living musician. Quite as much as that ofany other his music is an image of the time. In the quartet, hismagistral work, the Hebraic element is only one of several. The trio ofthe scherzo is like a section of some Polynesian forest, with its tropicwarmth, its monstrous growths, its swampy earth, its chattering monkeysand birds of paradise. There is the beat of the age of steel in thefinale. And the delicate Pastorale is redolent of the gentle fields ofEurope, smells of the hay, gives again the nun-like close of day intemperate skies. It is only that as a Jew it was necessary for ErnestBloch to say yea to his own heredity before his genius could appear. Andto what a degree it has appeared, one can gauge from the intensity withwhich his age mirrors itself in the music he has already composed. Hismusic is the modern man in his lately gotten sense of the tininess ofthe human elements in the race, the enormity of the animal past. ForErnest Bloch, the primeval forest with its thick spawning life, itsferocious beasts, its brutish phallic-worshiping humanity, is stillhere. Before him there still lie the hundreds and hundreds of thousandsof years of development necessary to make a sapient creature of man. And he writes like one who has been plunged into a darkness and sadnessand bitterness all the greater for the vision of the rainbow that hasbeen given him, for the glimpse he has had of the "pays du soleil, " theland of man lifting himself at last from the brute and becoming human. For he knows too well that only aeons after he is dead will the nightfinally pass. 

And he is the modern insomuch as the fusion of East and West isilluminated by what he does. The coloration of his orchestra, the criesof his instruments, the line of his melody, the throbbing of his pulses, make us feel the great tide sweeping us on, the wave rolling over allthe world. In his art, we feel the earth itself turning toward the lightof the East. 

APPENDIX

WAGNER

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig on May 22nd, 1813. He died inVenice February 13th, 1883. The facts of his career are too well knownto justify rehearsal. 

The dates of the composition and first performances of his operas are:"Rienzi, " 1838-40; première in Dresden, 1842. "Tannhäuser, " 1843-45(Paris version, 1860); Dresden, 1845. "Lohengrin, " 1845-48; Weimar, 1850. "Das Rheingold, " 1848-53; Munich, 1869. "Die Walküre, " 1848-56;Munich, 1870. "Tristan und Isolde, " 1857-59; Munich, 1865. "Siegfried, "1857-69; Bayreuth, 1876. "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, " 1861-67;Munich, 1868. "Die Götterdämmerung, " 1870-74; Bayreuth, 1876. "Parsifal, " 1876-82; Bayreuth, 1882. 

STRAUSS

Richard Strauss was born in Munich June 11th, 1864. His father, FranzStrauss, was first horn-player in the Munich Court Orchestra. His motherwas the daughter of the beer brewer, Georg Pschorr. He began composingat the tender age of six. From 1870 to 1874 he attended the elementaryschool at Munich. In 1874 he matriculated at the Gymnasium, and remainedthere until 1882. During the next year he attended lectures at theUniversity of Munich. From 1875 to 1880 he studied harmony, counterpointand instrumentation with Hofkapellmeister F. W. Meyer. His compositionswere performed publicly from 1880 on. In 1885 he made the acquaintanceof Alexander Ritter, who, together with Hans von Bülow, is supposed tohave converted young Strauss, until then a good Brahmsian, to Wagnerismand modernism. In 1885 at Bülow's invitation, Strauss conducted aconcert of the Meiningen Orchestra. In November of that year hesucceeded Bülow as conductor of the organization. In 1886 he becomethird Kapellmeister at the Munich Opera; in 1889, director at Weimar. 1892-3 was spent in Egypt and Sicily after an attack of inflammation ofthe lungs. In 1894 he became chief Kapellmeister at Munich. In 1895 hisEuropean concert-tours commenced. He conducted in Budapest, Brussels, Moscow, Amsterdam, London, Barcelona, Paris, Zürich and Madrid. In 1898he became conductor of the Berlin Royal Opera. In 1904 he came toAmerica to conduct at four festival concerts given in his honor in NewYork. In one month he gave twenty-one concerts in different cities withnearly as many orchestras. The tour ended with the hubbub over the factthat Strauss had conducted a concert in John Wanamaker's. Since 1898Strauss has resided chiefly in Charlottenburg and, in the summer, atMarquardstein near Garmisch. 

