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Library Buraau Cai. no. 1137

MUSICAL PORTRAITS

INTERPRETATIONS OF TWENTY
MODERN COMPOSERS

BY
PAUL ROSENFELD

H

NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.

il^lSl

mu

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY

THE QUINN a BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY. N. J.

^0
ARTHUR MOORE WILLIAMSON

Some of the material of this book was
originally printed in the iorm of articles
in '' The Dial,'' '' The New Republic*^
and '' The Seven Arts'' Thanks are
due the editors of these periodicals for
permission to recast a?td reprint it.

CONTENTS

Wagner, 3

Strauss, 27
• -moussorgsky, 57

Liszt, 73

Berlioz, 87
^ Franck, ioi
. Debussy, 119

Ravel, 133
m Borodin, 149
» RiMSKY- Korsakoff, 159
^ Rachmaninoff, 169
•*Scriabine, 177
*Strawinsky, 191

Mahler, 205

Reger, 223

Schoenberg, 233

Sibelius, 245

Loeffler, 257

Ornstein, 267

Bloch, 281

Appendix, 299

MUSICAL PORTRAITS

Wagner

Wagner's music, more than any other, is the sign
and symbol of the nineteenth century. The men to
whom it was disclosed, and who first sought to refuse,
and then accepted it, passionately, without reserva-
tions, found in it their truth. It came to their ears
as the sound of their own voices. It was the common,
the universal tongue. Not alone on Germany, not
alone on Europe, but on every quarter of the globe
that had developed coal-power civilization, the music
of Wagner descended with the formative might of the
perfect image. Men of every race and continent
knew it to be of themselves as much as was their
hereditary and racial music, and went out to it as
to their own adventure. And wherever music reap-
peared, whether under the hand of the Japanese or
the semi-African or the Yankee, it seemed to be
growing from Wagner as the bright shoots of the fir
sprout from the dark ones grown the previous year.
A whole world, for a period, came to use his idiom.
His dream was recognized during his very lifetime
as an integral portion of the consciousness of the
entire race.

For Wagner's music is the century's paean of mate-
rial triumph. It is its cry of pride in its possessions,

3

Wagner

its aspiration toward greater and ever greater objective
power. Wagner's style is stiff and diapered and em-
blazoned with the sense of material increase. It is
brave, superb, haughty with consciousness of the gi-
gantic new body acquired by man. The tonal pomp
and ceremony, the pride of the trumpets, the arrogant
stride, the magnificent address, the broad, vehement,
grandiloquent pronouncements, the sumptuous texture
of his music seems forever proclaiming the victory
of man over the energies of fire and sea and earth,
the lordship of creation, the suddenly begotten rail-
ways and shipping and mines, the cataclysm of wealth
and comfort. His work seems forever seeking to form
images of grandeur and empire, flashing with Sieg-
fried's sword, commanding the planet with Wotan's
spear, upbuilding above the heads of men the castle
of the gods. It dares measure itself with the terres-
trial forces, exults in the fire, soughs through the
forest with the thunderstorm, glitters and surges with
the river, spans mountains with the rainbow bridge.
It is full of the gestures of giants and heroes and
gods, of the large proud movements of which men
have ever dreamed in days of affluent power. Even
"Tristan und Isolde," the high song of love, and
" Parsifal," the mystery, spread richness and splendor
about them, are set in an atmosphere of heavy gor-
geous stuffs, amid objects of gold and silver, and thick
clouding incense, while the protagonists, the lovers and

Wagner

saviors, seem to be celebrating a worldly triumph,
and crowning themselves kings. And over the entire
body of Wagner's music, there float, a massive diadem,
the towers and parapets and banners of Nuremberg
the imperial free city, monument of a victorious
burgherdom, of civic virtue &at on the ruins of feudal-
ism constructed its own World, and demonstrated to
all times its dignity and sobriety and industry, its
solid worth.

For life itself made the Wagnerian gesture. The
vortex of steel and glass and gold, the black express-
packets plowing the seven seas, the smoking trains
piercing the bowels of the mountains and connecting
cities vibrant with hordes of business men, the tele-
graph wires setting the world aquiver with their in-
cessant reports, the whole sinister glittering faery of
gain and industry and dominion, seemed to tread and
soar and sound and blare and swell with just such
rhythm, such grandeur, such intoxication. Mountains
that had been sealed thousands of years had split open
again and let emerge a race of laboring, fuming giants.
The dense primeval forests, the dragon-haunted Ger-
man forests, were sprung up again, fresh and cool
and unexplored, nurturing a mighty and fantastic ani-
mality. Wherever one gazed, the horned Siegfried,
the man born of the earth, seemed near once more,
ready to clear and rejuvenate the globe with his
healthy instinct, to shatter the old false barriers

Wagner

and pierce upward to fulfilment and power. Man-
kind, waking from immemorial sleep, thought for the
first time to perceive the sun in heaven, to greet the
creating light. And where was this music more im-
manent than in the New World, in America, that es-
sentialization of the entire age? By what environ-
ment was it more justly appreciated, Saxon though
the accents of its recitative might be? Germany had
borne Wagner because Germany had an uninterrupted
flow of musical expression. But had the North Amer-
ican continent been able to produce musical art, it
could have produced none more indigenous, more
really autochthonous, than that of Richard Wagner.
Whitman was right when he termed these scores " the
music of the ^ Leaves.' " For nowhere did the forest
of the Niebelungen flourish more lushly, more darkly,
than upon the American coasts and mountains and
plains. From the tov^ers and walls of New York there
fell a breath, a grandiloquent language, a stridency
and a glory, that were Wagner's indeed. His regal
commanding blasts, his upsweeping marching violins,
his pompous and majestic orchestra, existed in the
American scene. The very masonry and river-spans,
the bursting towns, the fury and expansiveness of ex-
istence shed his idiom, shadowed forth his proud pro-
cessionals, his resonant gold, his tumultuous synco-
pations and blazing brass and cymbals and volcani-
cally inundating melody; appeared to be strugghng

Wagner 7

to achieve the thing that was his art. American life
seemed to be calling for this music in order that its
vastness, its madly affluent wealth and multiform
power and transcontinental span, its loud, grandiose
promise might attain something like eternal being.

And just as in Wagner's music there sounds the
age's cry of material triumph, so, too, there sounds
in it its terrible cry of homesickness. The energy
produced and hurled out over the globe was sucked
back again with no less a force. The time that saw
the victory of industrialism saw as well the revival
or the attempted revival of medieval modes of feel-
ing. Cardinal Newman was as typical a figure of nine-
teenth-century life as was Balzac. The men who had
created the new world felt within themselves a pas-
sionate desire to escape out of the present into the
past once more. They felt themselves victors and
vanquished, powerful and yet bereft and forlorn.
And Wagner's music expresses with equal veracity
both tides. Just as his music is brave with a sense
of outward power, so, too, it is sick with a sense
of inner unfulfilment. There is no longing more con-
suming, no homesickness more terrible, no straining
after the laving, immersing floods of unconsciousness
more burning than that which utters itself through
this music. There are passages, whole hours of his,
that are like the straining of a man to return into the
darkness of the mothering night out of which he came.

8 Wagner

There is music of Wagner that makes us feel as though
he had been seeking to create great warm clouds, great
scented cloths, wide curtains, as though he had come
to his art to find something in which he could envelop
himself completely, and blot out sun and moon and
stars, and sink into oblivion. For such a healer Tris-
tan, lying dying on the desolate, rockbound coast, cries
through the immortal longing of the music. For such
a divine messenger the wound of Amfortas gapes; for
such a redeemer Kundry, driven through the world
by scorching winds, yearns. His lovers come toward
each other, seeking in each other the night, the de-
scent into the fathomless dark. For them sex is the
return, the complete forget fulness. 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 and women. There is only the fierce,
impersonal longing for utter consumption, the extinc-
tion of the flaming torch, complete merging in the
Absolute, the weaving All. In each of them, desire
for the void mounts into a gigantic, monstrous flower,
into the shimmering thing that enchants King Mark's
garden and the rippling stream and the distant horns
while Isolde waits for Tristan, or into the devastating
fever that chains the sick Tristan to his bed of pain.

Wagner

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 such a return their great
fulfilment. Siegmund finds in the traits of his be-
loved his own childhood. Siegfried awakes on the
flame-engirdled hill a woman who watched over him
before he was born, and waited unchanged for his
ripening. It is with the kiss of Herzeleide that Kun-
dry enmeshes Parsifal. Brunhilde struggles for the
forgiving embrace of Wotan, sinks on the breast of
the god in submission, reconciliation, immolation.
And it is towards an engulfing consummation, some
extinction that is both love and death and deeper
than both, that the music of his operas aspires. The
fire that licks the rock of the Walkyrie, the Rhine that
rises in the finale of " Gotterdammerung " and inun-
dates the scene and sweeps the world with its silent,
laving tides, the gigantic blossom that opens its co-
rolla in the Liebestod and buries the lovers in a rain
of scent and petals, the tranquil ruby glow of the
chalice that suffuses the close of '^ Parsifal," are the
moments toward which the dramas themselves labor,
and in which they attain their legitimate conclusion,
completion and end. But not only his finales are full of
that entrancement. His melodic line, the lyrical pas-
sages throughout his operas, seem to seek to attain it,
if not conclusively, at least in preparation. Those
silken excessively sweet periods, the moment of recon-

lo Wagner

ciliation and embrace of Wotan and Brunhilde, the
*' Ach, Isolde " passage in the third act of " Tristan,"
those innumerable lyrical flights with their beginnings
and subsidings, their sudden advances and regressions,
their passionate surges that finally and after all their
exquisite hesitations mount and flare and unroll them-
selves in fullness — they, too, seem to be seeking to dis-
till some of the same brew, the same magic drugging
potion, to conjure up out of the orchestral depths some
Venusberg, some Klingsor's garden full of subtle scent
and soft delight and eternal forget fulness.

And with Wagner, the new period of music begins.
He stands midway between the feudal and the modern
worlds. In him, the old and classical period is accom-
plished. Indeed, so much of his music is sum, is ter-
mination, that there are times when it seems nothing
else. There are times when his art appears entirely
bowed over the past; the confluence of a dozen dif-
ferent tendencies alive during the last century and a
half; the capping of the labor of a dozen great musi-
cians; the fulfilment of the system regnant in Europe
since the introduction of the principle of the equal
temperament. For the last time, the old conceptions
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 its relative minor. Rhythms that had been used

-5

Wagner ii

all through the classical period 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 to something like an
ultimate conclusion. The ending, the conclusion,
the completion, are sensible throughout his art.
Few musicians have had their power and method placed
more directly in their hands, and benefited so hugely
by the experiments of their immediate predecessors,
have fallen heir to such immense musical legacies.
Indeed, Wagner was never loath to acknowledge his
indebtedness, and there are on record several instances
when he paraphrased Walther's song to his masters,
and signaled 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
structure of 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, the expositions of the thematic material of
" Parsifal " in the prelude and in Gurnamanz's narra-
tive, and its subsequent reappearance and adventures
and developments, are something like a summit of
symphonic art as Beethoven made it to be under-
stood. And his orchestra is scarcely more than the
orchestra of Beethoven. He did not require the

12 Wagner

band of independent instrumental families demanded
by Berlioz and realized by the modern men. He was
content with the old, classical orchestra in which
certain groups are strengthened and to which the harp,
the English horn, the bass-tuba, the bass-clarinet have
been added.

And his conception of an " unending melody," an
unbroken flow of music intended to give cohesion and
homogeneity to his music-dramas, was a direct con-
sequence of the efforts of Mozart and Weber to give
unity to their operatic works. For although these
composers retained the old convention of an opera
composed of separate numbers, they nevertheless man-
aged to unify their operas by creating a distinct style
in each of them, and by securing an emotional
development in the various arias and concerted num-
bers. The step from " Don Giovanni " and " Eury-
anthe " to "• Tannhauser " and '' Lohengrin " does not
seem quite as long a one to-day as once it did. In-
deed, there are moments when one wonders whether
" Lohengrin " is really a step beyond " Euryanthe,"
and whether the increase of power and vividness and
imagination has not been made at the expense of style.
Moreover, in much of what is actually progress in
Wagner the influence of Weber is clearly discernible.
The sinister passages seem but developments of mo-
ments in ^' Der Freischlitz"; the grand melodic style,
the romantic orchestra with its sighing horns and chiv-

Wagner 13

airy and flourishes, seem to come directly out of
^' Euryanthe "; the orchestral scene-painting from the
sunrise and other original effects in '' Oberon."

Even Meyerbeer taught Wagner something more
than the use of certain instruments, the bass-clarinet,
for instance. The old operatic speculator indubitably
was responsible for Wagner's grand demands upon
the scene-painter and the stage-carpenter. His pom-
pous spectacles fired the younger man not only with
" Rienzi." They indubitably gave him the courage to
create an operatic art that celebrated the new gold
and power and magnificence, and was Grand Opera
indeed. If the works of the one were sham,
and those of the other poetry, it was only that
Wagner realized what the other sought vainly all
his life to attain, and was prevented by the stock-
broker within.

And Chopin's harmonic feeling as well as Berlioz's
orchestral wizardry played a role in Wagner's artistic
education. But for all his incalculable indebtednesses,
Wagner is the great initiator, the compeller of the
modern period. It is not only because he summarized
the old. It is because he began with force a revo-
lution. In expressing the man of the nineteenth cen-
tury, he discarded the old major-minor system that
had dominated Europe so long. That system was the
outcome of a conception of the universe which set
man apart from the remainder of nature, placed him

14 Wagner

in a category of his own, and pretended that he was
both the center and the object of creation. For it
called man the consonance and nature the dissonance.
The octave and the fifth, the bases of the system, are
of course, to be found only in the human voice. They
are, roughly, the difference between, the average male
and the average female voice, and the difference be-
tween the average soprano and alto. It is upon those
intervals that the C-major scale and its twenty-three
dependents are based. But with the coming of a
conception that no longer separated man from the
rest of creation, and placed him in it as a small part
of it, brother to the animals and plants, to everything
that breathes, the old scale could no longer completely
express him. The modulations of the noises of wind
and water, the infinite gradations and complexes of
sound to be heard on the planisphere, seemed to ask
him to include them, to become conscious of them
and reproduce them. He required other more subtle
scales. And with Wagner the monarchy of the C-major
scale is at an end. '' Tristan und Isolde " and '' Par-
sifal " are constructed upon a chromatic scale. The
old one has had to lose its privilege, to resign it-
self to becoming simply one of a constantly growing
many. If this step is not a colossal one, it is still
of immense importance. The musical worthies who
ran about wringing their hands after the first per-
formance of each of Wagner's works, and lamented

Wagner 15

laws monstrously broken, and traditions shattered,
were, for once, right. They gauged correctly from
which direction the wind was blowing. They prob-
ably heard, faintly piping in the distance, the pen-
tatonic scales of Moussorgsky and Debussy, the scales
of Scriabine and Strawinsky and Ornstein, the bar-
barous, exotic and African scales of the future, the
one hundred and thirteen scales of which Busoni
speaks. And to-day there are no longer musical
rules, forbidden harmonies, dissonances. Siegfried
has broken them along with Wotan's spear. East
and West are near to merging once again. No doubt,
had there been no Wagner, the change would have
arrived nevertheless. However, it would have arrived
more slowly. For what he did accomplish was the
rapid emptying of the old wine that still remained in
the wineskin, the preparation of the receptacle for
the new vintage. He forced the new to put in imme-
diate appearance.

The full impact of these reforms, the full might of
Wagner, we of our generation doubtlessly never felt.
They could have been felt only by the generation to
whom Wagner first disclosed himself, the generation
that attained maturity between 1850 and 1880. It
was upon the men of those days that he did his full
work of destruction and revival. It was in them he bat-
tered down walls. It was them he made to hear afresh,
to stretch and grow in the effort to comprehend him.

1 6 Wagner

At the moment we encountered Wagner, his work was
already something of a closed experience, something
we were able to accept readily and with a certain ease
because it had been accepted and assimilated by an
entire world, and become part of the human organ-
ism. Its power was already slightly diminished. For
instance, Wagner the musician was no longer able
to make either Wagner the poet or Wagner the philos-
opher exist for us as they existed for the men of the
earlier generation. Only Houston Stewart Chamber-
lain still persisted in trying to stand upon the burn-
ing deck whence all the rest had fled. For us, it was
obvious that if Wagner's work throned mightily it was
because of his music, and oftentimes in spite of his
verse and his doctrine. For us, it was a commonplace
that dramatic movement and the filling up of scenes
by the introduction of characters who propose point-
less riddles to one another and explain at length what
their names are not, are incompatible; that poetry does
not consist in disguising commonplace expressions in
archaic and alliterative and extravagant dress; that
Wotan displays no grasp of the essentials of Schopen-
hauer's philosophy when he insists on dubbing Brun-
hilde his Will.

And yet, whatever the difference, most of Wag-
ner's might was still in him when first we came to
know his music. The spell in which he had bound
the generation that preceded ours was still powerful.

Wagner 17

For us, too, there occurred the moments when Sieg-
fried's cavernous forest depths first breathed on us,
when for the first time '' Die Meistersinger " flaunted
above the heads of all the world the gonfalon of art,
when for the first time we embarked upon the shore-
less golden sea of '' Tristan und Isolde." For us, too,
the name of Richard Wagner rang and sounded above
all other musical names. For us, too, he was a sort
of sovereign lord of music. His work appeared the
climax toward which music had aspired through cen-
turies, and from which it must of necessity descend
again. Other, and perhaps purer work than his, ex-
isted, we knew. But it seemed remote and less com-
pelling, for all its perfection. New music would ar-
rive, we surmised. Yet we found ourselves convinced
that it would prove minor and unsatisfactory. For
Wagner's music had for us an incandescence which
no other possessed. It was the magnetic spot of
music. Its colors blazed and glowed with a depth
and ardor that seemed to set it apart from other music
as in an enchanted circle. It unlocked us as did no
other. We demanded just such orchestral movement,
just such superb gestures, just such warm, immersing
floods, and were fulfilled by them. That there would
come a day when the magnetism which it exerted on
us would pass from it, and be seen to have passed,
seemed the remotest of possibilities.
For we accepted him with the world of our minor-

1 8 Wagner

ity. For each individual there is a period, varying
largely in extent, during which his existence is
chiefly a process of imitation. In the sphere of ex-
pression, that submission to authority extends well
over the entire period of gestation, well into the time
of physical maturity. There are few men, few great
artists, even, who do not, before attaining their proper
idiom and gesture, adopt those of their teachers and
predecessors. Shakespeare writes first in the style
of Kyd and Marlowe, Beethoven in that of Haydn and
Mozart; Leonardo at first imitates Verrocchio. And
what the utilization of the manner of their predeces-
sors is to the artist, that the single devotion to Wagner
was to us. For he was not only in the atmosphere,
not only immanent in the lives led about us. His
figure was vivid before us. Scarcely another ar-
tistic personality was as largely upon us. There
were pictures, on the walls of music-rooms, of gray-
bearded, helmeted warriors holding mailed blonde
women in their arms, of queens with golden ornaments
on their arms leaning over parapets and agitating their
scarves, of women throwing themselves into the sea
upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish
men and young girls conversing teasingly through a
window by a lilac-bush, that were Wagner. There
were books with stories of magical swans and hordes
of gold and baleful curses, of phantasmal storm ships
and hollow hills and swords lodged in tree-trunks

Wagner 19

awaiting their wielders, of races of gods and giants
and grimy dwarfs, of guardian fires and potions of
forgetfulness and prophetic dreams and voices, that
were Wagner. There were adults who went to assist
at these things of which one read, who departed in
state and excitement of an evening to attend perform-
ances of " Die Walkiire '^ and " Tristan und Isolde,'^
and who spoke of these experiences in voices and man-
ners different from those in which they spoke, say, of
the theater or the concert. And there were magnificent
and stately and passionate pieces that drew their way
across the pianoforte, that seized upon one and made
one insatiable for them. Long before we had actually
entered the opera house and heard one of Wagner's
works in its entirety, we belonged to him and knew
his art our own. We were born Wagnerians.

But of late a great adventure has befallen us. What
once seemed the remotest of possibilities has actually
taken place. We who were born and grew under
the sign of Wagner have witnessed the twilight of the
god. He has receded from us. He has departed from
us into the relative distance into which during his
hour of omnipotence he banished all other com-
posers.