The dates of the composition of his principal works are:

"Serenade for Wind Instruments, " Opus 7, 1882-83; "Eight Songs, " Opus10, 1882-83; "Aus Italien, " Opus 16, 1886; "Don Juan, " Opus 20, 1888;"Tod und Verklärung, " Opus 24, 1889; "Four Songs, " Opus 27, 1892-93;"Till Eulenspiegel's Lustige Streiche, " Opus 28, 1894-95; "Three Songs, "Opus 29, 1894-95; "Also Sprach Zarathustra, " Opus 30, 1894-95; "DonQuixote, " Opus 35, 1897; "Ein Heldenleben, " Opus 40, 1898; "Feuersnot, "Opus 50, 1900-01; "Taillefer, " Opus 52, 1903; "Sinfonia Domestica, " Opus53, 1903; "Salome, " Opus 54, 1904-05; "Elektra, " Opus 58, 1906-08; "DerRosenkavalier, " Opus 59, 1909-10; "Ariadne auf Naxos, " Opus 60, 1911-12;"Josef's Legende, " 1913; "Eine Alpensymphonie, " 1914-15; "Die Frau ohneSchatten, " 1915-17. 

MOUSSORGSKY

Modest Petrovitch Moussorgsky was born March 16th, 1839, in the villageof Karevo in the government of Pskow, Russia. His parents were membersof the lesser nobility. His mother gave him his first piano lessons. Atthe age of ten he was sent to the School of St. Peter and St. Paul inPetrograd. His piano-studies were continued with a certain ProfessorHerke. At the age of twelve he played in public a _Rondo de concert_ byHerz. In 1852 he matriculated at the school for ensigns, and the sameyear had his first composition, a polka, published. In 1856, whileserving as an officer in the Preobrajensky Guards, he made theacquaintance of Borodin. Soon after, he met Dargomyjski. It was withhim that, in his own words, "he for the first time lived the musicallife. " Later, he became acquainted also with Cui, Balakirew andRimsky-Korsakoff. He took lessons in composition of Balakirew, andfinally realized what his direction really was. A nervous maladyprevented him from working in 1859. But directly after hisconvalescence, he resigned from the guards, and set to work in earnest. In order to support himself, he accepted a position in the governmentservice. He lived in Petrograd with five friends. In 1865 he was oncemore attacked by his malady, and had to retire to the country for threeyears. In 1869 he returned to Petrograd, living with his friends theOpotchinines. His moment of success came in 1874, with the performanceof "Boris. " Directly after, his health commenced to fail. In 1879 heresigned his office, and sought to support himself by playingaccompaniments. He died in 1881 in a military hospital. 

The dates of composition of his principal works are:

"Boris Godounow, " 1868-71; "Khovanchtchina, " 1872-81; "The Marriage"(one act), 1868; "The Fair at Sorotchinsk" (fragment), 1877-81; "TheDefeat of Sennacherib, " 1867-74; "Jesus Navine, " 1877; "Sans Soleil, "1874; "La Chambre d'Enfants, " 1874; "Chants et Danses de la Mort, " 1875;"Marcia all Turka, " 1880; "La Nuit sur le Mont-Chauve, " 1867-75;"Tableaux d'une Exposition, " 1874; "Hopak, " 1877. 

LISZT

Franz Liszt was born near Odenburg, Hungary, October 22nd, 1811. He diedin Bayreuth, July 31st, 1886. He played in public for the first time atthe age of nine, in Odenburg. In 1829 he came to Vienna, remaining thereeighteen months studying piano under Czerny, and composition withSalieri. He then was taken to Paris, where he studied under Reicha till1825. In 1831 he heard Paganini play. It is supposed that he was soimpressed that he decided to become the Paganini of the piano. He wasvery much in demand in Paris as an artist. In 1835 he carried theComtesse d'Agoult off from a ball, and went with her to Geneva. Heremained in Geneva until 1839, when his triumphal progresses throughEurope commenced. In 1848 he became Kapellmeister in Weimar. Here, hecaused "Lohengrin" to be produced, and had "Der Fliegende Holländer" and"Tannhäuser, " as well as operas of Berlioz and Schumann, revived. It waswhile he was in Weimar that he formed a relationship with the PrincessSayn-Wittgenstein. In 1859 he went to Rome, where he remained till 1870. In 1866 Pius IX made him an Abbé. After 1870 he returned to Weimar, living there and in Budapest and in Rome. 

His principal orchestral works are: "Eine Faustsymphonie, " "Dante, ""Bergsymphonie, " "Tasso, " "Les Préludes, " "Orpheus, " "Mazeppa, ""Hungaria, " "Hunnenschlacht, " "Die Ideale, " "Two Episodes from Lenau'sFaust, " etc. 

His principal choral works are "Die Legende von der HeiligenElisabeth" and "Christus. "

His principal compositions for the pianoforte are: "Sonata in B-minor, ""Concerto in E-flat, " "Concerto in A, " "Années de pèlerinage, ""Consolations, " "Two Légendes, " "Liebesträume, " "Six Preludes and Fugues(Bach), " etc. , etc. Also innumerable transcriptions. 

BERLIOZ

Louis Hector Berlioz was born at La Côte Saint-André near Grenoble onDecember 11th, 1803. His father was a physician, and wished his son tofollow his profession. So Hector was sent to Paris to study. Instead ofstudying medicine he commenced to compose. A mass of his was performedat Saint-Roch in 1824. In 1826 he sought to enter the Conservatoire, butfailed in the preliminary examination. In 1827, 1828 and 1829, hecompeted for the Prix de Rome, and failed. In 1830 he finally securedit. While in Rome in 1831, he composed the "Symphonie Fantastique" and"Lélio. " In 1833 he married his adored Miss Smithson. In 1834 "Harold"was performed for the first time. "The Requiem" was composed in 1836, "Benvenuto Cellini" in 1837, "Roméo" in 1839. In 1840 Berlioz made hisfirst journey to Brussels; in 1842-43 he toured Germany. The "CarnavalRomain" was performed in 1844. In 1845-46 Berlioz gave numerous concertsin France, and toured Austria and Hungary. In December of the latteryear "La Damnation de Faust" failed at the Opéra Comique. In 1847Berlioz went to Russia and to England for the first time. In 1849 hebegan work on his "Te Deum"; in 1850 on "L'Enfance du Christ. " The nextyears were spent in conducting. In 1854, on the death of his wife, hemarried Mlle. Récio. In 1856 we find Berlioz in North Germany, Brusselsand London. He began the composition of "Les Troyens" the same year. Atits performance in 1863, the work failed. His last years were darkenedby the death of his wife and son. He died March 8th, 1869, in Paris. 

FRANCK

César-Auguste Franck was born at Liège, Belgium, December 10th, 1822. His father hoped to make a piano-virtuoso of him, and supervised hismusical education. At the age of eleven the young Franck was touringBelgium as a pianist. In 1835 the family emigrated to Paris, and twoyears later César was admitted to the Conservatoire. He studiedcomposition with Leborne and the piano with Zimmermann. He took thefirst prize for fugue in 1840. In 1842 his father compelled him to leavethe Conservatory and return to Belgium, but two years later he was oncemore in Paris, seeking to gain his living by teaching and playing. "Ruth" was performed in 1846. He was married in 1848. In 1851 he wasappointed organist at the church of Saint-Jean-Saint-François, later ofthe church of Sainte-Clotilde, which post he occupied during theremainder of his years. In 1872 he was appointed professor oforgan-playing at the Conservatoire. "Rédemption" was performed in 1873. "Les Béatitudes" was performed for the first time in 1880. Shortlyafter, the professorship of composition at the Conservatory was refusedhim, and five years later he was decorated with the ribbon of the Legionof Honor as "professor of organ-playing. " In 1887 a "Festival Franck"was given under the direction of Pasdeloup at the Cirque d'hiver. Hissymphony was performed for the first time in 1889. He died November 8th, 1890. 

The dates of the composition of his principal works are as follows:"Ruth, " 1843-46; "Six pièces pour grand orgue, " 1860-62; "Troisoffertoires, " 1871; "Rédemption, " 1871-72 (first version), 1874 (secondversion); "Prélude, fugue et variation, " 1873; "Trois pièces pour grandorgue, " 1878; "String-quintet, " 1878-79; "Les Béatitudes, " 1869-79; "LeChasseur maudit, " 1882; "Les Djinns, " 1884; "Prélude, choral et fugue, "1884; "Hulda, " 1882-85; "Variations symphoniques, " 1885; "Sonate, " 1886;"Prélude, aria et finale, " 1886-87; "Psyche, " 1887-88; "Symphonie, "1886-88; "Quatuor, " 1889; "Trois chorales, " 1890. 