He has been displaced. A new music has come into
being, and drawn near. Forms as solid and won-
drous and compelling as his are about us. Little by
little, during the last years, so gradually that it has

20 Wagner

been almost unbeknown to us, our relationship to him
has been changing. Something within us has moved.
Other musicians have been working their way in upon
our attention. Other works have come to seem as
vivid and deep of hue, as wondrous and compelling
as his once did. Gradually the musical firmament
has been reconstellating itself. For long, we were un-
aware of the change, thought ourselves still opposite
Wagner, thought the rays of his genius still as direct
upon us as ever they were. But of late so wide has
the distance become that we have awakened sharply
to the change. Of a sudden, we seem to ourselves
like travelers who, having boarded by night a liner
fast to her pier and fallen asleep amid familiar objects,
beneath the well-known beacons and towers of the
port, waken suddenly in broadest daylight scarcely
aware the vessel has been gotten under way, and
find the scene completely transformed, find them-
selves out on ocean and glimpse, dwindling be-
hind them, the harbor and the city in v/hich
apparently but a moment since they had Iain
enclosed.

It is the maturing of a generation that has produced
the change. For each generation the works of art pro-
duced by its members have a distinct importance.
Out of them, during their time, there sparks the
creative impulse. For every generation is something
of a unit.

Wagner 21

" Chaque generation 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 Tele d'Or. And
the resemblances between works produced independ-
ently of each other within the space of a few years,
generally so much greater than those that exist be-
tween any one work of one age and any of another,
bears him out. The styles of Palestrina and Vittoria,
which are obviously dissimilar, are nevertheless more
alike than those of Palestrina and Bach, Vittoria and
Haendel; just as those of Bach and Haendel, dissim-
ilar as they are, have a greater similarity than that
which exists between those of Bach and Mozart, of
Haendel and Haydn. And so, for the men of a single
period the work produced during their time is a power-
ful encouragement to self-realization, to the espousal
of their destiny, to the fulfilment of their life. For
the motion of one part of a machine stirs all the
others. And there is a part of every man of a gen-
eration in the work done by the other members of it.
The men who fashion the art of one's own time make
one's proper experiment, start from one's own point
of departure, dare to be themselves and oneself in the
face of the gainsaying of the other epochs. They are
so belittling, so condescending, so nay-saying and de-
terring, the other times and their masterpieces! They

22 Wagner

are so unsympathetic, so strange and grand and re-
mote! 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 is like one
who goes to men much older, men of different habits
and sympathies, in order to explain himself, and finds
himself disconcerted and diminished instead, glimpses
a secret jealousy and resentment beneath the mask.
But the adventure of encountering the artist of one's
own 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's thoughts, and fac-
ing one's problems. It is to get reassurance, to accept
oneself, 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 so creatively infecting for us. We have
found the music of the post- Wagnerian epoch. It is
our music. For we are the offspring of the generation
that assimilated Wagner. We, too, are the reaction
from Wagner. Through the discovery we have come to
learn that music can give us sensations different than
those given us by Wagner's. We have learned what it
is to have music say to us, " It is thus, after all, that
you feel." 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 alto-

Wagner 23

gether different stirring of the musical caldron. A
song of Moussorgsky's or Ravel's, a few measures of
" Pelleas " or '' Le Sacre du printemps," a single fine
moment in a sonata of Scriabine's, or a quartet or
suite of Bloch's, give us a joy, an illumination,
a satisfaction that little of the older music can
equal. For our own moment of action is finally at
hand.

So Wagner has retreated and joined the company
of composers who express another day than our own.
The sovereignty that was in him has passed to other
men. We regard him at present as the men of his
own time might have regarded Beethoven and Weber.
Still, he will always remain the one of all the com-
pany of the masters closest to us. No doubt he is
not the greatest of the artists who have made music.
Colossal as were his forces, colossal as were the strug-
gles he made for the assumption of his art, his musical
powers were not always able to cope with the tasks
he set himself. The unflagging inventive power of
a Bach or a Haydn, the robustness of a Haendel or a
Beethoven, the harmonious personality of a Mozart,
were things he could not rival. He is even inferior,
in the matter 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, and that
he simply went through the routine of composition.
Too often he permitted the system of leading-motifs

24 Wagner

to relieve him of the necessity of creating. Too often,
he made of his art a purely mental game. His
emotion, his creative genius were far more inter-
mittent, his breath far less long than one once imag-
ined. Some of the earlier works have commenced to
fade rapidly, irretrievably. At present one wonders
how it is possible that one once sat entranced through
performances of " The Flying Dutchman " and '' Tann-
hauser." '' Lohengrin " begins to seem a little brutal,
strangely Prussian lieutenant with its militaristic trum-
pets, its abuse of the brass. One finds oneself choos-
ing even among the acts of ''Tristan und Isolde,"
finding the first far inferior to the poignant, magnifi-
cent third. Sometimes, one glimpses a little too long
behind his work not the heroic agonist, but the man
who loved to languish in mournful salons, attired in
furred dressing gowns.

Indeed, if Wagner seems great it is chiefly as one of
the most delicate of musicians. It is the lightness of
his brush stroke that makes us marvel at the third act
of " Tristan," the first scene of the " Walkiire." It
is the delicacy of his fancy, the lilac fragrance pervad-
ing his inventions, that enchants us in the second act
of " Die Meistersinger." Through the score of "• Par-
sifal " there seem to pass angelic forms and wings
dainty and fragile and silver-shod as those of Beards-
ley's '' Morte d'Arthur."

But the debt we owe him will always give him a

Wagner 25

vast importance in our eyes. The men of to-day, ail
of them, stand directly on his shoulders. It is doubtful
whether any of us, the passive public, would be here
to-day as we are, were it not for his music.

Strauss

Strauss was never the fine, the perfect artist. Even
in the first flare of youth, even at the time when he
was the meteoric, dazzling figure flaunting over all
the baldpates of the universe the standard of the
musical future, it was apparent that there were serious
flaws in his spirit. Despite the audacity with which
he realized his amazing and poignant and ironic visions,
despite his youthful fire and exuberance — and it was
as something of a golden youth of music that Strauss
burst upon the world — one sensed in him the not quite
beautifully deepened man, heard at moments a callow
accent in his eloquence, felt that an unmistakable alloy
was fused with the generous gold. The purity, the in-
wardness, the searchings of the heart, the religious
sentiment of beauty, present so unmistakably in the
art of the great men who had developed music, were
wanting in his work. He had neither the unswerving
sense of style, nor the weightiness of touch, that mark
the perfect craftsman. He was not sufficiently a
scrupulous and exacting artist. It was apparent that
he was careless, too easily contented with some of
his material, not always happy in his detail. Mixed
with his fire there was a sort of laziness and indif-
ference. But, in those days, Strauss was unmistakably

:8 Strauss

the genius, the original and bitingly expressive musi-
cian, the engineer of proud orchestral flights, the out-
rider and bannerman of his art, and one forgave his
shortcomings because of the radiance of his figure, or
remained only half-conscious of them.

For, once his period of apprenticeship passed, and
all desire to write symphonies and chamber-music in
the styles of Schumann and Mendelssohn and Brahms,
to construct operas after the pattern of '' Tannhauser "
and " Parsifal " gone out of him, this slender, sleepy
young Bavarian with the pale curly hair and
mustaches had commenced to develop the expressive
power of music amazingly, to make the orchestra
speak wonderfully as it had never spokenr'before. Un-
der his touch the symphony, that most rigid and ab-
stract and venerable of forms, was actually displaying
some of the novel's narrative and analytical power,
its literalness and concreteness of detail. It was de-
scribing the developments of a character, was psycholo-
gizing as it had hitherto done only in conjunction with
poetry or the theater. Strauss made it represent the
inflammations of the sex illusion, comment upon Nietz-
sche and Cervantes, recount the adventures, somer-
saults and end of a legendary rascal, portray a hero
of our time. He made all these intellectual con-
cepts plastic in a music of a brilliance and a sprightli-
ness and mordancy that not overmany classic sym-
phonies can rival. Other and former composers, no

Strauss 29

doubt, had dreamt of making the orchestra more con-
cretely expressive, more precisely narrative and de-
scriptive. The '' Pastoral " symphony is by no means
the first piece of deliberately, confessedly program-
matic music. And before Strauss, both Berlioz and
Liszt had experimented with the narrative, descriptive,
analytical symphony. But it was only with Strauss
that the symphonic novel was finally realized.

Neither Berlioz nor Liszt had really embodied their
programs in living music. 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 the symphony based on an extra-musi-
cal scheme. His symphonic poems reveal how diffi-
cult it was for him to make his music follow the curve
of his ideas. In " Die Ideale," for instance, for the
sake of a conventional close, he departed entirely from
the curve of the poem of Schiller which he was pre-
tending to transmute. The variations in which he
reproduced Lamartine's verse are stereotyped enough.
When was there a time when composers did not deform
their themes in amorous, rustic and warlike varia-
tions? The relation between the pompous and some-
what empty " Lament and Triumph " and the unique,
the distinct thing that was the life of Torquato Tasso
is outward enough. And even " Mazeppa," in which
Liszt's virtuosic genius stood him in good stead.

30 Strauss

makes one feel as though Liszt could never quite keep
his eye on the fact, and finally became engrossed in
the weaving of a musical pattern fairly extraneous to
his idea. The " Faust Symphony " is, after all, an
exception. Berlioz, too, failed on the whole to achieve
the musical novel. Whenever he did attain musical
form, it was generally at the expense of his program.
Are the somewhat picturesque episodes of " Harold
in Italy," whatever their virtues, and they are many,
more than vaguely related to the Byronism that
ostensibly elemented them? The surprisingly conven-
tional overture to " King Lear " makes one feel as
though Berlioz had sat through a performance of one
of Shakespeare's comedies under the impression that
he was assisting at the tragedy, so unrelated to its
subject is the music. And where, on the other hand,
Berlioz did succeed in being regardful of his program,
as in the " Symphonie Fantastique," or in ^' Lelio,"
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 he possessed the
special gifts necessary to the performance of the task.
He possessed, in the first place, a miraculous power
of musical characterization. Through the representa-
tive nicety of his themes, through his inordinate capac-
ity for thematic variation and transformation, his play-
ful and witty and colorful instrumentation, Strauss

Strauss 31

was able to impart to his music a concreteness and de-
scriptiveness and realism hitherto unknown to sym-
phonic art, to characterize briefly, sparingly, justly, a
personage, a situation, an event. He could be pathetic,
ironic, playful, mordant, musing, at will. He was sure
in his tone, was low-German in " Till Eulenspiegel,"
courtly and brilliant in " Don Juan," noble and bit-
terly sarcastic in " Don Quixote," childlike in '^ Tod
und Verklarung." His orchestra was able to accom-*
modate itself to all the folds and curves of his elab-
orate programs, to find equivalents for individual traits.
It is not simply " a man," or even " an amatory hero "
that is portrayed in " Don Juan." It is no vague sym-
bol for the poet of the sort created by " Orpheus "
or " Tasso " or " Mazeppa." It is Lenau's hero him-
self, the particular being Don Juan Tenorio. The
vibrant, brilliant music of the up-surging, light-tread-
ing strings, of the resonant, palpitating brass, springs
forth in virile march, reveals the man himself, his
physical glamour, his intoxication that caused him
to see in every woman the Venus, and that in the
end made him the victim as well as the hero of the
sexual life. It is Till Eulenspiegel himself, the scurvy,
comic rascal, the eternal dirty little boy with his witty
and obscene gestures, who leers out of every measure
of the tone-poem named for him, and twirls his fingers
at his nose's end at all the decorous and respectable
world. Here, for once, orchestral music is really won-

32 Strauss

derfully rascally and impudent, horns gleeful and
windy and insolent, wood-wind puckish and obscene.
Here a musical form reels hilariously and cuts capers
and dances on bald heads. The variation of " Don
Quixote '' that describes with wood- wind and tam-
bourine Dulcinea del Toboso is plump and plebeian
and good-natured with her very person, is all the
more trenchantly vulgar and fiat for the preceding
suave variation that describes the knight's fair, sonor-
ous dream of her. There is no music more plain-
tively stupid than that which in the same work
figures the '' sheep " against which Don Quixote battles
so valiantly. Nor is there any music more maliciously,
malevolently petty than that which represents the
adversaries in '' Ein Heldenleben." So exceedingly
definite is the portrait of the Hero's Consort, for which
Frau Richard Strauss, without doubt, sat, that with-
out even having seen a photograph of the lady, one
can aver that she is graced v^^ith a diatonic figure.
And, certainly the most amusing passage of " Sin-
fonia Domestica " is that complex of Bavarian lusti-
hood. Bavarian grossness, Bavarian dreaminess and
Bavarian good nature, the thematic group that serves
as autoportrait of the composer.

And just as there seemed few characters that Strauss
could not paint, in those days, so, too, there seemed
few situations, few atmospheres, to which he could
not do justice. A couple of measures, the sinister

Strauss 33

palpitation of the timpani and the violas, the brooding
of the wood-wind, the dull flickering of the flutes, the
laboring breath of the strings, and we are lying on
the death-bed, exhausted and gasping for air, weighed
by the wrecks of hopes, awaiting the cruel blows on
the heart that will end everything. Horns and violins
quaver and snarl, flutes shrill, a brief figure descends
in the oboes and clarinets, and Till has shed his rascal-
sweat and danced on the air. The orchestra reveals
us Don Juan's love affairs in all their individuality:
first the passionate, fiery relation with the Countess,
quickly begun and quickly ended ; then the gentler and
more inward communion with Anna, with the bore-
dom resulting from the lady's continual demand for
sentiment and romantic posturing; then the great night
of love and roses, with its intoxicated golden winding
horns, its ecstatically singing violins; and finally the
crushing disappointment, the shudder of disgust. The
battle in " Ein Heldenleben " pictures war really; the
whistling, ironical wind-machine in " Don Quixote "
satirizes dreams bitingly as no music has done; the or-
chestra describes the enthusiastic Don recovering from
his madness, and smiles a conclusion; in " Also Sprach
Zarathustra " it piles high the tomes of science, and
waltzes with the Superman in distant worlds.

And then, though less fecund an inventor than Liszt,
less rich and large a temperament than Berlioz, Strauss
was better able than either of his masters to organize

34 Strauss

his material on difficult and original lines, and find
musical forms representative of his programs. Be-
cause of their labors, he was born freer of the classical
traditions than they had been, and was able to make
music plot more exactly the curves of his concepts,
to submit the older forms, such as the rondo and the
theme and variations, more perfectly to his purpose.
Compositions of the sort of '' Till Eulenspiegel," " Tod
und Verklarung " and ^' Ein Heldenleben," solidly
made and yet both narrative and dramatic, place the
symphonic poem in the category of legitimate musical
forms. The themes of '^ Till " grow out of each other
quite as do the themes of a Beethoven symphony or
of " Tristan " or of '' Parsifal." Indeed, Strauss has
done for the symphonic poem something of what Wag-
ner did for the opera. And not an overwhelming
number 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 the
terrifying opening passage of " Tod und Verklarung."
For Strauss was able to unloose his verve and fantasy
completely in the construction of his edifices. His
orchestra moves in strangest and most unconventional
curves, shoots with the violence of an exploding fire-
arm, ambles like a palfrey, swoops like a bird. There
are few who, at a first hearing of a Strauss poem, do
not feel as though some wild and troubling and panic

Strauss 35

presence had leaned over the concert hall and bedev-
iled the orchestra. For, in his hands, it is no longer
the familiar and terrorless thing it once had been, a
thing about whose behavior one can be certain. It
has become a formidable engine of steel and gold, vi-
brant with mad and unexpected things. Patterns
leap and tumble out of it. Violin music launches
swiftly into space, trumpets run scales, the tempi move
with the velocity of express trains. It has become a
giant, terrible bird, the great auk of music, that seizes
you in its talons and spirals into the empyrean.

But it was what he seemed to promise to perform,
to bring into being, even more than what he had al-
ready definitely accomplished, that spread about the
figure of Strauss the peculiar radiance. It was Nietz-
sche who had made current the dream of a new music,
a music that should be fiercely and beautifully animal,
full of laughter, of the dry good light of the intellect,
of " salt and fire and the great, compelling logic, of
the light feet of the south, the dance of the stars, the
quivering dayshine of the Mediterranean." The other
composers, the Beethovens and Brahms and Wagners,
had been sad, suffering, wounded men, men who had
lost their divine innocence and joy in the shambles,
and whose spiritual bodies were scarred, for all the
muscular strength gained during their fights, by hun-
ger and frustration and agony. Pain had even marred
their song. For what should have been innocence and

36 Strauss

effortless movement and godlike joy, Mozartean co-
ordination and harmony, was full of terrible cries, and
convulsive, rending motions, and shrouding sorrow.
And Nietzsche had dreamt of music of another sort.
He had dreamt of a music that should be a bridge to
the Superman, the man whose every motion would
be carefree. He had seen striding across mountain
chains in the bright air of an eternal morning a youth
irradiant with unbroken energy, before whom all the
world lay open in vernal sunshine like a domain be-
fore its lord. He had seen one beside whom the other
musicians would stand as convicts from Siberian prison
camps who had stumbled upon a banquet of the gods.
He had seen a young Titan of music, drunken with
life and fire and joy, dancing and reeling and laughing
on the top of the world, and with fingers amid the
stars, sending suns and constellations crashing. He
had caught sight of the old and eternally youthful
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 permitted one for an
instant to perceive a musical realm in which the earth-
fast could not breathe. He permitted one for an in-
stant to hear ringing " the prelude of a deeper,
mightier, perchance a more evil and mysterious music;
a super-German music which does not fade, wither and
die away beside the blue and wanton sea and the clear

Strauss 37

Mediterranean sky; a music super-European, which
would assert itself even amid the tawny sunsets of the
desert; a music whose soul is akin to the palm-trees;
a music that can consort and prowl with great, beauti-
ful, lonely beasts of prey; a music whose supreme
charm is its ignorance of Good and Evil." For
he came with some of the light and careless and
arrogant tread, the intellectual sparkling, the superb
gesture and port, of the musician of the new race.
The man who composed such music, one knew, had
been born on some sort of human height, in some
cooler, brighter atmosphere than that of the crowded
valleys. For in this music there beat a faster pulse,
moved a lighter, fierier, prouder body, sounded a more
ironic and disdainful laughter, breathed a rarer air
than had beat and moved and sounded and breathed
in music. It made drunken with pleasant sound, with
full rich harmonies, with exuberant dance and waltz
movements. It seemed to adumbrate the arrival of
a new sort of men, men of saner, sounder, more athletic
souls and more robust and cool intelligences, a genera-
tion that was vitally satisfied, was less torn and be-
labored by the inexpressible longings of the romantic
world, a generation very much at home on the globe.
For it had none of the restless, sick desire of Wagner,
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

38 Strauss

cerebral. Though it was obviously the speech of a
complicated, modern man, self-conscious, sophisticated,
nervous, product of a society perhaps not quite as free
and Nietzschean as it deemed itself, but yet culti-
vated and illuminated and refined, it nevertheless
seemed exuberantly sound. The sweet, broad, dia-
tonic idiom, the humor, the sleepy Bavarian accent,
the pert, naive, little folk-tunes it employed, the tran-
quil, touching, childlike tones, the close of ^' Tod und
Verklarung," with its wondrous unfolding of corolla
upon corolla, were refreshing indeed after all the
burning chromaticism of Wagner, the sultry air of
Klingsor's wonder-garden.

And this music glittered with the sun. The pitch
of Wagner's orchestra had, after all, been predomi-
nantly sober and subdued. But in the orchestra of
Strauss, the color-gamut of the plein-air painters got a
musical equivalent. Those high and brilliant tints,
these shimmering, biting tones, make one feel as though
Strauss made music with the paint-brush of a Monet
or a Van Gogh. His trumpets are high and brilliant
and silvery, his violins scintillant and electric, at mo-
ments winding a lazy, happy, smoke-blue thread
through the sunburnt fabric of the score. His horns
glow with soft, fruity timbres. The new sweetness
of color which he attains in his songs, the pale gold
of '' Morgen," the rose of the Serenade, the mild eve-
ning blue of " Traum durch die Dammerung," shim-

Strauss 39

mers throughout his orchestra scores. Never have
wind instruments sounded more richly, dulcetly, than
in that '^ Serenade fiir dreizehn Blaser." At a first
hearing of " Also Sprach Zarathustra," it seemed as
though the very dayspring had descended into the
orchestra to make that famous, brassy opening pas-
sage. For here, in the hand of Strauss, the orchestra
begins to round out its form and assume its logical
shape. The various families of instruments are made
independent; often play separately. The shattering
brass of which Berlioz had dreamt is realized. Violas
d'amore, hecklephones, wind-machines, are introduced
into the band; the familiar instruments are used in
unfamiliar registers. Through the tone-poems of
Strauss, the orchestral composer for the first time
has a suitable palette, and can achieve a bril-
liance as great as that which the modern painter can
attain.

To-day, it is difficult to realize that Richard Strauss
ever incensed such high hopes, that there was a time
when he made appear realizable Nietzsche's mad dream
of a modern music, and that for awhile the nimbus
of Dionysos burnt round his figure. To-day it is
difficult to remember that once upon a time Strauss
seemed to the world the golden youth of music, the
engineer of proud orchestral flights, the outrider and
bannerman of his art. For it is long since he has
promised to reveal the new beauty, the new rhythm,

40 Strauss

has seemed the wonderful start and flight toward some
rarer plane of existence, some bluer ether, the friend
of everything intrepid and living and young, the
" arrow of longing for the Superman." It is a long
while since any gracious, lordly light has irradiated
his person. In recent years he has become almost the
very reverse of v/hat 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 become dreary and
outward and stupid, even. He who once seemed the
champion of the new has come to fill us with the
weariness of the struggle, with deep self-distrust and
discouragement, has become a heavy and oppressive
weight. He who once sought to express the world
about him, to be the poet of the coming tim.e, now
seems inspired only by a desire to do the amazing, the
surface thing, and plies himself to every ephemeral
and shallow current of modern life. For Strauss has
not only not deepened and matured and increased in
stature; he has not even stood still, remained the
artist that once he was. He has progressively and
steadily deteriorated during the last decade. He has
become a bad musician. He is the cruel, the great
disappointment of modern music, of modern art. The
dream-light has failed altogether, has made the suc-
ceeding darkness the thicker for the momentary illu-
mination. Strauss to-day is seen as a rocket that
sizzled up into the sky with many-colored blaze, and

Strauss 41

then broke suddenly and extinguished swiftly into the
midnight.

It is not easy, even for those who were aware from
the very first that Strauss was not the spirit '' pardlike,
beautiful and swift " and that there always were dis-
tinctly gross and insensitive particles in him, to rec-
ognize in the slack and listless person who concocts
" Joseph's Legende " and the '' Alpensymphonie," the
young and fiery composer, genius despite all the im-
purities of his style, who composed " Till Eulen-
spiegel " and ^' Don Quixote "; not easy, even though
the contours of his idiom have not radically altered,
and though in the sleepy facile periods of his later
style one catches sight at times of the broad, simple
diction of his earlier. For the later Strauss lacks pre-
eminently and signally just the traits that made of
the earlier so brilliant and engaging a figure. Behind
the works of the earlier Strauss there was visible an
intensely fierily experiencing being, a man who had
powerful and poignant and beautiful sensations, and
the gift of expressing them richly. Behind the work
of the latter there is all too apparent a man who for a
long while has felt nothing beautiful or strong or full,
who no longer possesses the power of feeling anything
at all, and is inwardly wasted and dull and spent.
The one had a burning and wonderful pressure of
speech. The other seems unable to concentrate energy
and interest sufficiently to create a hard and living

42 Strauss

piece of work. The one seemed to blaze new pathways
through the brain. The other steps languidly in road-
ways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer.
The contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the
man who penetrated into the death-chamber and stood
under the gibbet, has turned to toying with his medium,
to imitating other composers, Mozart in " Der Rosen-
kavalier," Haendel in '' Joseph's Legende," Offenbach
and Lully (a coupling that only Strauss has the lack
of taste to bring about) in " Ariadne auf Naxos." He
has become increasingly facile and unoriginal, has
taken to quoting unblushingly Mendelssohn, Tchai-
kowsky, Wagner, himself, even. His insensitivity has
waxed inordinately, and led him to mix styles, to com-
mingle dramatic and coloratura passages, to jumble
the idioms of three centuries in a single work, to play
all manner of pointless pranks with his art. His lit-
erary taste has grown increasingly uncertain. He who
was once so careful in his choice of lyrics, and recog-
nized the talents of such modern German poets as
Birnbaum and Dehmel and Mackay, accepts librettos
as dull and inartistic and precious as those with which
Hofmannsthal is supplying him, and lends his art to
the boring buffooneries of " Der Rosenkavalier " and
"Ariadne auf Naxos." Something in him has bent
and been fouled.

One thing at least the Strauss of the tone-poems
indisputably was. He was freely, dazzlingly, daringly

Strauss 43

expressive. And this is what the Strauss of the last
years thinly and rarely is. It is not Oscar Wilde's
wax flowers of speech, nor the excessively stiff and
conventionalized action of '' Salome/' that bores one
with the Strauss opera of that name. It is not even
the libretto of " Der Rosenkavalier," essentially
coarse and boorish and insensitive as it is beneath
all its powdered preciosity, that wearies one with
Strauss's "Musical Comedy"; or the hybrid, lame,
tasteless form of " Ariadne auf Naxos " that turns one
against that little monstrosity. It is the generally in-
expressive and insufficient music in which Strauss has
vested them. The music of '' Salome," for instance,
is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. It
was the evacuation of an obsessive desire, the revul-
sion from a pitiless sensuality that the poet had in-
tended to procure through this representation. But
Strauss's music, save in such exceptional passages as
the shimmering, restless, nerve-sick opening page, or
the beginning of the scene with the head, or certain
other crimson patches, hampers and even negates the
intended effect. It emasculates the drama with its
pervasive prettiness, its lazy felicitousness where it
ought to be monstrous and terrifying, its reminiscences
of Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky and "Little Eg5^t."
The lascivious and hieratic dance, the dance of the
seven veils, is represented by a valse lente. Often-
times the score verges perilously on circus-music, re-

44 Strauss

calls the sideshows at county fairs. 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 demand that the composer in his music
express the sexual cruelty and frenzy symbolized in
the figure of the dancer. And the Salome of Strauss's
score is as little the Salome of Wilde as she is the
Salome of Flaubert or Beardsley or Moreau or Huys-
mans. One cannot help feeling her eminently a buxom,
opulent Berliner, the wife, say, of the proprietor of
a large department store; a heavy lady a good deal
less " damonisch " and " perverse " than she would
like to have it appear. But there are moments when
one feels as though Strauss's heroine were not even a
Berliner, or of the upper middle class. There are mo-
ments when she is plainly Kathi, the waitress at the
Miinchner Hofbralihaus. And though she declares to
Jokanaan that ''it is his mouth of which she is enam-
ored," she delivers the words in her own true-hearted,
unaffected brogue.

Nor is " Elektra," more sharp than " Salome."
though it oftentimes is, the musical equivalent for the
massive and violent forms of archaic Greek sculpture
that Strauss intended it be. Elektra herself is perhaps
more truly incarnate fury than Salome is incarnate
luxury; ugliness and demoniacal brooding, madness
and cruelty are here more sheerly powerfully ex-
pressed than in the earlier score; the scene of recog-

Strauss 45

nition between brother and sister is more large and
touching than anything in ^' Salome "; Elektra's paean
and dance, for all its closeness to a banal cantilena,
its tempo di valse so characteristic of the later
Strauss, is perhaps more grandiosely and bale fully
triumphant than the dancer's scene with the head.
Nevertheless, the work is by no means realized.
It is formally impure, a thing that none of the earlier
tone-poems are. Neither style nor shape are deeply
felt. Both are superficially and externally conceived;
and nothing so conclusively demonstrates it as the
extreme ineffectuality of the moments of contrast with
which Strauss has attempted to relieve the dominant
mood of his work. Just as in " Salome " the more
restless and sensual passages, lazily felt as they are,
are nevertheless infinitely more significant than the in-
tensely contrasting silly music assigned to the Prophet,
so, too, in " Elektra," the moments when Strauss is
cruel, brutal, ugly are of a much higher expressiveness
than those in which he has sought to write beautifully.
For whereas in moments of the first sort the lions of
the Mycenae gates do at times snarl and glower, in
those of the second it is the Teutonic beer-mug that
makes itself felt. Elektra laments her father in a very
pretty and undistinguished melody, and entreats her
sister to slay Klytemnsestra to the accompaniment of
a sort of valse perverse. It is also in tempo di valse
that Chrysothemis declares her need of wifehood and

46 Strauss

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 the more recent works.
With " Der Rosenkavalier," Strauss seems to have
reached a condition in which it is impossible for him
to penetrate a subject deeply. No doubt he always
was spotty, even though in his golden days he invari-
ably fixed the inner informing binding rhythm of each
of his works. But his last works are not only spotty,
but completely spineless as well, invertebrate masses
upon which a few jewels, a few fine patches, gleam
dully. " Salome " and '' Elektra " had at least a cer-
tain dignity, a certain bearing. " Der Rosenkavalier,"
" Ariadne auf Naxos," " Joseph's Legende " and " Eine
Alpensymphonie " are makeshift, slack, slovenly de-
spite all technical virtuosity, all orchestral marvels.
Every one knows what the score of " Rosenkavalier "
should have been, a gay, florid, licentious thing, the
very image of the gallant century with its mundane
amours and ribbons and cupids, its petit-mattres and
furbelows and billets-doux, its light emotions and
equally light surrenders. But Strauss's music is singu-
larly flat and hollow and dun, joyless and soggy, even
though it is dotted with waltzes and contains the de-
lightful introduction to the third act, and the brilliant
trio. It has all the worst faults of the libretto. Hof-

Strauss 47

mannsthaPs " comedy for music," though gross and
vulgar in spirit, and unoriginal in design, is full of a
sort of clever preciosity, full of piquant details culled
from eighteenth-century prints and memoirs. The
scene of the coiffing is a print of Hogarth's translated
to the stage; Rofrano's name " Octavian Maria Ehren-
reich Bonaventura Fernand Hyazinth " is like an essay
on the culture of the Vienna of Canaletto; the polite
jargon of eighteenth-century aristocratic Austria
spoken by the characters, with its stiff, courteous forms
and intermingled French, must have been studied from
old journals and gazettes. And Strauss's score is
equally precious, equally a thing of erudition and clev-
erness. Mozart turned the imbecilities of Schicka-
neder to his uses; Weber triumphed over the ridicu-
lous romancings of Helmine von Chezy. But Strauss
follows Hofmannsthal helplessly, soddenly. Just as
Hofmannsthal imitates Hogarth, so Strauss imitates
Mozart, affects his style, his turns, his spirit; inserts
a syrupy air in the style of Haendel or Mehul in the
first act; and jumbles Mozart with modern comic-opera
waltzes, Haendel with post-Wagnerian incantations.
And like Hofmannsthal's libretto, the score remains
a superficial and formless thing. The inner and co-
herent rhythm, the spiritual beat and swing, the great
unity and direction, are wanting. " I have always
wanted to write an opera like Mozart's, and now I
have done it," Strauss is reported to have said after

48 Strauss

the first performance of " Der Rosenkavalier." But
" Der Rosenkavalier " is almost antipodal to ^' Don
Giovanni " or to '' Falstaff " or to '' Die Meistersinger "
or to any of the great comic operas. For it lacks just
the thing the others possess abundantly, a strong lyrical
movement, a warm emotion that informs the music
bar after bar, scene after scene, act after act, and
imparts to the auditor the joy, the vitality, the beauty
of which the composers' hearts were full. It is a long
while since Strauss has felt 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 have found oneself
compelled to believe the mournful decadence of Rich-
ard Strauss the inevitable development awaiting musi-
cal genius in the modern world. There exists a group,
international in composition, which, above all other
contemporary bodies, arrogates to itself the style of
modernity. It is the group, tendrils of which reach
into every great capital and center, into every artistic
movement and cause, of the bored ones, the spoilt
ones. The present system has lifted into a quasi aris-
tocratic and leisurely state vast numbers of people
without background, without tradition or culture or
taste. By reason of its largeness and resources, this
group of people without taste, without interest, with-
out finesse, has come to dominate in particular the
world of art as the world of play, has come to demand

Strauss 49

distraction, sensation, excitement which its unreal ex-
istence does not afford it. Indeed, this band has come
to give a cast to the whole of present-day life; its
members pretend to represent present-day culture. It
is with this group with its frayed sensibilities and
tired pulses that Strauss has become increasingly
identified, till of late he has become something
like its court-musician, supplying it with stimu-
lants, awaking its curiosities, astonishing and excit-
ing it with the superficial novelty of his works, trying
to procure it the experiences it is so lamentably unable
to procure itself. It is for it that he created the trum-
pery horrors, the sweet erotics of the score of
" Salome." It is for it that he imitated Mozart sac-
charinely in " Der Rosenkavalier "; mangled Moliere's
comedy; committed the vulgarities and hypocrisies of
"Joseph's Legende." And did no evidence roundly
to the contrary exist, one might suppose this group to
really represent modern life; that its modernity was
the only true one; and that in expressing it, in conform-
ing to it, Strauss was functioning in the only manner
granted the contemporary composer. But since such
evidence exists aplenty, since a dozen other musicians,
to speak only of the practitioners of a single art, have
managed to keep themselves immune and yet create
beauty about them, to remain on the plane upon which
Strauss began life, to persevere in the direction in
which he was originally set, and yet live fully, one

50 Strauss

finds oneself convinced that the deterioration of
Strauss, which has made him musical purveyor to this
group, has not been the result of the pressure of out-
ward and hostile circumstances. One finds oneself
positively convinced that it was some inner weakness
within himself that permitted the spoilt and ugly folk
to seduce him from his road, and use him for their
purposes.

And in the end it is as the victim of a psychic de-
terioration that one is forced to regard this unfortu-
nate man. The thing that one sees happening to so
many people about one, the extinction of a flame, the
withering 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 it surprise
one to see it happening in the life of an artist, and
deflowering genius and ruining musical art? All the
hectic, unreal activity of the later Strauss, the dissi-
pation of forces, points back to such a cause. He
declares himself in every action the type who can no
longer gather his energies to the performance of an
honest piece of work, who can no longer achieve direct,
full, living expression, who can no longer penetrate the
center of a subject, an idea. He is the type of man
unfaithful to himself in some fundamental relation,
unfaithful to himself throughout his deeds. Many
people have thought a love of money the cause of

Strauss 51

Strauss's decay; that for the sake of gain he has de-
livered 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 of money plays an
inordinate role in the man's life, and keeps on playing
a greater and greater. But it is probable that Strauss's
desire for incessant gain is a sort of perversion, a
mania that has gotten control over him because his
energies are inwardly prevented from taking their log-
ical course, and creating works of art. Luxury-lov-
ing as he is, Strauss has probably never needed money
sorely. Some money he doubtlessly inherited through
his mother, the daughter of the Munich beer-brewer
Pschorr; his works have always fetched large prices —
his publishers have paid him as much as a thousand
dollars for a single song; and he has always been
able to earn great sums by conducting. No matter
how lofty and severe his art might have become, he
would always have been able to live as he chose.
There is no doubt that he would have earned quite
as much money with " Salome " and " Der Rosenka-
valier " had they been works of high, artistic merit as
he has earned with them in their present condition.
The truth is that he has rationalized his unwillingness
to go through the labor-pains of creation by pretend-
ing to himself a constant and great need of money,
and permitting himself to dissipate his energies in a
hectic, disturbed, shallow existence, in a tremor of

52 Strauss

concert-tours, guest-conductorships, money-making
enterprises of all sorts, which leave him about two
or three of the summer months for composition, and
probably rob him of his best energies. So works leave
his writing table half-conceived, half-executed. The
score of " Elektra " he permits his publishers to snatch
from him before he is quite finished with it. He com-
mences composing " Der Rosenkavalier " before hav-
ing even seen the third act. The third act arrives;
Strauss finds it miserable. But it is too late. The
work is half-finished, and Strauss has to go through
with it. Composition becomes more and more a me-
chanical thing, the brilliant orchestration of sloppy,
undistinguished music, the polishing up of details, the
play of superficial cleverness which makes a score like
'^ Der Rosenkavalier," feeble as it is, interesting to
many musicians.

And Richard Strauss, the one living musician who
could with greatest ease settle down to uninterrupted
composition, gets to his writing table in his apart-
ment in Charlottenburg every evening at nine o'clock,
that is, whenever he is not on duty at the Berlin Opera.

And always the excuses: "Earning money for the
support of wife and child is not shameful," " I am
going to accumulate a large enough fortune so that I
can give up conducting entirely and spend all my
time composing." But one can be sure that when
Strauss soliloquizes, it is a different defense that he

Strauss 53

makes. One can be sure, then, that he justifies him-
self cynically, bitterly, grossly, tells himself that the
game is not worth the candle, that greatness is a mat-
ter of advertisement, that only the values of the com-
mercial world exist, that other success than the pro-
curement of applause and wealth and notoriety consti-
tutes failure. Why should you take the trouble to
write good work that will bring you posthumous fame
when without trouble you can write work that will
bring you fame during your lifetime? The whole
world is sham and advertisement and opportunism, is
it not? Reputations are made by publishers and
newspapers. Greatness is a matter determined by ma-
jorities. But impress the public, but compose works
that will arouse universal comment, but break a few
academic formulas and get yourself talked about, but
write music that will surprise and seem wonderful
at a first hearing, and your fame is assured. The im-
portant thing is to live luxuriously and keep your
name before the public. In so doing one will have
lived life as fully as it can be lived. And after one
is dead, wliat does it all matter?

Yet, though the world be full of men whose spiritual
energies have been lamed in kindred fashions, the ter-
rible misadventure of Richard Strauss remains deeply
affecting. However far the millions of bright spirits
who have died a living death have fallen, their fall
has been no farther than this man's. There can be

54 Strauss

no doubt of the completeness of Strauss's disaster.
It is a long while since he has been much besides
a bore to his once fervent admirers, an object of
hatred to thousands of honest, idealistic musicians.
He has completely, in his fifty-sixth year, lost the
position of leadership, of eminence that once he had.
Even before the war his operas held the stage only
with difficulty. And it is possible that he will outlive
his fame. One wonders whether he is not one of the
men whose inflated reputations the war has pricked,
and that a world will shortly wonder, before his two
new operas, how it was possible that it should have
been held at all by the man. Had he been the most
idealistic, the most uncompromising of musicians he
could not be less respected. Perhaps his last chance
lay in the " Alpensymphonie." Here was a ceremony
that could have made him priest once again. Europe
had reached a summit, humanity had had a vision.
Before it lay a long descent, a cloudburst, the sunset
of a civilization, another night. Could Strauss have
once more girded himself, once more summoned the
faith, the energy, the fire that created those first grand
pages that won 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
been his champions, his audiences, his work already
seems old, part of the past even at its best, unreal
except for a few of the fine symphonic works.

Strauss 55

To us, who once thought to see in him the man of
the new time, he seems only the brave, sonorous trum-
pet-call that heralded a king who never put in his
appearance, the glare that in the East lights the sky
for 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. It comes up out of a ground that
lies thickly packed beneath our feet, and that is wider
than the widest waste, and deeper than the bottom-
less abysses of the sea. It comes up from a soil that
descends downward through all times and ages, through
all the days of humankind, down to the very founda-
tions of the globe itself. For it grows from the flesh
of the nameless, unnumbered multitudes of men con-
demned by life throughout its course to misery. It
has its roots where death and defeat have been. It
has its roots in all bruised and maimed and frustrate
flesh, in all flesh that might have borne a god and
perished barren. It has its root in every being who
has been without sun, in every being who has suffered
cold and hunger and disease, and pierces down and
touches every voiceless woe, every defeat that man
has ever known. And out of that sea of mutilated
flesh it rises like low, trembling speech, halting and
inarticulate and broken. It has no high, compelling
accent, no eloquence. And yet, it has but to lift its
poor and quavering tones, and the splendor of the
world is blotted out, and the great, glowing firmament
is made a sorrowful gray, and, in a single instant,

57

^8 Moussorgsky

we have knowledge of the stern and holy truth, know
the terrible floor upon which we tread, know what
man has ever suffered, and what our own existences
can only prove to be.

For it is the cry of one possessed and consumed in
every fiber of his being by that single consciousness.
It is as though Moussorgsky, the great, chivalric Rus-
sian, the great, sinewy giant with blood aflame for
gorgeousness and bravery and bells and games and
chants, had been all his days the Prince in '^ Khovanch-
tchina " to whom the sorceress foretells: "Disgrace
and exile await thee. Honors and power and riches
will be torn from thee. Neither thy past glory nor
thy wisdom can save thee. Thou wilt know what it is
to want, and to suffer, and to weep the tears of the
hopeless. And so, thou wilt know the truth of this
world." It is as though he had heard that cry inces-
santly from a million throats, as though it had tolled in
his ears like a bourdon until it informed him quite, and
suffused his youth and force and power of song. It is
as though his being had been opened entirely in orien-
tation upon the vast, sunless stretches of the world, and
distended in the agony of taking up into himself the
knowledge of those myriad broken lives. For it is the
countless defeated millions that live again in his
art. It is they who speak with his voice. Better
even than Walt Whitman, Moussorgsky might have
said:

Moussorgsky 59

"Through me, 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, had relinquished to them his giant Russian
strength, his zest of life, his joy, had given them his
proud flesh that their cry and confession might reach
the ears of the living.