DEBUSSY

Claude-Achille Debussy was born August 22nd, 1862, atSaint-Germain-en-Laye. He died at Paris March 22nd, 1918. He entered theConservatoire at the age of twelve, studying harmony with Lavignac andpiano with Marmontel. At the age of eighteen, he paid a brief visit toRussia. But it was not until several years later that he becameacquainted with the score of "Boris Godounow, " which was destined tohave so great an influence on his life, and precipitate his revolt fromWagnerism. In 1884 he gained the Prix de Rome with his cantata "L'Enfantprodigue. " During his three-year stay at the Villa Medici he composed"Printemps" and "La Damoiselle élue. " "Ariettes oubliées" were publishedin 1888, followed, in 1890, by "Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire"; in 1893 bythe string-quartet and the "Prélude à 'l'Après-midi d'un faune'"; in1894 by "Proses lyriques"; and in 1898 by "Les Chansons de Bilitis. " The"Nocturnes" were performed for the first time in 1899. "Pelléas, " uponwhich Debussy had been working for ten years, was produced at the OpéraComique in 1902. In 1903, "Estampes" were published. "Masques, " "L'Islejoyeuse, " "Danses pour harp chromatique" and "Trois chansons de France"were published in 1904. The following year saw the disclosure of thefirst book of "Images" for piano and of "La Mer. " The second book of"Images" appeared in 1906; "Ibéria" in 1907; "Trois chansons de Charlesd'Orléans" and the "Children's Corner" in 1908. "Rondes de Printemps"was performed for the first time in 1909. In 1910 there appeared "Troisballades de François Villon" and the first book of "Préludes for piano. "It was in the incidental music to d'Annunzio's _Le Martyre deSaint-Sébastien, _ performed in 1911, that Debussy's genius showed itselffor the last time in any fullness. In 1912 "Gigues" were performed; in1913 there appeared the second book of Préludes for piano. The worksproduced subsequently are of much smaller importance. 

RAVEL

Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, March 7th, 1875. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Paris. Henri Ghis was hisfirst piano-teacher, Charles-René his first teacher of composition. Hetook piano-lessons of Ricardo Viñès, and in 1891 was awarded a "premièremédaille" in piano-playing at the Conservatoire. In 1897 Ravel enteredthe class of Fauré. In 1898, his "Sites auriculaires" were publiclyperformed. In 1901 he failed for the first time to gain the Prix deRome. His quartet was performed in 1904. In 1903 he failed for thefourth time to gain the Prix de Rome. "Histoires naturelles" wereperformed in 1907, the "Rapsodie espagnole" in 1908. "L'Heure espagnole"was given at the Opéra Comique in 1911. "Daphnis et Chloé" was performedby the Russian Ballet in 1912. During the war Ravel served as ambulancedriver. He was wounded while serving before Verdun, and dismissed fromservice. He is living at present in Paris. 

The dates of composition of his principal works are:

"Miroirs, " 1905; "Sonatine, " 1905; "Gaspard de la Nuit, " 1908; "Valsesnobles et sentimentales, " 1911; "Ma Mère l'Oye, " 1908; "Histoiresnaturelles, " 1906; "Cinq Mélodies populaires grecques, " 1907; "TroisPoèmes de Mallarmé, " 1913; "Quatuor à cordes, " 1902-03; "Introduction etAllégro pour harpe, " 1906; "Rapsodie espagnole, " 1907; "Daphnis etChloé, " 1906-11; "L'Heure espagnole, " 1907; "Le Tombeau de Couperin, "1914-17. 

BORODIN

Alexander Porfirievitch Borodin was born in Petrograd November 12th, 1834, and died there February 27th, 1887. 

RIMSKY-KORSAKOFF

Nikolai Andreyevitch Rimsky-Korsakoff was born March 6th, 1844, atTikhvin, in the government of Novgorod, Russia. His father was a civilgovernor and landed proprietor. He began to study the pianoforte at theage of six. He was destined for a career in the navy, and, in 1856, hewas sent to study at the Petrograd Naval College. In 1861 he made theacquaintance of Balakirew and of the group about him. After a two-yearcruise in the navy, Rimsky returned to Petrograd in 1865. In 1866 he wasinstalled in furnished rooms, having decided upon becoming a composer. He began work on "Antar" in 1868. It was performed the following year. In 1871 he became professor of composition and orchestration at thePetrograd Conservatory. In 1872 his opera "The Maid of Pskof" wasproduced. Rimsky married, on June 30th of that year, Nadejeda Pourgold. Moussorgsky was best man at the ceremony. In 1873 he became Inspector ofNaval Bands. In 1874 he toured the Crimea. In 1883 he was called upon toreorganize the Imperial chapel. In 1889 he conducted two Russianconcerts at the Paris Exposition. In the following year he conducted twoRussian concerts in Brussels. He resigned his position as conductor ofthe Russian Symphony concerts and the inspectorship of the Imperialchapel in 1894. In 1900 he was in Brussels again. In 1904, due to hispolitical views, he was called upon to vacate his post of Director ofthe Conservatory. He attended the Russian festival in Paris in thespring of 1907. The French Society of Composers, however, refused toadmit him to membership. He died in April, 1908, at his property atLioubensk. 