Sometimes, Moussorgsky is whole civilizations dis-
carded 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
an instant in a world that carelessly flung them aside,
and then turned and went away. Sometimes he is
the brutal, ignorant, helpless throng that kneels in
the falling snow while the conquerors, the great ones
of this world, false and true alike, pass by in the
torchlight amid fanfares and hymns and acclamations
and speak the fair, high words and make the kingly
gestures that fortune has assigned to them. Sometimes
he is even life before man. He is the dumb beast
devoured by another, larger; the plants that are
crowded from the sunlight. He knows the ache and
pain of inanimate things. And then, at other mo-
ments, he is a certain forgotten individual, some ob-

6o Moussorgsky

scure, nameless being, some creature, some sentient
world like the monk Pimen or the Innocent in " Boris
Godounow," and out of the dust of ages an halting,
inarticulate voice calls to us. He is the poor, the
aging, the half-witted; the drunken sot mumbling in his
stupor; the captives of life to whom death sings his
insistent, luring songs; the half -idiotic peasant boy
who tries to stammer out his declaration of love to
the superb village belle; the wretched fool who weeps
in the falling snowy night. He is those who have never
before spoken in musical art, and now arise, and are
about us and make us one with them.

But it is not only as content that they are in this
music. This music is they, in its curves and angles,
in its melody and rhythms, in its style and shape.
There are times when it stands in relation to other
music as some being half giant, half day-laborer, might
stand in the company of scholars and poets and other
highly educated and civilized men. The unlettered,
the uncouth, the humble, the men unacquainted with
eloquence are in this music in very body. It pierces
directly from their throats. No film, no refinement on
their speech, no art of music removes them from us.
As Moussorgsky originally wrote these scores, their
forms are visible on page after page. When his music
laughs it laughs like barbarians holding their sides.
When it weeps, it weeps like some little old peasant
woman crouching and rocking in her grief. It has

Moussorgsky 6i

all the boisterousness and hoarseness of voices that
sound out of peasant-cabins and are lodged in men
who wear birch-bark shoes and eat coarse food and
suffer cold and hunger. Within its idiom there are
the croonings and wailings of thousands of illiterate
mothers, of people for whom expression is like a tear-
ing of entrails, like a terrible birth-giving. It has in
it the voices of folk singing in fairs, of folk sitting
in inns; exalted and fanatical and mystical voices;
voices of children and serving-maids and soldiers; a
thousand sorts of uncouth, grim, sharp speakers. The
plaint of Xenia in " Boris Godounow " is scarcely-
more than the underlining of the words, the accentua-
tion of the voice of some simple girl uttering her grief
for some one recently and cruelly dead. There are
moments when the whole of '' Boris Godounow," ma-
chinery of opera and all, seems no more elegant, more
artful and refined than one of the simpler tunes cher-
ished by common folk through centuries, passed from
generation to generation and assumed by each because
in moments of grief and joy and longing and ease it
brought comfort and solace and relief. This music is
common Russia singing. It is Russia speaking with-
out the use of words. For like the folk-song, it has
within it the genius and values of the popular tongue.
Moussorgsky's style is blood-brother to the spoken
language, is indeed as much the Russian language as
music can be. In the phrase of Jacques Riviere, "" it

62 Moussorgsky

speaks in words ending in ia and schka, in humble
phrases, in swift, poor, suppliant terms." Indeed, so
unconventional, so crude, shaggy, utterly inelegant, are
Moussorgsky 's scores, that they offend in polite musi-
cal circles even to-day. It is only in the modified,
" corrected " and indubitably castrated versions of
Rimsky-Korsakoff that " Boris " and " Khovanch-
tchina " maintain themselves upon the stage. This
iron, this granite and adamantine music, this grim,
poignant, emphatic expression will not fit into the
old conceptions. The old ones speak vaguely
of " musical realism," " naturalism," seeking to
find a pigeon-hole for this great quivering mass of
life.

No doubt the music of Moussorgsky is not entirely
iron-gray. Just as, in the midst of " Boris," there
occurs the gentle scene between the Czar and his chil-
dren, so scattered through this stern body of music
there are light and gay colors, brilliant and joyous
compositions. Homely and popular and naive his mel-
odies and rhythms always are, little peasant-girls with
dangling braids, peasant lads in gala garb, colored
balls that are thrown about, singing games that are
played to the regular accompaniment of clapping
palms, songs about ducks and parrakeets, dances full
of shuffling and leaping. Even the movements of the
sumptuous " Persian Dances " in ^' Khovanchtchina "
are singularly naive and simple and unpretentious.

Moussorgsky 63

) Sometimes, however, the full gorgeousness of Byzan-
'tine art shines through this music, and the gold-dusty
modes, the metallic flatness of the pentatonic scale, the
mystic twilit chants and brazen trumpet-calls make us
l^see the mosaics of Ravenna, the black and gold ikons
of Russian churches, the aureoled saints upon bricked
walls, the minarets of the Kremlin. There is
scarcely an operatic scene more magnificent than the
scene of the coronation of Tsar Boris, with its mas-
sive splendors of pealing bells and clarion blares and
the caroHng of the kneeling crowds. Then, like Boris
himself, Moussorgsky sweeps through in stiff, bla-
zoned robes, crowned with the domed, flashing Slavic
tiara. And yet through all these bright colors, as
through the darker, sadder tones of the greater part
of his work, there comes to us that one anguished,
overwhelming sense of life, that single great conscious-
ness. The gay rich spots are but part of it, intensify
the great somber mass. Their simplicity, their child-
likeness, their innocence, are qualities that are per-
ceived only after suffering. The sunlight in them is
the gracious, sweet, kindly sunlight that falls only
between nights of pain. The bright and chivalric pas-
sages of " Boris," the music called forth by the mem-
ories of feudal Russia, and the glory of the Czars,
give a deeper, stranger, even more wistful tone to the
great gray pile of which they are a part. '' Khovanch-
tchina " is never so much the tragedy, the monu-

64 Moussorgsky

ment to beings and cultures superseded and cast aside
in the relentless march of life, as in the scene when
Prince Ivan 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 intoned by his
followers the sweetest melody that Moussorgsky wrote
or could write. And out of that h3niin to the glory
of the perishing house there seems to come to us all
the pathos of eternally passing things, all the wistful-
ness of the last sunset, all the last greeting of a van-
ished happiness. More sheerly than any other mo-
ment, more even than the infinitely 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 the sadness and darkness and pitifulness of human
existence, that scene brings into view the great bleak
monolith that the work of Moussorgsky really is, the
great consciousness it rears silently, accusingly against
the sky. As collieries rear themselves, grim and
sinister, above mining towns, 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 Wagnerian halls. The operas of Moussorg-
sky have begun to achieve the eminence that Wagner's
once possessed. To a large degree, it is the change
of times that has advanced and appreciated the art
of Moussorgsky. Although " Boris " saw the light

Moussorgsky 65

at the same time as " Die Gotterdammerung/' and al-
though Moussorgsky lies chronologically very near the
former age, he is far closer to us in feeling than is
Wagner. The other generation, with its pride of
material power, its sense of well-being, its surge to-
ward mastery of the terrestrial forces, its need of
luxury, was unable to comprehend one who felt life a
grim, sorrowful thing, who felt himself a child, a crone,
a pauper, helpless in the terrible cold. For that was
required a less naive and confident generation, a day
more sophisticated and disabused and chastened. And
so Moussorgsky's music, with its poor and uncouth
and humble tone, its revulsion from pride and material
grandeur and lordliness, its iron and cruelty and bleak-
ness, lay unknown and neglected in its snows. Indeed,
it had to await the coming of " Pelleas et Melisande "
in order to take its rightful place. For while Mous-
sorgsky may have influenced Debussy artistically, it
was Debussy^s work that made for the recognition
and popularization of Moussorgsky's. For the music
of Debussy is the delicate and classical and voluptu-
ous and aristocratic expression of the same conscious-
ness of which Moussorgsky's is the severe, stark, bar-
baric; the caress as opposed to the pinch. Conse-
quently, Debussy's art was the more readily compre-
hensible of the two. But, once " Pelleas " produced,
the assumption of '' Boris " was inevitable. Moussorg-
sky's generation had arrived. The men who felt as

66 Moussorgsky

he, who recognized the truth of his spare, metallic
style, his sober edifices, had attained majority. A
world was able to perceive in the music of the dead
man its symbol.

But it is by no means alone the timeliness of Mous-
sorgsky that has advanced him to his present position.
It is the marvelous originality of his art. He is one
of the most completely and nobly original among com-
posers, one of the great inventors of form. The music
of Moussorgsky is almost completely treasure-trove.
It is not the development of any one thing, the con-
tinuation of a line, the logical outcome of the labors
of others, as the works of so many even of the great-
est musicians are. It is a thing that seems to have
fallen to earth out of the arcana of forms like some
meteorite. At the very moment of Wagner's triumph
and of the full maturity of Liszt and Brahms, Mous-
sorgsky composed as though he had been born into a
world in which there was no musical tradition, a world
where, indeed, no fine musical literature, and only a
few folk-songs and orthodox liturgical chants and
Greek-Catholic scales existed. Toward musical theory
he seems to have been completely indifferent. Only
one rule he recognized, and that was, '^ Art is a means
of speech between man and man, and not an end." He
was self-taught, and actually invented an art of music
with each step of composition. And what he pro-
duced, though it was not great in bulk, was novel with

Moussorgsky 67

a newness that is one of the miracles of music.
Scarcely a phrase in his operas and songs moves in
a conventional or unoriginal curve. The songs of
Moussorgsky are things that can be recognized in
each of their moments, so deeply and completely dis-
tinctive they are. There is not a bar of the collection
called ^' Sans soleil " that is not richly and powerfully
new. The harmonies sound new, the melodies are
free and strange and expressive, the forms are solid
and weighty as bronze and iron. They are like lumps
dug up out of the earth. The uttermost simplicity
obtains. And every stroke is decisive and meaningful.
Moussorgsky seems to have crept closer to life than
most artists, to have seized emotions in their naked-
ness and sharpness, to have felt with the innocence
of a child. One of his collections is entitled " La
Chambre d'Enfants." And that surprise and wonder
at all the common facts of life, the sharpness with
which the knowledge of death comes, characterize
not alone this group, but all the songs. He is through-
out them the child who sees the beetle lie dead,
and who expresses his wonder and trouble directly
from his heart with all the sharpness of neces-
sary speech. So much other music seems indirect,
hesitating, timorous, beside these little forms of
granite.

And then, Moussorgsky's operas, " Boris " in par-
ticular, are dramatically swifter than most of Wagner's.

68 Moussorgsky

He never made the mistake the master of Bayreuth
so frequently made, of subordinating the drama to the
music, and arresting the action for the sake of a
" Waldweben " or a " Charfreitagszauber." The lit-
tle scenes of Pushkin's play spin themselves off quickly
through the music; the action is reinforced by a skele-
ton-like form of music, by swift vivid tonal etchings,
by the simplest, directest picturings. Musical charac-
terization is of the sharpest; original ideas pile upon
each other and succeed each other without ado. The
score of Boris, slim as it is, is a treasure house of
inventions, of some of the most perfect music written
for the theater. Few operatic works are musically
more important, and yet less pretentious. And " Kho-
vanchtchina," fragmentary though it is, is almost no
less full of noble and lovely ideas. These fragments,
melodies, choruses, dances are each of them real inven-
tions, wonderful pieces caught up in nets, the rarest sort
of beauties. A deep, rich glow plays over these melo-
dies. Their simplicity is the simplicity of perfectly
felicitous inventions, of things sprung from the earth
without effort. They are so much like folk-tunes that
one wonders whether they were not produced hundreds
of years ago and handed down by generations of Rus-
sians. One of them even, the great chorus in the first
scene, might stand as a sort of national anthem for
Russia. Others, like the instrumental accompaniment
to the first entrance of Prince Ivan Khovansky, are

Moussorgsky 69

some of those bits that represent a whole culture, a
whole tradition and race.

These pieces are the children of an infinitely noble
mind. There is something in those gorgeous melodies,
those magnificent cries, those proud and solemn themes
of which both " Boris " and " Khovanchtchina " are
full, that makes Wagner seem plebeian and bourgeois.
Peasant-Hke though the music is, reeking of the soil,
rude and powerful, it still seems to refer to a mind of a
prouder, finer sort than that of the other man. The
reticence, the directness, the innocence of any theatri-
cality, the avoidance of all that is purely effective, the
dignity of expression, the salt and irony, the round, full
ring of every detail are good and fortifying after the
scoriae inundations of Wagner^s genius. The gaunt
gray piles, the metallic surfaces, the homelinesses of
Moussorgsky, are more virile, stronger, more resisting
than Wagner's music. Only folk aristocratically sure
of themselves can be as gay and light at will. If there
is anything in modern music to be compared with the
sheer, blunt, powerful volumes of primitive art it is
the work of Moussorgsky. And as the years pass, the
man's stature and mind become more immense, more
prodigious. One has but to hearken to the accent of
the greater part of modern music to gauge in whose
shadow we are all living, how far the impulse coming
from him has carried. The whole living musical world,
from Debussy to Bloch, from Strawinsky to Bartok,

70 Moussorgsky

has been vivified by him. And, certainly, if any mod-
ern music seems to have the resisting power that beats
back the centuries and the eons, it is his pieces of
bronze and ironware and granite. What the world
lost when Modest Moussorgsky died in his forty-second
year we shall never know.

But, chiefest of all, his music has the grandeur of
an essentially religious act. It is the utterance of
the profoundest spiritual knowledge of a people.
Moussorgsky was buoyed by the great force of the
Russian charity, the Russian humility, the Russian
pity. It was that great religious feeling that possessed
the man who had been a foppish guardsman content
to amuse ladies by strumming them snatches of "II
Trovatore " and " La Traviata " on the piano, and
gave him his profound sense of reality, his knowledge
of how simple and sad a thing human life is after
all, and made him vibrate so exquisitely with the suf-
fering inherent 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
very breath of his fellows as it left their bodies. Cer-
tainly, it was from his race's dim, powerful sense of
the sacrament of pain that his music flows. He him-
self confessed that it was the sense of another's inar-
ticulate anguish, sympathy with a half-idiotic peasant-
boy stammering out his hopeless love, that first stirred

Moussorgsky J I

the poet within him and led him to compose. The
music of defeat, the insistent cry of the world's pain,
sound out of his music because the Russian folk has
always known the great mystery and reality and good
of suffering, has known that only the humble, only
those who have borne defeat and pain and misfortune
can see the face of life, that sorrow and agony can
hallow human existence, and that while in the days of
his triumph and well-being man is a cruel and evil
being, adversity often makes to appear in him divine
and lovely traits. Dostoievsky was never more the
Russian prophet than when he wrote " The Idiot," and
uttered in it his humble thanksgiving that through
the curse of nature, through the utter uselessness of
his physical machine, through sickness and foolishness
and poverty, he had been saved from doing the world's
evil and adding to its death. And Moussorgsky is the
counterpart of the great romancer. Like the other,
he comes in priestly and ablutionary office. Like the
other, he expresses the moving, lowly god, the god
of the low, broad forehead and peasant garb, that his
people bears within it. Both prose and music are man-
ifestations of the Russian Christ. To Europe in its
late hour he came as emissary of the one religious mod-
ern folk, and called on men to recognize the truth and
reform their lives in accordance with it. He came to
wrest man from the slavery of the new gigantic body
he had begotten, to wean him from lust of power, to

72 Moussorgsky

pacify and humble him. Once more he came to fulfil
the Old Testamentary prophets. The evangel of Tol-
stoy, the novels of Dostoievsky, the music of Mous-
sorgsky are the new gospels. In Moussorgsky, music
has given the new world its priest.

Liszt

Oh, magnificent and miserable Abbe Liszt! Strange
and unnatural fusion of traits the most noble and the
most mean! One can scarcely say which was the
stronger in you, the grand seigneur or the base come-
dian. For in your work they are equally, inextricably
commingled. In your art it is the actor who thrones
it in the palace hall, the great lord of music who struts
and capers on the boards of the itinerant theater. No-
where, in all music, is grandeur nigher to the dust, and
nowhere does the dust reveal more grandiose traits.
Your compositions are the most brilliant of bastards,
the most lamentable of legitimate things. They smite
us with both admiration and aversion, affect us as
though the scarlet satin robes of a patrician of Venice
were to betray the presence beneath them of foul,
unsightly rags. They remind us of the fagades of the
palaces of Vicenza, which, designed by the pompous
and classicizing Palladio, are executed in stucco and
other cheap materials.

And yet, the many works in which you do not show
yourself the artist reveal the plenitude of your
powers almost as much as the few in which you do.
The most empty of your many ostentatious orchestral
soliloquies, the most feeble of your many piano-pyro-

73

74 Liszt

technics, the iciest of your bouquets of icy, exploding
stars, the brassiest of your blatant perorations, the
very falsest of your innumerable paste jewels, declare
that you were born to sit among the great ones of your
craft. For they reveal you the indubitable virtuosic
genius. The very cleverness of the imitation of the
precious stone betrays how deep a sense of the beauty
of the real gem you had, how expert you were in the
trade of diamond cutter. Into the shaping of your
bad works of art there went a temperament, a playful-
ness, a fecundity, a capriciousness, a genius that many
better artists have not possessed.

You were indeed profusely endowed, showered with
musical gifts as some cradled prince might be showered
with presents and honors. Everything in your per-
sonality was grand, seigneurial, immense in scale. You
were born musical King of Cyprus and Jerusalem and
Armenia, titular sovereign of vast, unclaimed realms.
Few composers have been more inventive. No com-
poser 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 with orig-
inal themes of a high order, are like treasure houses
in which gold ornaments lie negligently strewn in piles.
Indeed, your inventive power supplied not only your
own compositions with material, but those of your
son-in-law, Richard Wagner, as well. As James Hune-

Liszt 75

ker once so brightly put 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 Walkiire "; Parsifal and Kundry a long
.while in your piano-sonata before he introduced them
into his " Blihnenweihfestspiel."

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 it was for
either Schumann or Chopin. You knew even better
than they how to listen for its proper voice. You were
more deeply aware than they of its proper color and
quality. You seem to have come to it absolutely with-
out preconceived ideas. Your B-minor sonata, how-
ever unsatisfactory its actual quality, remains one
of the magistral works of the sort. For few works
better exhibit the various ranges of the instrument,
better contrast different volumes of piano-sound. The
sonata actually lies on different planes, proceeds from
various directions, delimits a solid form, 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 pianoforte composition do not by any
means lessen the wonder of your comprehension of
the instrument's dynamics. The new men, Scriabine
and the composers of the modern French school, may

^t Liszt

have penetrated more deeply than it was in your power
to do, may have achieved where you failed. Never-
theless, they could not have progressed had it not been
for your way-finding. They are immeasurably indebted
to you.

Not even Wagner had an influence on the new age
greater than yours, more largely prepared the way
of the newest music. You are indeed the good friend
of all who dream of a new musical language, a new
musical syntax and balance and structure, and set out
to explore the vast, vague regions, the terra incognita
of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its gen-
eral, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily
to the romantic period, your conviction that the con-
tent conditions the form of every piece makes you
the link between classic and modern musical art.
The symphonic poem, whether or not it originates
in the overtures of Beethoven, is mainly your handi-
work, since although you yourself were not sufficiently
free of the classic formulas to create a symphonic
form entirely programmatic, as Strauss has subse-
quently done, you nevertheless gave him the hint
whereby he has profited most. The impressionists,
too, seem to stem from you. The little piece called
" Les jeux d'eau de La Villa d'Este '^ seems not a
little to anticipate their style. And although you were
not responsible for the music of the nationalistic Rus-
sian school, the robust, colorful barbarian in you nev-

Liszt 77

ertheless made you welcome and encourage their work.
It made you write to Borodin and Moussorgsky those
cordial letters which pleased them so much. For at
that time they were but obscure workmen, while you
were 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 fellow craftsmen. Art-
ists are oftentimes so petty in their conduct toward
each other that it is indeed refreshing to read with
what infallible kindness you treated so many com-
posers less fortunately situated than yourself. And not
only Wagner and Cesar Franck benefited by your good
deeds. Many obscurer and younger men, poor Ed-
ward MacDowell, for instance, knew what it was to
receive cordial and commendatory letters from you,
to be assisted by you in their careers, to have their
compositions brought to performance by the best Ger-
man orchestras through your aid. And you had no
conceit in you, smilingly referred to your symphonic
poems as " Gartenmusik," and replied to Wagner,
when he informed you that he had stolen such and
such a theme from you, " Thank goodness, now it will
at least be heard! " Had you, O Liszt, expressed the
nobility of your nature as purely in your composition
as you expressed it in your social relations, we could
have complained of no mountainous rubble, no squalor
marring the perfect splendor of your figure.

78 Liszt

But, unhappily, the veritable grandeur of your en-
dowment never begot itself a body of work really sym-
bolic of itself. For if your music, as a whole, has any
grandeur, it is the hollow grandeur of inflation, of
ostentation, of externality. Your music is almost en-
tirely a monstrous decor de theatre. It is forever
seeking to establish tragical and satanic and pas-
sional atmospheres, to suggest immense and regal
and terrific things, to gain tremendous effects. It is
full of loud, grandiloquent pronouncements, of
whirlwinds, thunderstorms, coronations on the Capito-
line, ideals, lamentations, cavalcades across half of
Asia, draperies, massacres, frescoes, fagades, magnifi-
cats, lurid sunsets, scimitars, miracles, triumphs of
the cross, retreats from the world. It is full of all the
romantic properties. Like vast pieces of stage scenery
the various passages and movements are towed before
our eyes, and we are bidden to feast our eyes on repre-
sentations of titanic rocks and lowering skies and holy
hermits' dwellings that remind us dangerously of the
wonders displayed in the peepshows at gingerbread
fairs. The atmosphere of the compositions is so in-
variably sensational, the gesture so calculated, so the-
atrical, that much of the truly impressive material, the
quantities of original ideas, lose all substantiality, and
become indistinct components of these vast mountains
of ennui, these wastes of rhetorical and bombastic in-
struments, these loud and prancing concertos of cir-

Liszt 79

cus-music. There is something almost insulting to the
intelligence in these over-emphasized works, these pre-
tentious fagades, these vast, pompous frescoes by Kaul-
bach, these Byronic instrumental soliloquies, these hol-
low, empty flourishes of the brass, these fooHshly Sa-
tanic chromatics, these inevitable triumphs of the cross
and the Gregorian modes.

No doubt, much of your fustian and rhodomontade,
your diabolic attitudes, your grandiose battles between
the hosts of evil and the light of the Tree, your inter-
minable fanfares, was due the age in which you grew.
The externality, the pompousness of intention, the the-
atrical postures, was part of the romantic constitution.
The desire to achieve sensational effects, the tendency
to externalize, to assume theatrical postures and in-
tend pompously, was inborn in every single one of the
men among whom you passed your youth. For they
had suddenly, painfully become aware that nature was
supremely indifferent to their individual fates and
sorrows. So wounded were they in their amour-
propre that they sought to restore their diminished
sense of self-worth by exaggerating the importance and
intensity of their sufferings and seeking to convince
themselves of their satanic sins and dreadful dooms.
Manfred, posing darkly on an Alpine crag and sum-
moning

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

8o Liszt

was the type of you all. You had to ward off con-
sciousness of your own insignificance by conceiving
yourselves amid stupendous surroundings, lurid natu-
ral effects, flaming prairies, pinnacles, torrents, coli-
seums, subterranean palaces, moonlit ruins, bandit
dens, and as laboring under frightful curses, dire pun-
ishments, ancestral sins, etc., etc.

But while we find the frenetic romanticism of a Dela-
croix, for instance, attractive, even, because of the
virtue of his painting, and forgive that of a Berlioz and
a Chateaubriand because of the many beauties, the
veritable grandeurs of their styles, we cannot quite
learn to love yours. For in you the disease was aggra-
vated by the presence of another powerful incentive
to strut and posture and externalize and inflate your
art. For you were the virtuoso. You were the man
whose entire being was pointed to achieve an effect.
You were the man whose life is lived on the concert-
platform, whose values are those of the concert-room,
who finds his highest good in the instantaneous effect
achieved by his performance. From childhood you
were the idolized piano- virtuoso. All your days you
were smothered in the adulation showered upon you
in very tangible form by the great ladies of every
capital of Europe. And a virtuoso you remained all
your existence. You never developed out of that early
situation into something more salutary to the artist.
On the contrary, you came to require the atmosphere

Liszt 8 1

of the performance, the exhibition, about you continu-
ally, to find the rose leaves and the clouds of perfume
absolutely necessary. Most of your composition seems
but the effort to perpetuate about you the admiration
and the adulation, the glowing eyes and half-parted
lips and heaving bosoms. Everything in your piano-
music is keyed for that effect. The shameless sentimen-
talities, the voluptuous lingerings over sweet chords and
incisive notes, the ostentatious recitatives, the moist,
sensual climaxes, the titillating figuration, the over-
draperies, were called into existence for the immediate,
the overwhelming effect at first hearing. Everything is
broadened and peppered and directed to obtaining you
the Pasha-power you craved. Besides being windy
and theatrical, your music is what Nietzsche so bit-
terly called it, "Die Schule der Gelaufichkeit — nach
Frauen."

So your vast artistic endowment lies squandered,
your ideas shallowly set, your science misused.
For while fate showered you magnificently with gifts,
it seems to have at the same time sought to negate its
liberality by fusing in your personality the base alloy,
by decreeing that you should have enormous powers
and yet abuse them. It prevented you from often
being completely genuine, completely incandescent,
completely fine. It refused you for the greater part
the true adamantine hardness of the artist, the inviola-
bility of soul, the sense of style. It made you, the

82 Liszt

prodigiously fecund inventor, the mine of thematic
material, prodigal; unable to refine your ore, to chase
your ideas, and give them their full value. Wagner
could have said of you, had he so wished, what Haendel
is reported to have said of the composer from whom
he borrowed, " Of what use is such a good idea to
a man like him? " One must indeed go to Wagner
for the appreciation of many of the inventions, the
Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Parsifal and Kundry,
music, which you cast from you so carelessly. As for
yourself, you are too much the " virtuosic genius "; too
much, at heart, the actor. Your music is perhaps the
most cunningly carpentered for effect, the most arti-
ficial known to us. 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 as complete
as it would appear to be. During the entire perform-
ance, you have been secretly keeping one wicked little
eye trained on the ladies of the audience.

Sometimes you play the religious. Perhaps there
truly was in you a vein of devotion and faith. The
fact that you took Holy Orders to escape marrying
the Princess of Sa}^- Wittgenstein, who pursued you
those many years and doubtlessly bored you with her
theological writings, does not entirely disprove its ex-

Liszt 83

istence. Indeed, your '' Dante " symphony, with its
Hell full of impenitent sexual offenders, its Purgatory
full of those who repent them of their excesses, its
Paradise represented by a hymn to the Virgin, sug-
gests what manner of role, and how real a one, re-
ligion might have played in your luxurious existence.
But, for the most part, the religiosity of your music
recalls overmuch the fashionable confessor^s. You
bring consolation, doubtlessly. But you bring it by
choice into the boudoir. You speak sadly of the cruel
winds of 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 most beau-
tiful 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 recalls dangerously the restaurant Magyar,
the fiddler in the frogged coat. You draw from your
violin passionate laments. In a sort of ecstasy you
celebrate 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, for sensational con-
trasts, for grandiose and bombastic expression. Once,
only, you were completely the artist, impregnating your

84 Liszt

work with a fine glow of life, making it deeply digni-
fied and impassioned, sincere and firm, profoundly
moving. For you, too, there was the cardinal excep-
tion. For you there was the '' Faust Symphony."
The work is romantic music, the music of the Byronic
school par excellence. Here, too, is the brooding and
revolt, the satanic cynicism, the expert's language.
But here the miracle has taken place, and your music,
generally so loose and shallow and theatrical, has the
point, the intensity, the significance that it seems
everywhere else to lack. Here, for once, is a work
of yours that moves by its own initiative, that has an
independent and marvelous life, that is brilliant and
yet substantial. Here you have materialized yourself.
We believe in your Faust as we believe neither in
your Tasso nor in your Mazeppa nor in your Orpheus.
For he utters your own romantic brooding in touch-
ing and impressive terms. In the theme that con-
jures up before us '' Faust in ritterlicher Hofkleidung
des Mittelalters," you have expressed your own sei-
gneurial pride and daintiness. 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 real drama in the first.
There is a warm, fragrant hush in the second. Perhaps
Gretchen plucks her daisy a little too thoroughly. But
there is a rare sensitiveness and delicacy of feeling

Liszt 85

in her music. It is all in pastels. There is some-
thing very youthful and warm in it that perhaps no
other composition of yours displays, as though in com-
posing it you had recaptured pristine emotions long
since spoiled.

But it is the third movement, the Allegro ironico,
that opened your sluices and produced your genius.
For in the conception of Mephisto you found in Goethe,
you found your own spiritual equation. You, too,
were victim of a disillusioned intellect that played
havoc with all you found pure and lovely and poured
its sulphuric mockery over all your aspiration. For
all your mariolatry, you were full of " der Geist der
stets verneint." And so you were able to create a
musical Mephisto that will outlive your other work,
sonata and all, and express you to other times. For
here, all that one senses dimly behind your sugared
and pretentious compositions speaks out frankly. Lis-
tening to this mighty scherzo, we know the cynicism
that corroded your spirit. We hear it surge and
fill the sky. We hear it pour its mocking laugh-
ter over grief and longing and pride, over purity
and tenderness in those outrageous orchestral ara-
besques that descend on the themes of the " Faust "
and '' Marguerite " movements, and whip them into
grinning distortions. We hear it deny and stamp and
curse, topple the whole world over in ribald scorn.
The concluding chorus may seek to call in another

86 Liszt

emotion. You may turn with all apparent fervor
and pray '' das Ewig-Weibliche " to save you. The
other expression remains the telling one. It is one
of the supreme 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 for all, how infinitely much greater a
musician you might have been, O miserable and mag-
nificent Abbe Liszt!

Berlioz

The course of time, that has made so many musicians
recede from us and dwindle, has brought Berlioz the
closer to us and shown him great. The age in which
he lived, the decades that followed his death, found
him unsubstantial enough. They recognized in him
only the projector of gigantic edifices, not the builder.
His music seemed scaffolding only. Though a gener-
ation of musicians learned from him, came to listen
to the proper voices of the instruments of the or-
chestra because of him, though music became increas-
ingly pictural, ironic, concrete because he had labored,
his own work still appeared ugly with unrealized in-
tentions. If he obtained at all as an artist, it was
because of his frenetic romanticism, his bizarreness,
his Byronic postures, traits that were after all minor
and secondary enough in him. For those were the only
of his characteristics that his hour could understand.
All others it ignored. And so Berlioz remained for
half a century simply the composer of the extravagant
" Symphonic Fantastique " and the brilliant '' Harold
in Italy," and, for the rest, a composer of brittle and
arid works, barren of authentic ideas, " a better lit-
terateur than musician." However, with the departure
of the world from out the romantic house, Berlioz has

87

88 Berlioz

rapidly recovered. Music of his that before seemed
ugly has gradually come to have force and significance.
Music of his that seemed thin and gray has suddenly
become satisfactory and red. Composers as eminent
as Richard Strauss, conductors as conservative as
Weingartner, critics as sensitive as Romain Rolland
have come to perceive his vast strength and impor-
tance, to express themselves concerning him in no
doubtful language. 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 he
assume the stature rightfully his, and live.

For we exist to-day in a time of barbarian inroads.
We are beholding the old European continent of music
swarmed over by Asiatic hordes, Scyths and Mongols
and Medes and Persians, all the savage musical tribes.
Once more the old arbitrary barrier between the con-
tinents is disappearing, and the classic traits of the
West are being mingled with those of the subtle, sen-
suous, spiritual East. It is as if the art of music,
with its new scales, its new harmonies, its new color-
ing, its new rhythmical life, were being revolutionized,
as if it were returning to its beginnings. It is as if
some of the original impulse to make music were re-
awakening. And so, through this confusion, Berlioz
has suddenly flamed with significance. For he him-
self was the rankest of barbarians. A work like the
" Requiem " has no antecedents. It conforms to no

Berlioz 89

accepted canon, seems to obey no logic other than
that of the rude and powerful mind that cast it forth.
For the man who could write music so crude, so sheerly
strong, so hurtling, music innocent of past or tra-
dition, the world must indeed have been in the first
day of its creation. For such a one forms must indeed
have had their pristine and undulled edge and un-
diminished bulk, must have insisted themselves sharply
and compellingly. The music has all the uncouthness
of a direct and unquestioning response to such a vision.
Little wonder that it was unacceptable to a silver and
romantic epoch. The romanticists had aspired to
paint vast canvases, too. But the vastness of their
canvases had remained a thing of intention, a thing
of large and pretentious decoration. Berlioz's music
was both too rude and too stupendous for their tastes.
And, in truth, to us as well, who have felt the great
cubical masses of the moderns and have heard the bar-
barian tread, the sense of beauty that demanded the
giant blocks of the " Requiem '' music seems still a
little a strange and monstrous thing. It seems indeed
an atavism, a return to modes of feeling that created
the monuments of other ages, of barbarous and for-
gotten times. Well did Berlioz term his work '' Baby-
lonian and Ninevitish " ! Certainly it is like nothing
so much as the cruel and ponderous bulks, the sheer,
vast tombs and ramparts and terraces of Khorsabad
and Nimroud, bare and oppressive under the sun of

90 Berlioz

Assyria. Berlioz must have harbored some elemental
demand for form inherent in the human mind but
buried and forgotten until it woke to life in him again.
For there is a truly primitive and savage power in
the imagination that could heap such piles of music,
revel in the shattering fury of trumpets, upbuild cho-
ragic pyramids. Here, before Strawinsky and Orn-
stein, before Moussorgsky, even, was a music barbar-
ous and radical and revolutionary, a music beside
which so much of modern music dwindles.

It has, primarily, some of the nakedness, some of
the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern
men aspire. In the most recent years there has evi-
denced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous
and fluent contours of the musical impressionists, from
the style of " Pelleas et Melisande " in particular.
Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and
Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own
fashion, the one through a sort of mathematical harsh-
ness, the second through a Gothic severity, the third
through a machine-like regularity, to give their 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 remarkable than theirs.
He attained it through the nakedness of his melodic
line. The music of the " Requiem " is almost en-
tirely a singularly powerful and characteristic line. It

Berlioz 91

is practically unsupported. Many persons pretend that
Berlioz wanted a knowledge of harmony and counter-
point. Certainly his feeling for harmony was a very
rudimentary one, in nowise refined beyond that of his
predecessors, very simple when compared to that of
his contemporaries, Chopin and Schumann. And his
attempts at creating counterpoint, judged from the
first movement of " Harold in Italy," are clumsy
enough. But it is questionable whether this ignorance
did not stand him in good stead rather than in bad;
and whether, in the end, he did not make himself
fairly independent of both these musical elements.
For the ^' Requiem " attains a new sort of musical
grandeur from its sharp, heavy, rectangular, rhythmi-
cally powerful melodic line. It voices through it a
bold, naked, immense language. With Baudelaire,
Berlioz could have said, " L'energie c'est le grace
supreme." For the beauty of this his masterpiece lies
in just the dehneating power, the characteristic of this
crude, vigorous, unadorned melody. Doubtless to
those still baffled by its nudity, his music appears thin.
But if it is at all thin, its thinness is that of the steel
cable.

And it has the rhythmical vivacity and plenitude
that characterizes the newest musical art. If there
is one quality that unites in a place apart the Strawin-
skys and Ornsteins, the Blochs and Scriabines, it is
the fearlessness and exuberance and savagery with

92 Berlioz

which they pound out their rhythms. Something long
buried in us seems to arise at the vibration of these
fierce, bold, clattering, almost convulsive strokes, to
seek to gesticulate and dance and leap. And Berlioz
possessed this elemental feeling for rhythm. Schu-
mann was convinced on hearing the '' Symphonic Fan-
tastique " that in Berlioz music was returning to its
beginnings, to the state where rhythm was uncon-
strained and irregular, and that in a short while it
would overthrow the laws which had bound it so
long. So, too, it seems to us, despite all the rhythmical
innovations of our time. The personality that could
beat out exuberantly music as rhythmically various
and terse and free must indeed have possessed a
primitive naivete and vitality and spontaneity of im-
pulse. What manifestation of unbridled will in that
freedom of expression! Berlioz must have been blood-
brother to the savage, the elemental creature who out
of the dark and hidden needs of life itself invents on
his rude musical instrument a mighty rhythm. Or, he
must have been like a powerful and excited steed,
chafing his bit, mad to give his energy rein. His blood
must forever have been craving the liberation of tur-
gid and angular and irregular beats, must forever
have been crowding his imagination with new and
compelling combinations, impelling him to the move-
ments of leaping and marching. For he seems to have
found in profusion the accents that quicken and lift

Berlioz 93

and lance, found them in all varieties, from the brisk
and delicate steps of the ballets in '^ La Damnation de
Faust " to the large, far-flung momentum that drives
the choruses of the " Requiem " mountain high; from
the mad and riotous finales of the '^ Harold " sym-
phony and the " Symphonie Fantastique " to the red,
turbulent and canaille march rhythms, true music
of insurgent masses, clangorous with echoes of tocsins
and barricades and revolutions.

But it is in his treatment of his instrument that
Berlioz seems most closely akin to the newest musi-
cians. For he was the first to permit the orchestra
to dictate music to him. There had, no doubt, existed
skilful and sensitive orchestrators before him, men
who were deeply aware of the nature of their tools,
men who, like Mozart, could scarcely repress their
tears at the sound of a favorite instrument, and wrote
marvelously for flutes and horns and oboes and all the
components of their bands. But matched with his,
their knowledge of the instrument was patently rel-
ative. For, with them, music had on the whole a gen-
eral timbre. Phrases which they assigned, say, to vio-
lins or flutes can be assigned to other instruments with-
out doing the composition utter damage. But in the
works of Berlioz music and instruments are insepa-
rable. One cannot at all rearrange his orchestration.
Though the phrases that he has written for bassoon or
clarinet might imaginably be executed by other instru-

94 Berlioz

merits, the music would perish utterly in the substi-
tution. What instrument but the viola could appre-
ciate the famous "Harold" theme? For just as in
a painting of Cezanne's the form is inseparable from
the color, is, indeed, one with it, so, too, in the works
of Berlioz and the moderns the form is part of the
sensuous quality of the band. When Rimsky-Korsa-
koff uttered the pronouncement that a composition for
orchestra could not exist before the orchestration was
completed, he was only phrasing a rule upon which
Berlioz had acted all his life. For Berlioz set out to
learn the language of the orchestra. Not only did he
call for new instruments, instruments that have eventu-
ally become integral portions of the modern bands,
but he devoted himself to a study of the actual natures
and ranges and qualities of the old, and wrote the
celebrated treatise that has become the textbook of
the science of instrumentation. The thinness of much
of his work, the feebleness of the overture to " Ben-
venuto Cellini," for instance, results from his inex-
perience in the new tongue. But he had not to practise
long. It was not long before he became the teacher
of his very contemporaries. Wagner owes as much
to Berlioz's instrumentation as he owes to Chopin's
harmony.

But for the new men, he is more than teacher.
For them he is like the discoverer of a new continent.
Through him they have come to find a new fashion

Berlioz 95

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 face of the earth. The
tone-poems of Debussy and the ballets of Ravel and
Strawinsky, the scintillating orchestral compositions of
Strauss and Rimsky and Bloch, could scarcely have
come to be had not Berlioz called the attention of the
world to the instruments in which the colors and tim-
bres in which it is steeped, lie dormant.

And so the large and powerful and contained being
that, after all, was Berlioz has come to appreciation.
For behind the fiery, the volcanic Berlioz, behind the
Byronic and fantastical composer, there was always
another, greater man. The history of the art of Ber-
lioz is the history of the gradual incarnation of that
calm and majestic being, the gradual triumph of that
grander personality over the other, up to the final
unclosing and real presence in " Romeo " and the
" Mass for the Dead." The wild romanticist, the lover
of the strange and the lurid and the grotesque who
created the ^' Symphonic Fantastique," never, perhaps,
became entirely abeyant. And some of the salt and
flavor of Berlioz's greater, more characteristic works,
the tiny musical particles, for instance, that compose
the " Queen Mab " scherzo in " Romeo," or the bizarre
combination of flutes and trombones in the " Requiem,"
macabre as the Orcagna frescoes in Pisa, are due his
fantastical imaginings. But, gradually, the deeper Ber-

96 Berlioz

lioz came to predominate. That deeper spirit was 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 that could not readily build
itself out into the world, so large and simple it was,
and had to wait long before it could find a worthy
portal. It managed only to express itself partially,
fragmentarily, in various transformations, till, by
change, it found in the idea of the Mass for the Dead
its fitting opportunity. Still, it was never entirely
absent from the art of Berlioz, and in the great clear
sense of it gained in the '' Requiem " we can perceive
its various and ever-present substantiations, from the
very beginning of his career.