The titles of his operas are: "The Maid of Pskof, " 1872; "A Night inMay, " 1880; "Sniegouroschka, " 1882; "Mlada, " 1892; "Christmas EveRevels, " 1895; "Sadko, " 1897; "Mozart and Salieri, " 1898; "Boyarina VeraSheloga, " 1898; "The Tsar's Bride, " 1899; "The Tale of Tsar Saltan, "1900; "Servilia, " 1902; "Kashchei the Immortal, " 1902; "Pan Voyevoda, "1902; "Kitj, " 1907; "Le Coq d'or, " 1907. 

Among his orchestral compositions are: Symphony No. 1, "SerbianFantasy, " Opus 6; "Symphonic Suite Antar, " Opus 9; Symphony, Opus 32. "Spanish Caprice, " Opus 34; "Scheherazade, " Opus 35; "Easter Overture, "Opus 36. 

RACHMANINOFF

Sergei Vassilievitch Rachmaninoff was born March 29th, 1873, at Onega inthe government of Novgorod, Russia. He entered the PetrogradConservatory in 1882, studying piano in the class of Demyaresky, theoryin that of Professor L. A. Sacchetti. In 1885 he entered the MoscowConservatory, studying under Zviereiff, Taneyef and Arensky. His firstpublic appearance as a pianist took place in 1892. He has been composingsteadily since 1894. His first symphony was produced by Glazounof in1895. His European tours commenced in 1899. In 1903 he taught in theMoscow Maryinsky Institute. From 1904 to 1906 he conducted at theImperial Opera in Moscow. His own operas, "The Miser Knight" and"Francesca da Rimini, " were performed at that time. After 1907 he livedin Dresden. His first American tour took place in 1909. His second beganin 1918. 

Among Rachmaninoff's works are three operas, "Aleko, " "The MiserKnight, " "Francesca da Rimini"; two symphonies, Opus 13 and Opus 27;three concertos for pianoforte, Opus 1, 18 and 30; a symphonic poem "DieToteninsel, " Opus 29; a work for chorus and orchestra, "The Bells"; two'cello sonatas, Opus 19 and Opus 28; a pianoforte trio, Opus 9; pianopieces, Opera 3, 5, 10, 16, 23, 32; and numerous songs. 

SCRIABINE

Alexander Nicolas Scriàbine was born in Moscow in 1871, of aristocraticparents. In his tenth year he was placed in the 2nd Moscow Army CadetCorps. His first piano lessons were taken from G. A. Conus. Musicaltheory he studied with Professor S. I. Taneieff. While still continuingthe Cadet courses, he was enrolled as a student at the MoscowConservatory of Music. He studied the pianoforte with Vassily Safonoff, counterpoint first with Taneieff and later with Arensky. His studiesboth in the Conservatory and in the corps were completed by 1891. In1892 he toured Europe for the first time as pianist, playing inAmsterdam, Brussels, The Hague, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Petrograd. Thenext five years Scriàbine devoted to both concert-tours andcomposition. In 1897 he became Professor of Pianoforte, playing at theMoscow conservatory, remaining such for six years. He resigned from hispost in 1903 in order to devote himself entirely to composition andconcertizing, living principally in Beattenberg, Switzerland, and inParis. It is during that time that he seems to have been converted toTheosophy. He spent 1905-06 in Genoa and in Geneva. In February, 1906, Scriàbine embarked on a tour of the United States. He played in New YorkCity, Chicago, Washington, Cincinnati and other cities. The next yearswere spent in Beattenberg, Lausanne and Biarritz. From 1908 to 1910, Scriàbine lived in Brussels. Then he returned to Moscow, touring Russiain 1910, 1911 and 1912. In 1914 he visited England for the first time. Returning to Russia just before the outbreak of the war, he set about ona work involving the unification of all the arts entitled "Mysterium. "On April 7th, 1915, he was taken ill with blood-poisoning. On April 14thhe was dead. 

His principal orchestral works are: "Le Poème divine, " Opus 43; "LePoème de l'Extase, " Opus 54; and "Prometheus, " Opus 60. It is not easyto say which of his many compositions for the pianoforte are the mostimportant. Sonata No. 7, Opus 64; Sonata No. 8, Opus 66; Sonata No. 9, Opus 68; and Sonata No. 10, Opus 70; are perhaps the most magistral. 