It is in the overture to " King Lear " already, in
that noble and gracious introduction. From the very
beginning, Berlioz revealed himself a proud and aris-
tocratic spirit. Even in his most helpless moments,
he is always noble. He shows himself possessed of a
hatred for all that is unjust and ungirt and vulgar.
There is always a largeness and gravity and chastity
in his gesture. The coldness is most often simply the
apparent coldness of restraint; the baldness, the laco-
nism of a spirit that abhorred loose, ungainly manners
of speech. Even the frenetic and orgiastic finales of
the " Harold " and " Fantastic " symphonies are tem-
pered by an athletic steeliness and irony, are pervaded,
after all, by the good dry light of the intellect. The

Berlioz 97

greater portion of the " Harold " is obviously, in its
coolness and neatness and lightness, the work of one
who was unwilling to dishevel himself in the cause of
expression, who outlined his sensations reticently
rather than effusively, and stood always a little apart.
The " Corsair " overture has not the wild, rich bal-
ladry of that of the " Flying Dutchman," perhaps. But
it is full of the clear and quivering light of the Medi-
terranean. It is, in the words of Hans von Blilow, " as
terse as the report of a pistol." And it flies swiftly
before a wind its own. The mob-scenes in " Benve-
nuto Cellini " are bright and brisk and sparkling, and
compare not unfavorably with certain passages in
" Petrouchka." And, certainly, " Romeo " manifests
unforgettably the fineness and nobility of Berlioz's
temper. " The music he writes for his love scenes,"
some one has remarked, " is the best test of a musi-
cian's character." For, in truth, no type of musical
expression gives so ample an opportunity to all that
is latently vulgar in him to produce itself. And one
has but to compare the " Garden Scene " of " Romeo ^'
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 a light Ber-
lioz's music reveals him. Wagner's powerful music
hangs over the garden of his lovers like an oppressive
and sultry night. Foliage and streams and the very
moonlight pulsate with the fever of the blood. But

98 Berl

lOZ

there is no tenderness, no youth, no delicacy, no grace
in Wagner's love-passages. Tchaikowsky's, too, is
predominantly lurid and sensual. And while Wagner's
at least is full of animal richness, Tchaikowsky's is
morbid and hysterical and perverse, sets us amid the
couches and draperies and pink lampshades instead of
out under the night-time sky. Berlioz's, however, is
full of a still and fragrant poesy. His is the music
of Shakespeare's lovers indeed. It is like the opening
of hearts dumb with the excess of joy. It has all the
high romance, all the ecstasy of the unspoiled spirit.
For Berlioz seems to have possessed always his candor
and his youth. Through three hundred years men
have turned toward Shakespeare's play, with its Italian
night and its balcony above the fruit-tree tops, in won-
der at its youthful loveliness, its delicate picture of
first love. In Berlioz's music, at last, it found a
worthy rival. For the musician, too, had within him
some of the graciousness and highness and sweetness
of spirit the poet manifested so sovereignly.

But it is chiefly in the " Requiem " that Berlioz
revealed himself in all the grandeur and might of his
being. For in it all the aristocratic coolness and terse-
ness of " La Damnation de Faust " and of " Harold
en Italic," all the fresco-like calm of " Les Troyens a
Carthage," find their freest, richest expression.
" Were I to be threatened with the destruction of all
that I have ever composed," wrote Berlioz on the eve

Berlioz 99

of his death, '^ it would be for that work that I would
beg Hfe." And he was correct in the estimation of
its value. It is indeed one of the great edifices of tone.
For the course of events which demanded of Berlioz
the work had supplied him with a function commen-
surate with his powers, and permitted him to register
himself immortally. He was called by his country to
write a mass for a commemoration service in the
church of the Invalides. That gold-domed building,
consecrated to the memory of the host of the fallen,
to the countless soldiers slain in the wars of the mon-
archy and the republic and the empire, and soon to be-
come the tomb of Napoleon, had need of its officiant.
And so the genius of Berlioz arose and came. The
" Requiem " is the speech of a great and classic soul,
molded by the calm light and fruitful soil of the Medi-
terranean. For all its " Babylonian and Ninevitish '*
bulk, it is full of the Latin calm, the Latin repose, the
Latin resignation. The simple tone, quiet for all its
energy, the golden sweetness of the '^ Sanctus," the
naked acceptance of all the facts of death, are the lan-
guage of one who had within him an attitude at once
primitive and grand, an attitude that we have almost
come to ignore. Listening to the Mass, we find our-
selves feeling as though some vates of a Mediterranean
folk were come in rapt and lofty mood to offer sacri-
fice, to pacify the living, to celebrate with fitting rites
the unnumbered multitudes of the heroic dead. There

lOO Berlioz

are some compositions that seem to find the common
ground of 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 momentary welcoming extended to Berlioz. The
age in which he lived was unprepared for his art. It
found itself better prepared for Wagner. For Wag-
ner's was nearer the older music, summed it up, in
fact. So Berlioz had to remain uncomprehended and
unhoused. And when there finally came a time for
the music of Wagner to retreat, and another to take
its place, Berlioz was still half -buried under the mis-
understanding of his time. And yet, with the Kas-
sandra of Eulenberg, Berlioz could have said at the
moment when it seemed as though eternal night were
about to obscure him forever:

" Einst treibt der Friihling uns in neuer Bliithe
Empor ans Licht; Leben, wir scheiden nicht,
Denn ewig bleibet, was in uns ergliihte
Und drangt sich ewig wieder auf zum Licht! "

For the likeness so many of the new men bear him
has provided us with a wonderful instance of the eter-
nal recurrence of things.

Franck

Belgian of Liege by birth, and Parisian only by
adoption, Cesar Franck nevertheless precipitated mod-
ern French music. The group of musicians that, — at
the moment when the great line of composers that
has descended in Germany since the days of Bach
dwindled in Strauss and Mahler and Reger, — re-
vived the high tradition of French music, created a
fresh and original musical art, and at present, by virtue
of the influence it exercises on the new talents of other
nations, has come well-nigh to dominate the interna-
tional musical situation, could scarcely have attained
existence had it not been for him. He assured the
artistic success not only of the men like Magnard and
d'Indy and Dukas, whose art shows obvious signs of
his influence. Composers like Debussy and Ravel,
who appear to have arrived at maturity independently
of him, have nevertheless benefited immeasurably by
his work. It is possible that had he not emigrated
from Liege and labored in the heart of France, they
would not have achieved any of their fullness of ex-
pression. For what Berlioz was perhaps too premature
and too eccentric and radical to bring about, — the dis-
sipation of the torpor that had weighed upon the musi-
cal sense of his countrymen for a century, the re-

lOI

I02 Franc k

awakening of the peculiarly French impulse to make
music, not alone in single and solitary individ-
uals, but in a large and representative group, the
revival of a truly musical life in France, — this man,
by virtue of the peculiarities of his art, and par-
ticularly by virtue of his timeliness, succeeded in
effecting.

For Cesar Franck overcame a false musical culture
in the land of his adoption by showing it, at the mo-
ment it was prepared to perceive it, the face of a true.
The French are not an outstandingly musical race.
Music plays a comparatively insignificant role in their
civilization. The mass of the people does not demand
it, has never demanded it as insistently as do Germans
and Russians, and as did the mass of Italians during
the Renaissance, the mass of English before the Revo-
lution. Something of a prejudice against its own
musical impulse must exist in the race. For though
France has a very definite musical feeling, a thing
that varies little with the passing centuries and makes
for the surprising similarities between the work of
Claude Le Jeune in the sixteenth century, Rameau in
the eighteenth and Debussy in the twentieth, she has,
during her thousand years of culture, and while pro-
ducing 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;

Franck 103

Russia three within the last fifty years. In France
centuries elapse between the appearance of a Josquin
des Pres in the fifteenth century, a Rameau in the
eighteenth, a Debussy in the early twentieth. And
whenever the French have been given a musical art of
their own, whenever a composer comparable to the
Goujons and Montaignes, the Renoirs and the Baude-
laires has made his appearance among them, they gen-
erally have been swift to turn from him and to prefer
to him not only foreigners, which would not necessarily
be bad, but oftentimes the least respectable of musi-
cians. The triumph of Rameau was of the briefest.
Scarcely had his magnificent lyric tragedies established
themselves when the Guerre des bougons broke out,
and popular taste, under the direction of Jean Jacques
Rousseau and the other Encyclopedists, discovered
the light Italian music of the day more " natural "
and infinitely preferable to the severe and noble
forms of the greatest of French composers. The
appearance of Gluck gave Rameau's work a veri-
table coup de grace, and banished the master from
the operatic stage. And for a century and a
quarter, French music, particularly the music of
the theater, was completely unfaithful to the racial
spirit. During the greater part of the nineteenth cen-
tury, Rossini and Meyerbeer dominated the operatic
world. The native operatic composers, Auber and
Boieldieu, Adam and Halevy, combined the slack-

I04 Franc k

nesses of both without achieving anything at all com-
parable to their flashy brilliance. As far as the accent
of their music went, they floated cheerfully somewhere
between Germany and Italy. And when something
recognizably indigenous did put in its appearance in
the operas of Thomas and Gounod, it did but the veri-
est lip-service to the 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. Were there nothing
else to demonstrate it, the survival among the French
of an institution named M. Camille Saint-Saens would
amply do so. For the work of this extraordinary per-
sonality, or, more correctly, impersonality, who for
twenty-five years of the Third Republic dominated the
musical situation in his country, got himself acclaimed
everywhere, not only in Paris, but also in Berlin, the
modern French master, and to-day at the ripe age of
one hundred and forty still persists in writing string-
quartets with the same frigid classicism that distin-
guished his first efforts, is obviously a compromise re-
sulting from the conflict of two equally strong im-
pulses— that of making music and that of fending off
musical expression. For years this man has been go-
ing through all the gestures of the most serious sort
of composition without adding one iota to musical art.

Franck 105

For years he has been writing music apparently logical,
clear, well- formed. His opus-numbers mount well to-
ward two hundred. He has written symphonies, con-
certos for piano and violin, operas, cantatas, sym-
phonic poems, suites, ballades, fantasies, caprices. He
has written large numbers of each. He has written
^' impressions " of Naples, of Algiers, of the Canary
Islands, of every portion of the globe he has visited.
But despite all this apparent activity, M. Saint-Saens
has really succeeded in effecting nothing at all. His
compositions are pretty well outside the picture of
musical art. To-day they are already older than Men-
delssohn's, of which pale art they seem an even paler
reflection. Mendelssohn, too, was a person inwardly
at war with himself, and perhaps Saint-Saens may be
another example of the same conflict. Still, the latter
has achieved a sort of waxy coldness from which the
amiable Felix was after all saved. Elegant, finished,
smooth, classicizing, the music of M. Camille Saint-
Saens leaves us in the completest of objectivity. We
are touched and moved not at all by it. Sometliing,
we vaguely perceive, is supposed to be taking place
beneath our eyes. Faint frosty lights pass across the
orchestra. This, we guess, is supposed to be an in-
ward and musing passage. This is a finale, this a
dramatic climax. But we are no more than languidly
pleased with the cleverness and urbanity of the orches-
tration, the pleasant shapeliness of certain melodies,

io6 Franci

the neatness of composition. In the end, the man
bores us thoroughly. He has invented a new musical
ennui. It is that of being invariably pretty and im-
personal and insignificant.

Do you know the '' Phaeton " of Saint-Saens? Oh,
never think that this little symphonic poem recounts
the history of brilliant youth and its sun-chariot, the
runaway steeds and the bleeding shattered frame!
The '' Phaeton " of whom Saint-Saens sings is not the
arrogant son of Phoebus. Whatever the composer may
protest, it is the low, open-wheeled carriage that he is
describing. He shows it to us coursing through the
Bois de Boulogne on a bright spring morning. The new
varnish of the charming vehicle gleams smartly, the
light, rubber-tired wheels revolve swiftly, the silver-
shod harnesses glisten in the sunny air. But, alas,
the ponies are frightened by something, doubtlessly
the red dress of a singer of the Opera Comique. There
is a runaway, and before the steeds can be reined
the phaeton is upset. No one is hurt, and in a
few minutes the equipage is restored. Neverthe-
less, the composer cannot control in himself a few
sighs for the new coat of varnish now so rudely
scratched.

Franck was of another temper. The impulse that
drove him to make music was not so weak and pliable.
It could not be barbered and dapperly dressed and
taught to conduct a clouded cane elegantly in the

Franc k 107

rue de la Paix or the allee des Acacias. It was too
hot and wild and shy a thing, too passionately set in
its course, too homesick for the white fulgurant heights
of Heaven to negate itself at the behest of French so-
ciety and conform to what the academicians declared
to be '' la vielle tradition frangaise." Franck was too
much an artist in the spirit of La Fontaine and Ger-
maine Pillon and Poussin and the others who formed
that tradition, and who would be assailed in its name
fiercely were they to reappear to-day. Moreover, he
was of the race of musicians who come to make music
largely to free themselves of besetting demons, of the
sinister brood of doubts and fears and woes, and win
their way back again 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, yearning to cry his despair and
loneliness and grief to the ears of the God of his
childhood, and battling through long vigils for trust
and belief and reconciliation. Again and again his
music re-echoes the cry, '' I will not let Thee go unless
Thou bless me." Of modern composers Bruckner alone
had affair so steadily with the heights, and Franck
is the gentler, sweeter, tenderer of the two. He set
himself, quite in the fashion of the composers of the
dying renaissance, to write an hundred hymns to the
Virgin. He sought in his piano compositions to re-

io8 Franck

capture the lofty, spiritual tone, the religious com-
munion that informed the works of Bach. Only once,
in the ^' Variations Symphoniques," is he brilliant and
virtuosic, and then, with what disarming naivete 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, that breathes
through his work. Alone with his instrument and
the clouded skies, he pours out his sadness, his
bitterness, strives for resignation. Or, his music is
a bridge from the turmoiled present to some rarer,
larger, better plane. In symphony and quartet, in
sonata and oratorio, he attains it. The hellish brood
is scattered; the great bells of faith swing bravely out
once more; the world is full of Sabbath sunshine and
pied with simple field-flowers. And he goes forth
through it 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 sense to fruition in the Paris of Am-
broise Thomas and Gounod and Massenet may be
gauged from the fact that the compositions that as-
sure Franck his position were almost all produced dur-
ing the last ten years of his life, after his fifty-eighth
year had been passed. For thirty years the man had
to struggle with his medium and his environment be-
fore he was even able to do his genius justice. In-
deed, up to the year 1850, he produced little of im-

Franck 109

portance at all. The trios recall Meyerbeer; the can-
tata " Ruth/' with which this his first period of com-
position closes, has a sweetness of the sort afterward
identified with the name of Massenet. The works of
the second period, which ends around 1875 with the
re-editing of the recently composed oratorio " Redemp-
tion," reveal him still in search of power and a personal
manner. No doubt a great improvement over the
works of the first period is visible. From this time
there date the seraphic " Panis angelicus," and the
noble and delicate " Prelude, fugue and variation " for
harmonium and piano. But it was only with the com-
position of his oratorio " Les Beatitudes," completed in
1879, that Franck's great period commences. The
man had finally been formed. And, in swift succes-
sion, there came/ from, his worktable the series of com-
positions, the '' Prelude, chorale et fugue " for piano,
the sonata, the symphonic poem " Psyche," the sym-
phony, the quartetfand the three chorales for organ
that fully disclose his genius. There is scarcely an-
other example in all musical history of so long retarded
a flowering.

And it was a music almost the antithesis of Saint-
Saens' that finally disclosed itself through Franck. In
it everything is felt and necessary and expressive. It
is unadorned. None of the light musical frosting that
conceals the poverty and vulgarity of so many of the
other's ideas is to be found here. The designs them-

no Franck

selves are noble and significant. Franck possessed a
rare gift of sensing exactly what was to his purpose.
He had the artistic courage necessary to suppressing
everything superfluous and insignificant. His music
says something with each note, and when it has no
more to say, is silent. He is concise and direct. The
Symphony, for instance, is an unbroken curve, an or-
derly progression by gentle and scarcely perceptible
stages from the darkness of an aching, gnawing intro-
duction into the clarity of a healthy, exuberant close.
And whereas Saint-Saens' style is over-smooth and
glacial, a sort of musical counterpart of the sculpture
of a Canova or a Thorwaldsen, Franck's is subtle,
mottled, rich, full of the play of light and shadow.
The chromatic style that Wagner has developed in
" Tristan " and in " Parsifal " is built upon and fur-
ther developed into a style almost characterized by
its rich and subtle and incessant modulations. Old
and mixed modes make their appearance in it. The
thematic material is originally turned, oftentimes broad
and churchly and magnificent; the movement of the
Franckian themes being a distinct invention. The
harmony is full and varied and brilliant. But it is
pre-eminently the seraphic sweetness of Franck's style
that distinguishes his music and sets it over against
this other that is so hard of edge and thin of sub-
stance. Over it there plays a light and luminous ten-
derness, an almost naive and reticent and virginal

Franck in

quality. The music of '' Psyche " is executed with
the lightest of musical brushes. It is as sweet and
lucent and gracious as a fresco of Raphael's. The
lightest, the silkiest of veils floats in the section marked
"Le Sommeil de Psyche"; the gentlest of zephyrs
carries the maiden to her lord. Small wonder that
devout commentators have discovered in this music,
so uncorporeal and diaphanous, a Christian inten-
tion, and pretend that in Franck's mind Psyche was
the believing soul and Eros the divine lover! Ten-
derness, seraphic sweetness were the man's character-
istic, permeating everything he touched. Few com-
posers, certainly, have invented music more divinely
sweet than that of the third movement of the quartet,
more ecstatic and luminous than the ideas scattered
all through his work, that seem like records of some
moment when the heavens opened over his head and
the empyrean resounded with the hallelujahs of the
angelic host. And, certainly, no composer, Mozart
alone excepted, has discovered such naively and inno-
cently joyous themes as those that fill the close of
the sonata and the symphonic variations with delicious
vernal sunshine.

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

112 Jrranci

" yeux menteurs, I'hypocrisie
Des serrements de mains,
La masque d'amitie cachant la jalousie,
Les pales lendemains

De ces jours de triomphe "...

of which M. Saint-Saens in his little volume of verse
complains somewhat pompously, were unknown to
Cesar Franck. For this man, even in the years of
his prime, there were only the humiliations, the dis-
appointments that are the lot of uncomprehended
genius. He had rich pupils, among them the Vicomte
Vincent d'Indy, but not one of them seems to have
come forward to help him, to secure him greater time
for composition, to save him from wasting his precious
days in instructing a few amateurs. All his life, until
the very last of his seventy years, Cesar Franck was
obliged to arise every morning at five o'clock in order
to have a couple of hours in which to be free to com-
pose before the waxing day obliged him to begin trot-
ting from one end of Paris to the other giving
lessons. During his lifetime he had to content him-
self with half-prepared performances of his works,
had to resign himself to having composers of operettas
preferred to him when chairs at the Conservatoire
became vacant, to receiving practically no recognition
from a government pretending with hue and cry to
protect and encourage the arts. Had it not been for
the fervor and faithfulness with which Ysaye labored

Franck 113

to spread his renown, practically cramming down the
throats of an unwilling public the violin sonata and
the quartet, the man would not have known any suc-
cess at all even during the very last years of his
career. As it was, his reputation spread only after
he was dead. Then, of course, the inevitable monu-
ment was erected to him.