STRAWINSKY

Igor Fedorovitch Strawinsky was born at Oranienbaum near Petrograd, June5th, 1882. His father was a bass singer attached to the court. Igor wasdestined for a legal career. But in 1902 he met Rimsky-Korsakoff inHeidelberg, and abandoned all idea of studying the law. He studied withRimsky till 1906. His "Scherzo fantastique, " inspired by Maeterlinck's_Life of the Bee_, which was produced in 1908, attracted the attentionof Sergei Diaghilew to the young composer, and secured him a commissionto write a ballet for Diaghilew's organization. The immediate result was"L'Oiseau de feu, " which was composed and produced in 1910. "Petruschka"was written in 1911, the composer residing in Rome at the time. "LeSacre du printemps" was written in Clarens, where Strawinsky generallylives. It was produced in Paris in 1913. The opera "Le Rossignol, " ofwhich one act was completed in 1909, and two in 1914, was produced inParis and in London just before the war. A new ballet "Les Nocesvillageoises" has not as yet been produced. 

Other of Strawinsky's compositions are:

Opus 1, "Symphony in E-flat"; Opus 2, "Le Faune et la Bergère, " songswith orchestral accompaniment; Opus 3, "Scherzo fantastique"; Opus 4, "Feuerswerk"; Opus 5, "Chant funèbre" in memory of Rimsky-Korsakoff;Opus 6, Four Studies for the pianoforte; Opus 7, Two songs; "Les Roisdes Etoiles, " for chorus and orchestra; Three songs on Japanese poemswith orchestral accompaniment; Three pieces for string-quartet; Anunpublished pianoforte sonata; A ballet for clowns. 

MAHLER

Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt, Bohemia, July 7th, 1860. He died inVienna May 18th, 1911. He studied the pianoforte with Epstein, composition and counterpoint with Bruckner. In 1883 he was appointedKapellmeister in Kassel; in 1885 he was called to Prague; in 1886 he wasmade conductor of the Leipzig opera. In 1891 he went to Hamburg toconduct the opera, and in 1897 he was made director of the Vienna CourtOpera. In 1908 he came to New York to conduct the operas of Wagner, Mozart and Beethoven at the Metropolitan. In 1909 he became conductor ofthe New York Philharmonic Society. His health broke in 1911, and hereturned to Vienna. 

Mahler wrote nine symphonies. The first dates from 1891, the second from1895, the third from 1896, the fourth from 1901, the fifth from 1904, the sixth from 1906, the seventh from 1908, the eighth from 1910, andthe ninth from 1911. 

Other of his compositions are: "Das Klagende Lied, " for soli, chorus, and orchestra; "Das Lied von der Erde, " for soli, and orchestra;"Kindertotenlieder, " with orchestral accompaniment; "Lieder einerfahrenden Gesellen, " with orchestral accompaniment; "Des KnabenWunderhorn, " twelve songs. 

REGER

Max Reger was born in Brand, Bavaria, March 19th, 1873. His father wasschool-teacher at Weiden in the Palatinate, and Reger, it was hoped, would follow his profession. However, the musical profession prevailed. Reger studied with Riemann from 1890 to 1895. At first he decided toperfect himself as a pianist. Later, composition and organ-playingabsorbed him. He was made professor of counterpoint in the Royal Academyin Munich in 1905. In 1907 he was made musical director of theUniversity of Leipzig and professor of composition at the LeipzigConservatory. From 1911 until his death he was Hofkepellmeister atMeiningen. He died in Jena, May 11th, 1916. 

His works for orchestra include: "Sinfonietta, " Opus 90; "Serenade, "Opus 95; "Hiller-Variations, " Opus 100; "Symphonic Prologue, " Opus 120;"Lustspielouvertüre, " Opus 123; "Konzert in Alten Stiel, " Opus 125;"Romantische Suite, " Opus 128; "Vier Tondichtungen nach Böcklin, " Opus130; "Ballet-Suite, " Opus 132; "Mozart-Variations, " Opus 140;"Violin-concerto, " Opus 101; "Piano-concerto, " Opus 114. 

His works for chorus include: "Gesang der Verklärten, " Opus 71; "Psalm100, " Opus 106; "Die Nonnen, " Opus 112. 