Still, the future was with Cesar Franck as it has
been with few artists. The timeliness of his art was
almost miraculous. Without a doubt, during the years
of his labor, the French were most ready for a musical
renaissance. 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 had
lain upon them during the two previous regimes. Peo-
ple began to work again, bellies were somewhat emptier
and heads somewhat fuller than they had been under
Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon. Above all, the
vapid and superficial life of the Second Empire was
ended. People were more sober and inward and re-
alistic than they had been. There was an unusual
activity in all the arts. Painting, fiction, poetry, sculp-
ture had or were having new births. A single creative
spark was sure to set the very recalcitrant musicians
ablaze. Vast talents such as those of Bizet and Cha-
brier were making themselves felt. But given a single
powerful and constructive influence, a single classic

114 Franck

expression of the French musical feeling, and a score
of gifted musicians were ready to spring into life.
And that example was set by Franck. For, Belgian
in part though his music indubitably is, Belgian of
Antwerp and Brussels as well as of Liege and the
Walloon country, Flemish almost in its broad and
gorgeous passages, it is what the work of the super-
ficially Parisian Saint-Saens never attains to being.
It is representative of the great classical tradition of
France, deeply expressive of the French spirit. It
must have been some profound kinship with the neigh-
boring people, deeper even than that he bore his own
countrymen, that sent the youth Franck from Liege
to Paris, held him fast in the city all his long and
obscure life, and made him flourish in the alien soil.
For his music has traits that are common to the rep-
resentative French artists and have come to identify
the French genius. Once again, one caught sight in
the music of the French clarity and orderliness, logi-
cality and conciseness. Once again there were great,
sonorous edifices in the grand style temperate in tone.
The very diffidence that makes it so difficult for the
race to express itself with ease in music was expressed
in this work. Moreover, along with the silveriness of
Rameau, the simple solidity of French prose, and some
of the old jollity of the medieval French artists, is in
the music of Franck. Old modes revive in it, old peas-
ant rhythms beat the ground once more.

Franc k 115

But, chiefest of all, it expressed the people described
in the section of '' Jean-Christophe " significantly en-
titled " Dans la Maison." It expressed the essential
France hidden by the glare of the Third Republic.
The music of Cesar Franck is the music of the people
driven into themselves by the conditions of modern
life. It is the music of the fine ones who stand hesitant
on the threshold of the world, and have incessantly
to struggle for the power to act, for faith and hope.
It is the music of those who in the midst of milHons
feel themselves forsaken and alone and powerless, and
in whose obscure and laborious existence Franck him-
self shared. It is a thing turned away from the
market-place, full of the quiet of the inner chamber.
Through so much of Franck one feels the steady glow
of the lamp in the warm room. With its songs of
loneliness and doubt and ruth, its seif-communings
and vigils and prayers, its struggle for the sunlight
of perfect confidence and healthiness and zest, it
might come directly out of the lives of a half-dozen
of the eminent persons whom France produced dur-
ing the closing years of the nineteenth century. Ro-
main Rolland himself is of this sort. It was for
these people, self-distrustful, disillusioned, doubtful,
that Charles Peguy wrote, bidding them remember
the divine origin of the life and the institutions that
seemed so false to them, bidding them remember that
the Republic itself was the result of a mystical im-

Ii6 Franc k

pulse in the human heart, that the dead of a race
live on in the bodies of the breathing, and that the
members of a folk are one. The mysticism and
Catholicism of Paul Claudel, the revulsion from the
scepticism of Renan and Anatole France that has be-
come so general in recent French thought, the tra-
ditionalism, nay, the intellectual reaction, of the latest
France, are all foreshadowed and outlined in the music
of Cesar Franck. He must have pulsed with the very
heart of his adopted 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 throng out
of the aperture made in the Chinese Wall. And after
Franck there followed a generation of French musi-
cians such as the world has not seen since the days
of the clavecinists. Within ten years, from one of
the most moribund, Paris had become the most im-
portant and vivid of musical centers. Something that
had been wanting in the air of Paris a long while had
swept largely into it again. The musical imagination
had been freed. After Franck it was impossible for
a French musician not to have the courage to express
himself in his own idiom, to dare develop the forms
peculiarly French, to break with the foreign German
and Italian standards that had oppressed the national
genius so long. For this man had done so. And with
the Debussys and Magnards and Ravels, the dTndys

Franc k 1 17

and Dukas and Schmitts, the Chaussons and Ropartz's
and the Milhauds that followed immediately on Cesar
Franck, an institution like the Societe Nationale de
Musique came to have a meaning. Once again, French
music 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 one appear, in
all the future ages of the world. But the music of
Debussy is proper to us, in our day, as is no other,
and might stand before all time our symbol. For it
lived in us before it was born, and after birth returned
upon us like a release. Even at a first encounter the
style of " Pelleas " was mysteriously familiar. It made
us feel that we had always needed such rhythms, such
luminous chords, such limpid phrases, that we perhaps
had even heard them, sounding faintly, in our imagi-
nations. The music seemed as old as our sense of
selfhood. It seemed but the exquisite recognition of
certain intense and troubling and appeasing moments
that we had already encountered. It seemed fash-
ioned out of certain ineluctable, mysterious experiences
that had budded, ineffably sad and sweet, from out our
lives, and had made us new, and set us apart, and
that now, at the music's breath, at a half-whispered
note, at the unclosing of a rhythm, the flowering of a
cluster of tones out of the warm still darkness, were
arisen again in the fullness of their stature and become
ours entirely.

119

I20 Debussy

For Debussy is of all musicians the one amongst
us most fully. He is here, in our midst, in the world
of the city. There is about him none of the unworld-
liness, the aloofness, the superhumanity that distances
so many of the other composers from us. We need
not imagine him in exotic singing robes, nor in classical
garments, nor in any strange and outmoded and pic-
turesque attire, to recognize in him the poet. He is
the modern 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 him as we know
ourselves. His experiences are but our own, intensified
by his 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, intent upon some
errand upon which we, too, have gone, journeying a
road which we ourselves have traveled. We know
the room in which he lives, the windows from which
he gazes, the moments which come upon him there
in the silence of the lamp. For he has captured in
his music what is distinguished in the age's delight
and tragedy. All the fine sensuality, all the Eastern
pleasure in the infinite daintiness and warmth of na-
ture, all the sudden, joyous discovery of color and
touch that made men 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 slumbering
trees," the " earth of departed sunset," the '' earth of
the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with

Debussy 12I1

blue." It is full of material loveliness, plies itself
to innumerable dainty shells — to the somnolence of
the Southern night, to the hieratic gesture of temple
dancers, to the fall of lamplight into the dark, to the
fantastic gush of fireworks, to the romance of old
mirrors and faded brocades and Saxony clocks, to the
green young panoply of spring. And just as it gives
again the age's consciousness of the delicious robe of
earth, so, too, it gives again its sense of weariness
and powerlessness and oppression. The nineteenth
century had been loud with blare and rumors and the
vibration of colossal movements, and man had appar-
ently traversed vast distances and explored titanic
heights and abysmal depths. And yet, for all the glare,
the earth was darker. The light was miasmic only.
The life of man seemed as ever a brief and sad
and simple thing, the stretching of impotent hands,
unable to grasp and hold; the interlacing of
shadows; the unclosing, a moment before night-
fall, of exquisite and fragile blossoms. The sense
of the infirmity of life, the consciousness that it
had no more than the signification of a dream with
passing lights, or halting steps in the snow, or an
old half -forgotten story, had mixed a deep wistfulness
and melancholy into the very glamour of the globe,
and become heavier itself for all the sweetness of
earth. And Debussy has fixed the two in their con-
fusion.
He has permeated music completely with his im-

122 Debussy

pressionistic sensibility. His style is an image of this
our pointillistically feeling era. With him impression-
ism achieves a perfect musical form. Structurally, the
music of Debussy is a fabric of exquisite and poignant
moments, each full and complete in itself. His wholes
exist entirely in their parts, in their atoms. If his
phrases, rhythms, lyric impulses, do contribute to the
formation of a single thing, they yet are extraordi-
narily independent and significant in themselves. No
chord, no theme, is subordinate. Each one exists for
the sake of its own beauty, occupies the universe for
an instant, then merges and disappears. The har-
monies are not, as in other compositions, prepara-
tions. They are apparently an end in themselves, flow
in space, and then change hue, as a shimmering stuff
changes. For all its golden earthiness, the style of
Debussy is the most liquid and impalpable of musical
styles. It is forever gliding, gleaming, melting; crys-
tallizing for an instant in some savory phrase, then
moving quiveringly onward. It is well-nigh edgeless.
It seems to flow through our perceptions as water
flows through fingers. The iridescent bubbles that
float upon it burst if we but touch them. It is for-
ever suggesting water — fountains and pools, the glisten-/
ing spray and heaving bosom of the sea. Or, it shad-
ows forth the formless breath of the breeze, of the
storm, of perfumes, or the play of sun and moon. His
orchestration invariably produces all that is cloudy

Debussy 123

and diaphanous in each instrument. He makes music
with flakes of light, with bright motes of pigment. His
palette glows with the sweet, limpid tints of a Monet
or a Pissaro or a Renoir. His orchestra sparkles with
iridescent fires, with divided tones, with delicate vio-
lets and argents and shades of rose. The sound of
the piano, usually but the ringing of flat colored stones,
at his touch becomes fluid, velvety and dense, takes
on the properties of satins and liqueurs. The pedal
washes new tint after new tint over the keyboard.
'' Reflets dans Teau " has the quality of sheeny blue
satin, of cloud pictures tumbling in gliding water.
Blue fades to green and fades back again to blue in
the middle section of ^^ Homage a Rameau." Bright,
cold moonlight slips through '' Et la lune descend sur
le temple que fut "; ruddy sparks glitter in " Mouve-
ment " with its Petruchka-like joy; the piano is liquid
and luminous and aromatic in '' Cloches a travers les
feuilles."

Yet there is no uncertainty, no mistiness in his forni,
as there is in that of some of the other impressionists
His music is classically firm, classically precise anc
knit. His lyrical, shimmering structures are perfectly
fashioned. The line never hesitates, never becomes
lost nor involved. It proceeds directly, clearly, pass-
ing through jewels and clots of color, and fusing them
into the mass. The trajectory never breaks. The
music is always full of its proper weight and timbre.

124 Debussy

It can be said quite without exaggeration that his best
work omits nothing, neglects nothing, that every
component element is justly treated. His little
pieces occupy a space as completely as the
most massive and grand of compositions. A com-
position like '' Nuages," the first of the three
nocturnes for orchestra, while taking but five min-
utes in performance, outweighs any number of
compositions that last an hour. '' L'Apres-midi d'un
faune " is inspired and new, marvelously, at every
measure. The three little pieces that comprise the first
set of ^' Images " for piano will probably outlast
half of what Liszt has written for the instrument.
^^ Pelleas '^ will some day be studied for its miraculous
invention, its classical moderation and balance anc
truth, for its pure diction and economical orchestra-
tion, quite as the scores of Gluck are studied to-day.\
For Debussy is, of all the artists who have made
music in our time, the most perfect. Other musicians,
perhaps even some of the contemporary, may exhibit
a greater heroism, a greater staying power and inde-
fatigability. Nevertheless, in his sphere he is every
inch as perfect a workman as the greatest. Within
his limits he was as pure a craftsman as the great
John Sebastian in his. The difference between the two
is the difference of their ages and races, not the dif-
ference of their artistry. For few composers can
match with their own Debussy's perfection of taste,

Debussy 125

his fineness of sensibility, his poetic rapture and pro-
found awareness of beauty. Few have been more gra-
ciously rounded and balanced than he, have been,
like him, so fine that nothing which they could do
could be tasteless and insignificant and without grace.
Few musicians have been more nicely sensible of their
gift, better acquainted with themselves, surer of the
character and limitations of their genius. Few have
been as perseverantly essential, have managed to sus-
tain their emotion and invention so steadily at a height.
The music of Debussy is full of purest, most delicate
poesy. Perhaps only Bach and Moussorgsky have as
invariably found phrases as pithy and inclusive and
final as those with which '' Pelleas " is strewn, phrases
that with a few simple notes epitomize profound and
exquisite emotions, and are indeed the word. There
are moments in Debussy's work when each note opens
a prospect. There are moments when the music of
" Pelleas," the fine fluid line of sound, the melodic
moments that merge and pass and vanish into one
another, become the gleaming rims that circumscribe
vast darkling forms. There are portions of the drama
that are like the moments of human intercourse when
single syllables unseal deep reservoirs. The tender-
ness manifest here is scarcely to be duplicated in mu-
sical art. And tenderness, after all, is the most intense
of all emotions.

A thousand years of culture live in this fineness.

126 Debussy

In these perfect gestures, in this grace, this certainty
of choice, this justice of values, this simple, profound,
delicate language, there live on thirty generations of
gentlefolk. Thirty generations of cavaliers and dames
who developed the arts of life in the mild and fruitful
valleys of " the pleasant land of France " speak here.
The gentle sunlight and gentle shadow, the mild win-
ters and mild summers of the He de France, the plenti-
ful fruits of the earth, the excitement of the vine,
contributed to making this being beautifully balanced,
reserved, refined. The instruction and cultivation of
the classic and French poets and thinkers, Virgil and
Racine and Marivaux, Catullus and Montaigne and
Chateaubriand, the chambers of the Hotel de Ram-
bouillet, the gardens and galleries of Versailles, the
immense drawing-room of eighteenth-century Paris,
helped form this spirit. In all this man's music one
catches sight of the long foreground, the long cycles
of preparation. In every one of his works, from the
most imposing to the least, from the '' String Quartet "
and " Pelleas " to the gracile, lissome little waltz, " Le
plus que lent," there is manifest the Latin genius nur-
tured and molded and developed by the fertile, tran-
quil soil of France.

And in his art, the gods of classical antiquity live
again. Debussy is much more than merely the sen-
suous Frenchman. He is the man in whom the old
Pagan voluptuousness, the old untroubled delight in

Debussy 127

the body, warred against so long by the black brood of
monks and transformed by them during centuries into
demoniacal and hellish forms, is free and pure and
sv/eet once more. They once were nymphs and naiads
and goddesses, the " Quartet " and " L'Apres-midi d'un
faune " and " Sirenes." They once wandered through
the glades of Ionia and Sicily, and gladdened men 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 wonder and sweetness of the
flesh, of flesh tasted deliciously and enjoyed not in
closed rooms, behind secret doors and under the shame-
ful pall of the night, but out in the warm, sunny
open, amid grasses and scents and the buzzing of
insects, the waving of branches, the wandering of
clouds. The Quartet is alive, quivering with light, and
with joyous animality. It moves like a young fawn;
spins the gayest, most silken, most golden of spider
webs; fills one with the delights of taste and smell
and sight and touch. In the most glimmering, floating
of poems, " L'Apres-midi d'un faune," there is caught
magically by the climbing, chromatic flute, the drowsy
pizzicati of the strings, and the languorous sighing of the
horns, the atmosphere of the daydream, the sleepy
warmth of the sunshot herbage, the divine apparition,
the white wonder of arms and breasts and thighs. The
Lento movement of " Iberia " is like some drowsy,
disheveled gipsy. Even "La plus que lent" is full

128 Debussy

of the goodness of the flesh, is like some slender young
girl with unclosing bosom. And in " Sirenes/' some-
thing like the eternal divinity, the eternal beauty of
woman's body, is celebrated. It is as though on the
rising, falling, rising, sinking tides of the poem, on
the waves of the glamorous feminine voices, on the
aphrodisiac swell of the sea, the white Anadyomene
herself, with her galaxy of tritons and naiads, ap-
proached earth's shores once more.

If any musical task is to be considered as having
been accomplished, it is that of Debussy. For he
wrote the one book that every great artist writes. He
established a style irrefragably, made musical impres-
sionism as legitimate a thing as any of the great styles.
That he had more to make than that one contribution
is doubtful. His art underwent no radical changes.
His style was mature already in the Quartet and in
" Proses lyriques," and had its climax in " Pelleas," its
orchestral deployment in ^' Nocturnes " and " La Mer "
and " Iberia," its pianistic expression in the two vol-
umes of " Images " for pianoforte. Whatever the re-
finement of the incidental music to " Le Martyre de
Saint-Sebastien," Debussy never really transgressed
the Hmits set for him by his first great 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 " Berceuse heroique," and

Debussy 129

deprived us of much delightful art, neither it nor his
death actually robbed us of some radical development
which we might reasonably 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
the glare and tumult, an art into which it could re-
treat, an art which could compensate it for a life be-
come too cruel and demanding, he had produced. He
had essentially fulfilled himself.

The fact that " Pelleas " is the most eloquent of all
Debussy's works and his eternal sign does not, then,
signify that he did not grow during the remainder of
his life. A complex of determinants made of his music-
drama the fullest expression of his genius, decreed
that he should be living most completely at the mo-
ment he composed it. The very fact that in it Debussy
was composing music for the theater made it certain
that his artistic sense would produce itself at its
mightiest in the work. For it entailed the statement of
his opposition to Wagner. The fact that it was music
conjoined with speech made it certain that Debussy, so
full of the French classical genius, would through con-
tact with the spoken word, through study of its essen-
tial quality, be aided and compelled to a complete reali-
zation of a fundamentally French idiom. And then
Maeterlinck's little play offered itself to his genius as a
unique auxiliary. It, too, is full of the sense of the
shadowiness of things that weighed upon Debussy, has

130 Debussy

not a little of the accent of the time. This '' vieille et
triste legende de la foret " is alive with images, such as
the old and somber castle inhabited by aging people
and lying lost amid sunless forests, the rose that blooms
in the shadow underneath Melisande's casement, Meli-
sande's hair that falls farther than her arms can reach,
the black tarn that broods beneath the castle-vaults
and breathes death, Golaud's anguished search for
truth in the prattle of the child, that could not but
call a profound response from Debussy's imagination.
But, above all, it was the figure of Mehsande herself
that made him pour himself completely into the set-
ting of the play. For that figure permitted Debussy
to give himself completely in the creation of his ideal
image. The music is all Melisande, all Debussy's
love- woman, ^t is she that the music reveals from
the moment Melisande rises from among the rocks
shrouded in the mystery of her golden hair. It is
she the music limns from the very beginning of the
work. The entire score is but what a man might feel
toward a woman that was his, and yet, like all women,
strange and mysterious and unknown to him. The
music is like the stripping of some perfect flower, petal
upon petal. There are moments when it is all that
lies between two people, and is the fullness of their
knowledge. It is the perfect sign of an experience.
And so, since Debussy's art could have no second
climax, it was in the order of things that the works

Debussy 131

succeeding upon his masterpiece should be rel-
atively less important. Nevertheless, the ensuing
poems and songs and piano-pieces, with the exception
of those written during those years when Debussy
could have said with Rameau, his master, '' From day
to day my taste improves. But I have lost all my
genius," are by little less perfect and astounding pieces
of work. His music is like the peaks of a mountain
range, of which one of the first and nearest is the
highest, while the others appear scarcely less high.
And they are some of the bluest, the loveliest, the
most shining that stretch through the region of mod-
ern music. It will be long before humankind has
exhausted their beauty.

Ravel

Ravel and Debussy are of one lineage. They both
issue from what is deeply, graciously temperate in the
genius of France. Across the span of centuries, they
touch hands with the men who first expressed that
silver temperance in tone, with Claude Le Jeune, with
Rameau and Couperin and the other clavecinists. Un-
diverted by the changes of revolutionary times, they
continue, in forms conditioned by the modern feeling
for color, for tonal complexity, for supple and undulant
rhythm, the high tradition of the elder music.

Claude Le Jeune wrote motets; the eighteenth-cen-
tury masters wrote gavottes and rigadoons, forlanas
and chaconnes, expressed themselves in courtly dances
and other set and severe forms. Ravel and Debussy
compose in more liberal and naturalistic fashion. And
yet, the genius that animates all this music is single.
It is as though all these artists, born so many hundred
years apart from each other, had contemplated the
pageant of their respective times from the same point
of view. It is as though they faced the problems of
composition with essentially the same attitudes, with
the same demands and reservations. The new music,
like the old, is the work of men above all reverent
of the art of life itself. It is the work of men of the

133

134 Ravel

sort who crave primarily in all conduct restraint, and
who insist on poise and good sense. They regard
all things humanly, and bring their regard for the
social values to the making of their art. Indeed, the
reaction of Debussy from Wagnerism was chiefly the
reaction of a profoundly socialized and aristocratic
sensibility outraged by over-emphasis and unrestraint.
The men of whom he is typical throughout the ages
never forget the world and its decencies and its de-
mands. And yet they do not eschew the large, the
grave, the poignant. The range of human passions
is present in their music, too, even though many of
them have not had gigantic powers, or entertained
emotions as grand and intense as the world-consum-
ing, world-annihilating mysticism of a Bach, for in-
stance. But it is shadowed forth 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, 6 ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille."

All expression is made in low, aristocratic tone, in
grisaille. Most often it achieves itself through a sil-
very grace. It is normal for these men to be pro-
found through grace, to be amusing and yet artisti-
cally upright. It is normal for them to articulate
nicely. High in their consciousness there flame always
the commandments of clarity, of delicacy, of precision.