His chamber-works include: String-sextet, Opus 118; Pianoforte-quintet, Opus 64; Pianoforte-quartet, Opus 113; Five string-quartets, Opera 54, 74, 109, 121; Serenade for flute, violin and viola, Opus 77a; Trio forflute, violin and viola, Opus 76b; Nine violin sonatas, Opera 1, 3, 41, 72, 84, 103b, 122, 139; Four 'cello sonatas, Opera 5, 28, 71, 116; Threeclarinet sonatas, Opera 49, 197; Four sonatas for violin solo, Opus 42. 

His organ compositions include: Suite, Opus 16; Fantasy, Opus 27;Fantasy and fugue, Opus 29; Fantasy, Opus 20; Sonata, Opus 33; Twofantasies, Opus 40; Fantasy and fugue, Opus 46; The fantasies, Opus 52;Symphonic fantasy and fugue, Opus 57; Sonata, Opus 60; Fifty-twopreludes, Opus 67; Variations and fugue, Opus 73; Suite, Opus 92;Intermezzo, passacaglia and fugue, Opus 127. 

His pianoforte works include: Aquarellen, Opus 25; Variations and fugue, Opus 81; "Aus Meinem Tagebuch, " Opus 82; Two sonatinas, Opus 89. 

He wrote over three hundred songs. 

SCHOENBERG

Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna September 13th, 1874. He wasself-taught until his 20th year. His first instruction was received fromhis brother-in-law, Alexander von Zemlinsky. In 1901 he went to Berlin, and became the Kapellmeister of the "Uberbrettl, " the cabaret managed byBirnbaum, Wedekind and von Wolzogen. Due to the influence of RichardStrauss, he secured a position as instructor in Stern's Conservatory. In1903 he returned to Vienna. He aroused the interest of Gustav Mahler, who secured performances for several of his works. The Rosé Quartetperformed the sextet "Verklärte Nacht" and the Quartet, Opus 7. The"Kammersymphonie" and the choral work "Gurrelieder" were also played. In1910 Schoenberg was appointed teacher of composition in the ImperialAcademy. In 1911 he returned to Berlin, remaining there till 1916 (?). He is said at present to be in Vienna. 

Among his compositions are:

Opera 1, 2 and 3, Songs--"Gurrelieder"; Opus 4, sextet "VerklärteNacht"; Opus 5, "Pelleas und Melisanda"; Opus 7, 1st String-quartet;Opus 8, Songs with orchestral accompaniment; Opus 9, "Kammersymphonie";Opus 10, 2nd String-quartet, with setting of "Entrückung, " by StefanGeorge; Opus 11, three pieces for Piano; Opus 13, _a capella_ choruses;Opus 15, Songs; Opus 16, five Pieces for Orchestra; Opera 17 and 19, Piano pieces; Opus 21, "Die Lieder des Pierrot Lunaire. "

A new Kammersymphonie and a monodrama "Erwartung" remain unpublished. 

SIBELIUS

Jean Sibelius was born in Tavastehus, Finland, December 8th, 1865. Hematriculated at the University of Helsingfors in 1885, but shortly aftergave up all idea of studying law, and entered the Conservatory in 1886. Here he remained three years, studying composition with Wegelius. In1889-90 he studied with Becken in Berlin. In 1891 he went to Vienna tostudy instrumentation with Karl Goldmark. From 1893-97 he taughtcomposition at the Helsingfors Conservatory. In 1897 the Finnish Senateallotted him the sum of $600 yearly for a period of ten years, in orderto permit him leisure for composition. In 1900 he toured Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium and France as conductor of the Helsingfors PhilharmonicOrchestra. In 1901 he was invited to conduct his own compositions at thefestival of the Deutscher Tonkünstlerverein in Heidelberg. In 1914, while in America, Yale University conferred upon him the degree ofDoctor of Music. At present he is living in Järsengrää, Finland. 

Among Sibelius's compositions are:

Five Symphonies: No. 1, Opus 39; No. 2, Opus 43; No. 3, Opus 52; No. 4, Opus 63; No. 5 (composed in 1916). 

String-quartet "Voces intimæ, " Opus 56. 

"En Saga, " Opus 9; "Karelia Overture, " Opus 10; "Der Schwan von Tuonela"and "Lemmenkainen zieht heimwarts, " Opus 22; "Finlandia, " Opus 26;"Suite King Christiern II, " Opus 27; "Pohjohla's Daughter, " Opus 49;"Nächtlicher Ritt und Sonnenaufgang, " Opus 55; "Scènes historiques, "Opus 66; "Die Okeaniden, " Opus 72. Some fifty songs, etc. , etc. 

LOEFFLER

Charles Martin Loeffler was born in Mülhausen, Alsace, January 30, 1861. He studied the violin under Massart and Léonard in Paris, and underJoachim in Berlin. He studied composition with Guirand in Paris. Playedviolin in Pasdeloup's orchestra, then in the orchestras at Nice andLugano. From 1883 till 1903 he was second leader in the Boston SymphonyOrchestra. Since 1903 he has been devoting himself completely tocomposition. He is living at present in Medford, Massachusetts. 

His compositions include: Suite for violin and orchestra, "Les Vielléesde l'Ukraine, " 1891; Concerto for cello, 1894; Divertissement fororchestra, 1895; "La Mort de Tintagiles, " 1897; "Divertissementespagnol" for orchestra and saxaphone; "La Villanelle du Diable"; "APagan Poem"; "Hora mystica"; "Psalm 137"; "To One Who Fell in Battle";Two rhapsodies for oboe, viola and pianoforte; String-sextet;String-quartet; Music for Four Stringed Instruments; Songs on poems byBaudelaire, Verlaine, Yeats, Rossetti, Lodge, Kahn, etc. 

ORNSTEIN

Leo Ornstein was born in Krementchug, Russia, December 11th, 1895. Hisfather was cantor in the synagogue. Until 1906 Ornstein was a pupil inthe Petrograd Conservatory. Because of the pogroms, his family emigratedto New York. There he attended the Friends' School and studied music inthe Institute of Musical Art. Later, he studied with Bertha FieringTapper. He made his début as pianist in January, 1911. In 1913-14 helived in Europe, in Paris chiefly. He was introduced to the Frenchpublic by Calvocoressi at a concert in the Sorbonne. In the summer hetoured Norway. He returned to America in the autumn, and early next yeargave a series of recitals of ultra-modern music at the Fifty-seventhStreet Theatre. Next year he continued the series at four semi-privaterecitals at the home of Mrs. Arthur M. Reis. He has been giving concertsall over the United States and Canada since. He is living at present inJackson, N. H. 

Among Ornstein's compositions there are:

Two symphonic poems, "The Fog" and "The Life of Man" (after Andrev); aPiano-concerto, Opus 44; a setting of the 30th Psalm for chorus; aQuartet for strings, Opus 28; a Miniature String-quartet; aPiano-quintet, Opus 49; two Sonatas for Violin and Piano, Opera 26 and31; two Sonatas for Cello and Piano, Opera 45 and 78; Three Lieder, Opus33; Four settings of Blake, Opus 18. --For piano solo: Sonata, Opus 35;Dwarf Suite, Opus 11; Impressions of the Thames, Opus 13; TwoImpressions of Notre-Dame, Opus 16; Two Shadow Pieces, Opus 17; SixShort Pieces, Opus 19; Three Preludes, Opus 20; Three Moods, Opus 22;Eleven Short Pieces, Opus 29; Burlesques, Opus 30; Eighteen Preludes--àla Chinoise, Opus 39; Arabesques, Opus 48; Poems of 1917, Opus 68. 

BLOCH

Ernest Bloch was born in Geneva, Switzerland, July 24th, 1880. Hestudied in Geneva with Jaques Dalcroze; in Brussels with Ysaye; at theHoch Conservatory in Frankfort with I. Knorr; and with Thuille inMunich. His opera "Macbeth" was produced at the Opéra Comique in Parisin 1910. In 1915 he was appointed professor of composition in theconservatory in Geneva. In 1916 he came to America as conductor of theMaud Allan Symphony Orchestra. His quartet was performed by theFlonzaleys that season, and in May, 1917, the Society of the Friends ofMusic devoted a concert entirely to his works. Returning to Switzerlandin the summer he once more voyaged to America, this time with theintention of settling here. He taught composition at the David MannesSchool from 1917 to 1919. In September, 1919, he won the Coolidge Prizewith his Suite for viola. He lives in New York. 

Besides "Macbeth, " the list of his compositions includes a Symphony inC-sharp minor; "Vivre-Aimer"; "Hiver-Printemps"; "Trois Poèmes juives, ""Trois Psaumes" (22nd for baritone, 14th and 137th for soprano); "Poèmesd'Automne" for mezzo-soprano; "Schelemo, " rhapsody for 'cello andorchestra; "Israel" (symphony--two movements); String-quartet; and Suitefor viola and piano or viola and orchestra. A sonata for violin andpiano is in process of preparation.