Ravel 135

Indeed, so repeatedly have temperaments of this
character appeared in France, not only in her
music, but also in her letters and other arts, from
the time of the Pleiade, to that of Charles Louis
Philippe and Andre Gide and Henri de Regnier, that it
is difficult not to hold theirs the centrally, essentially
French tradition, and not to see in men like Rabelais
only the Frank, and in men like Berlioz only the
atavism to Gallo-Roman times.

But it is not only the spirit of French classicism
that Ravel and Debussy inherit. In one respect their
art is the continuation of the music that came to a
climax in the works of Haydn and Mozart. It is
subtle and intimate, and restores to the auditor the
great creative role assigned to him by so much of the
music before Beethoven. The music of Haydn and
Mozart defers to its hearer. It seeks deliberately to
enlist his activity. It relies for its significance largely
upon his contribution. The music itself carries only a
portion of the composer's intention. It carries only
enough to ignite and set functioning the auditor's imag-
ination. To that person is reserved the pleasure of
fathoming the intention, of completing the idea adum-
brated by the composer. For Haydn and Mozart did
not desire that the listener assume a completely pas-
sive attitude. They had too great a love and respect
of their fellows. They were eager to secure their
collaboration, had confidence that they could compre-

136 Ravel

hend all that the music intimated, regarded them as
equals in the business of creation. But the music
written since their time has forced upon the hearer
a more and more passive role. The composers arro-
gated to themselves, to varying extents, the greater part
of the activity; insisted upon giving all, of doing the
larger share of the labor. The old intimacy was lost;
with Wagner the intellectual game of the leit-motif
system was substituted for the creative exercise.
The art of Ravel and Debussy returns to the
earlier strategy. It makes the largest effort to
excite the creative imagination, that force which Will-
iam Blake identified with the Saviour Himself. It
strives continually to lure it into the most energetic
participation. And because Ravel and Debussy have
this incitement steadily in view, their music is a music
of few strokes, comparable indeed to the pictural art
of Japan which it so often recalls. It is the music
of suggestion, of sudden kindlings, brief starts and
lines, small forms. It never insists. It only pricks.
It instigates, begins, leaves off, and then continues,
rousing to action the hearer's innate need of an aim
and an order and meaning in things. Its subtle ges-
tures, its brief, sharp, delicate phrases, its quintes-
sentiality, are like the thrusting open of doors into
the interiors of the conscience, the opening of windows
on long vistas, are like the breaking of light upon ob-
scured memories and buried emotions. They are like

Ravel 137

the unsealing of springs long sealed, suffering them to
flow again in the night. And for a glowing instant,
they transform the auditor from a passive receiver
into an artist.

And there is much besides that Ravel and Debussy
have in common. They have each been profoundly
influenced by Russian music, " Daphnis et Chloe "
showing the influence of Borodin, " Pelleas et Meli-
sande " that of Moussorgsky. Both have made wide
discoveries in the field of harmony. Both have felt the
power of outlying and exotic modes. Both have been
profoundly impressed by the artistic currents of the
Paris about them. Both, like so many other French
musicians, have been kindled by the bright colors of
Spain, Ravel in his orchestral Rhapsody, in his one-
act opera '' L'Heure espagnol " and in the piano-piece
in the collection " Miroirs " entitled ^' Alborada del
Graciozo," Debussy in '' Iberia " and in some of his
preludes. Indeed, a parallelism exists throughout their
respective works. Debussy writes " Homage a Ra-
meau "; Ravel " Le Tombeau de Couperin." Debussy
writes " Le Martyre de Saint-Sebastien "; Ravel pro-
jects an oratorio, " Saint-Frangois d'Assise." Ravel
writes the " Ondine " of the collection entitled " Gas-
pard de la nuit"; Debussy follows it with the "On-
dine " of his second volume of preludes. Both, dur-
ing the same year, conceive and execute the idea of
setting to music the lyrics of Mallarme entitled " Sou-

138 Ravel

pir " and " Placet futile." Nevertheless, this fact con-
stitutes Ravel in no wise the imitator of Debussy. His
work is by no means, as some of our critics have made
haste to insist, a counterfeit of his elder's. Did the
music of Ravel not demonstrate that he possesses a
sensibility quite distinct from Debussy's, in some re-
spects less fine, delicious, lucent, in others perhaps even
more deeply engaging; did it not represent a distinct
development from Debussy's art in a direction quite
its own, one might with justice speak of a disciple-
ship. But in the light of Ravel's actual accomplish-
ment, of his large and original and attractive gift,
of the magistral craftsmanship that has shown itself
in so many musical forms, from the song and the
sonatine to the string-quartet and the orchestral poem,
of the talent that has revealed itself increasingly from
year to year, and that not even the war and the ex-
perience of the trenches has driven underground, the
parallelism is to be regarded as necessitated by the
spiritual kinship of the men, and by their contempo-
raneity.

And, certainly, nothing so much reveals Ravel the
peer of Debussy as the fact that he has succeeded so
beautifully in manifesting what is peculiar to him.
For he is by ten years Debussy's junior, and were he
less positive an individuality, less original a tempera-
ment, less fully the genius, he could never have real-
ized himself. There would have descended upon him

Ravel 139

the blight that has fallen upon so many of the younger
Parisian composers less determinate than he and like
himself made of one stuff with Debussy. He, too,
would have permitted the art of the older and well-
established man to impose upon him. He, too, would
have betrayed his own cause in attempting to model
himself upon the other man. But Debussy has not
sv^erved nor hampered Ravel any more than has his
master, Gabriel Faure. He is too sturdily set in his
own direction. From the very commencement of his
career, from the time when he wrote the soft and hesi-
tating and nevertheless already very personal " Pa vane
pour une Infante defunte," he has maintained himself
proudly against his great collateral, just as he has
maintained himself against what is false and epicene
in the artistic example of Faure. Within their com-
mon limits, he has realized himself as essentially as
Debussy has done. Their music is the new and double
blossoming of the classical French tradition. From
the common ground, they stretch out each in a differ-
ent direction, and form the greater contrast to each
other because of all they have in common.

The intelligence that fashioned the music of De-
bussy was one completely aware, conscious of itself,
flooded with light in its most secret places, set four-
square in the whirling universe. Few artists have
been as sure of their intention as Debussy always was.
The man could fix with precision the most elusive

140 Ravel

emotions, could describe the sensations that flow on
the borderland of consciousness, vaguely, and that
most of us cannot grasp for very dizziness. He could
write music as impalpable as that of the middle sec-
tion of " Iberia," in which the very silence of the
night, the caresses of the breeze, seem to have taken
musical flesh. Before the body of his work, so clear
and lucid in its definition, so perfect in its organiza-
tion, one thinks perforce of a world created out of
the flying chaos beneath him by a god. We are given
to know precisely of what stuff the soul of Debussy
was made, what its pilgrimages were, in what adven-
ture it sought itself out. We know precisely wherein
it saw reflected its visage, in '' water stilled at even,"
in the angry gleam of sunset on wet leaves, in wild
and headlong gipsy rhythms, in moonfire, shimmering
stuffs and flashing spray, in the garish lights and odors
of the Peninsula, in rain fallen upon flowering par-
terres, in the melancholy march of clouds, the golden
pomp and ritual of the church, the pools and gardens
and pavilions reared for its delight by the delicate
Chinese soul, in earth's thousand scents and shells and
colors. For Debussy has set these adventures before
us in their fullness. Before he spoke, he had dwelt
with his experiences till he had plumbed them fully,
till he had seen into and around and behind them
clearly. And so we perceive them in their es-
sences, in their eternal aspects. The designs are the

Ravel 141

very curve of the ecstasy. They are sheerly delimited.
The notes appear to bud one out of the other, to follow
each other out of the sheerest necessity, to have an
original timbre, to fix a matter never known before,
that can never live again. Every moment in a repre-
sentative composition of Debussy's is logical and yet
new. Few artists have more faultlessly said what they
set out to say.

Ravel is by no means as perfect an artist. He has
not the clear self-consciousness, the perfect recogni-
tion of limits. His music has not the absolute com-
pleteness of Debussy's. It is not that he is not a
marvelous craftsman, greatly at ease in his medium.
It is that Ravel dares, and dares continually; seeks
passionately to bring his entire body into play; as-
pires to plenitude of utterance, to sheerness and rigid-
ity of form. Ravel always goes directly through the
center. But compare his " Rapsodie espagnol " with
Debussy's '' Iberia " to perceive how direct he is.
Debussy gives the circumambient atmosphere, Ravel
the inner form. Between him and Debussy there is
the difference between the apollonian and the diony-
siac, 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 to remain, in all his manhood, the child
that once we all were. In him the powerful and spon-
taneous flow of emotion from out the depths of being

142 Ravel

has never been dammed. He can still speak from the
fullness of his heart, cry his sorrows piercingly, pro-
duce himself completely. Gracious and urbane as his
music is, proper to the world of modern things and
modern adventures and modern people, there is still
a gray, piercing lyrical note in it that is almost primi-
tive, and reflects the childlike singleness and intensity
of the animating spirit. The man who shaped not only
the deliberately infantine '' Ma Mere I'Oye," but also
things as quiveringly simple and expressive and songful
as " Oiseaux tristes," as ^' Sainte," as " Le Gibet," or
the '' Sonatine," as the passacaglia of the Trio or the
vocal interlude in " Daphnis et Chloe," has a pureness
of feeling that we have lost. And it is this crying,
passionate tone, this directness of expression, this
largeness of effort, even in tiny forms and limited
scope, that, more than his polyphonic style or any
other of the easily recognizable earmarks of his art,
distinguishes his work from Debussy's. The other man
has a greater sensuousness, completeness, inventive-
ness perhaps. But Ravel is full of a lyricism, a pierc-
ingness, a passionateness, that much of the music of
Debussy successive to " Pelleas " wants. We under-
stand Ravel's music, in the famous phrase of Bee-
thoven, as speech '' vom Herz — zu Herzen."

And we turn to it gratefully, as we turn to all art
full of the '' sense of tears in mortal things," and into
which the pulse of human life has passed directly.

Ravel

143

For there are times when he is close to the bourne
of life, 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
Ravel has but to touch a note, and we unclose; when
he has but to let an instrument sing a certain phrase,
and things which lie buried deep in the heart rise out
of the dark, like the nymph in his piano-poem, drip-
ping with stars. The music of "" Daphnis," from fhe
very moment of the introduction with its softly un-
folding chords, its far, glamorous fanfares, its human
throats swollen with songs, seems to thrust open doors
into the unplumbed caverns of the soul, and summon
forth the stuff to shape the dream. Little song written
since Weber set his horns a-breathing, or Brahms trans-
muted the witchery of the German forest into tone,
is more romantic. Over it might be set the invocation
of Heine:

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

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

And Ravel is at once more traditional and more
progressive a composer than Debussy. One feels the

144

Ravel

past most strongly in him. Debussy, with his thor-
oughly impressionistic style, is more the time. No
doubt there is a certain almost Hebraic melancholy
and sharp lyricism in Ravel's music 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, dainty structures, in the dryness of his black.
In ^^ Le Tombeau de Couperin," Ravel is the old clave-
cinist become contemporary of Scriabine and Strawin-
sky, the old clavecinist who had seen the projectiles fall
at Verdun and lost a dozen friends in the trenches.
He finds it easy, as in some of his recent songs, to
achieve the folktone. If it is true that he is a Jew,
then his traditionalism is but one more brilliant in-
stance of the power of France to adopt the children
of alien races and make them more intensely her own
than some of her proper offspring. In no other in-
stance, however, not in that of Lully nor in that of
Franck, has the transfusion of blood been so success-
ful. Ravel is in no wise treacherous to himself. There
must be something in the character of the French na-
tion that makes of every Jew, if not a son, yet the
happiest and most faithful of stepchildren.

And as one feels the past more strongly in Ravel,
so, too, one finds him in certain respects even more
revolutionary than Debussy. For while the power of
the latter flagged in the making of strangely MacDow-
ellesque preludes, or in the composition of such ghosts

Ravel 145

as " Gigues " and " Jeux " and '' Karma," Ravel has
continued increasingly in power, has developed his art
until he has come to be one of the leaders of the musi-
cal evolution. If there is a single modern composi-
tion which can be compared to " Petruchka " for its
picture of mass-movement, its pungent naturalism, it
is the " Feria " of the " Rapsodie espagnol." If there
is a single modern orchestral work that can be com-
pared to either of the two great ballets of Strawinsky
for rhythmical vitality, it is " Daphnis et Chloe," with
its flaming dionysiac pulses, its " pipes and timbrels,"
its wild ecstasy. The same delicate clockwork mechan-
ism characterizes " L'Heure espagnol," his opera
bouffe, that characterizes " Petruchka " and " Le
Rossignol." A piano-poem like " Scarbo " rouses the
full might of the piano, and seems to bridge the way to
the music of Leo Ornstein and the age of steel. And
Ravel has some of the squareness, the sheerness and
rigidity for which the ultra-modern are striving. The
liquescence of Debussy has given away again to
something more metallic, more soHd and unflowing.
There is a sort of new stiffness in this music. And in
the field of harmony Ravel is steadily building upon
Debussy. His chords grow sharper and more biting;
in " Le Tombeau de Couperin " and the minuet on
the name of Haydn there is a harmonic daring and
subtlety and even bitterness that is beyond anything
attained by Debussy^, placing the composer with the

146 Ravel

Strawinskys and the Schoenbergs and the Ornsteins
and ail the other barbarians.

And then his ironic humor, as well, distinguishes
him from Debussy. The humor of the latter was,
after all, light and whimsical. That of Ravel, on
the other hand, is extremely bitter. No doubt,
the " icy " Ravel, the artist ''a qui I'absence de sen-
sibilite fait encore une personalite," as one of the qui-
rites termed him, never existed save in the minds of
those unable to comprehend his reticence and deli-
cacy and essentiality. Nevertheless, besides his lyri-
cal, dreamy, romantic temper, he has a very unsenti-
mental vein, occurring no doubt, as in Heine, as a
sort of corrective, a sort of compensation, for the
pervading sensibleness. And so 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 '' His-
toires naturelles " of Jules Renard for chant, writing in
" Valses nobles et sentimentales " a slightly ironical
and disillusioned if smiling and graceful and delicate
commentary to the season of love, projecting a music-
drama on the subject of Don Quixote. Over his waltzes
Ravel maliciously sets a quotation from Henri de
Regnier: " Le plaisir delicieux et toujours nouveau
d'une occupation inutile." With Casella, he writes a
musical " A la maniere de," parodying Wagner, d'Indy,
Chabrier, Strauss and others most wittily. Something

Ravel 147

of Eric Satie, the clown of music, exists in him, too.
And probably nothing makes him so inexplicable and
irritating to his audiences as his ironic streak. People
are willing to forgive an artist all, save only irony.

What the future holds for Maurice Ravel is known
only to the three norns. But, unless some unforeseen
accident occur and interrupt his career, it can only
hold the most brilliant rewards. The man seems surely
bound for splendid shores. He is only in the forty-
fifth year of his life, and though his genius was already
fresh and subtle in the Quartet, written as early as
1903, it has grown beautifully in power during the last
two decades. The continued exploration of musical
means has given his personality increasingly free play,
and has unbound him. The gesture of the hand has
grown swifter and more commanding. The instruments
have become more obedient. He has matured, become
virile and even magistral. The war has not softened
him. He speaks as intimately as ever in " Le Tom-
beau de Couperin." Already one can see in him one
of the most delightful and original musical geniuses
that have been nourished by the teeming soil of France.
It is possible that the future will refer to him in even
more enthusiastic tone.

Borodin

Borodin's music is a reading of Russia's destiny in the
book of her past. " I live," the composer of ^' Prince
Igor " wrote to a friend one summer, ^' on a steep and
lofty mountain whose base is washed by the Volga.
And for thirty versts I can follow the windings of the
river through the blue of the immeasurable distance."
And his music, at least those rich fragments that
are his music, make us feel as though that summer
sojourn had been symbolic of his career, as though in
spirit he had ever lived in some high, visionary place
overlooking the sweep of centuries in which Russia
had waxed from infancy to maturity. It is as though
the chiming of the bells of innumerable Russian vil-
lages, villages living and villages dead and underground
a thousand years, had mounted incessantly to his ears,
telling him of the progress of a thing round which
sixty generations had risen and fallen like foam. It
is as though he had followed the Volga, flowing east-
ward, not alone for thirty, but for thirty hundred
versts through plains reverberant with the age-long
combat and clashing, the bleeding and fusing of Slav
and Tartar; had followed it until it reached the zone
where Asia, with her caravans and plagues and shrill
Mongolian fifes, comes out of endless wastes. And it

149

i^o Borodin

is as though, piercing further into the bosom of the
eternal mother, Asia, his eye had rested finally upon
a single spot, a single 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, advanc-
ing slowly, patiently, steadily into power and manhood,
until it had come into possession of the wildest and fair-
est land of eastern Europe, until it had joined with
other stocks and swelled into a vast nation, a gigantic
empire; and that then, in that moment of fulfilment,
Borodin had turned in prophetic ecstasy upon modern
Russia and bade it ring its bells and sound its chants,
bade it push onward with its old faith and vigor, since
the Slavonic grandeur and glory were assured. For
through the savage trumpet-blasts and rude and lum-
bering rhythms, through the cymbal-crashing Mongol
marches and warm, uncouth peasant chants that are
his music, there surges that vision, that sense of im-
manent glory, that fortifying asseveration.

It rises to us for the reason that although his music
is an evocation of past times, a conjuring up of the
buried Muscovy, it is a glad and exuberant one. It
has the tone neither of those visions of departed days
inspired by yearnings for greener, happier ages, nor
of those out of which there speaks, as there speaks out
of the " Salammbo " of Flaubert, for instance, a horror
of man's everlasting filth and ferocity. A fresh and

Borodin 151

joyous and inspiriting wind blows from these pages.
The music of " Prince Igor," with its epical movement
and counter-movement, its shouting, wandering, sav-
age hordes, its brandished spears and flashing Slavic
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 childlike laughter. The
B -minor symphony makes us feel as though the very
pagan joy and vigor that had once informed the as-
semblies and jousts and feasting of the boy ar try of
medieval Russia, and made the guzli and bamboo flute
to sound, had waked again in Borodin; and in this
magnificent and lumbering music, these crude and
massive forms, lifted its wassail and its gold and song
once more. For the composer of such works, such
evocations, it is patent that the past was the wonderful
warrant of a wonderful future. For this man, indeed,
the reliques, the trappings, the minaret-crowned mon-
uments, the barbaric chants and gold ornaments, all
the thousand rich things that recalled Muscovy and
the buried empire to him, and that he loved so dearly,
were valuable chiefly because 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 found Russia her modern musical speech.
The group, which comprised Moussorgsky, Balakirew,
Cui, Rimsky-Korsakoff and Borodin, was unified by

152 Borodin

an impulse common to all the members. All were in
revolt against the grammar of classical music. All
felt the tradition of western European music to be
inimical to the free expression of the Russian sensi-
bility, and for the first time opposed to the musical
West the musical East. For these young composers,
the plans and shapes of phrases^ the modes, the
rhythms, the counterpoint, the " Rules," the entire
musical theory and science that had been estabUshed
in Europe by the practice of generations of com-
posers, was a convention; the Russian music, par-
ticularly that of Rubinstein and Tchaikowsky, which
had sought to ply itself in accord with it, an artificial
and sophisticated thing, as artificial and sophisticated
a thing as the pseudo-Parisian culture of the Petro-
grad salons. It was their firm conviction that for the
Russian composer only one model existed, and that
was the Russian folk-song. Only in the folk-song were
to be found the musical equivalents of the spoken
speech. Only in the folk-song were to be found the
musical accents and turns and inflections, the phrases
and rhythms and colors that expressed the national
temper. And to the popular and to the liturgical chants
they went in search of their proper idiom. But it was
not only to the musical heritage that they went. In
search of their own selves they sought out every ves-
tige of the past, every vestige of the fatherland that
Peter the Great and Catherine had sought to reform,

Borodin 153

and that persists in every Russian underneath the coat-
ing of convention. Together with the others, Borodin
steeped himself in the lore and legends of the buried
empire, familiarized himself with the customs of the
Slavs of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, searched
libraries for the missals illuminated by the old monks
of the Greek church, deciphered epics and ballads and
chronicles, assimilated the songs and incantations of
the peasants and savage tribes of the steppes, collected
the melodies of European and Asiatic Russia from the
Ukraine to Turkestan.

And he and his companions were right. Their in-
stincts had not misled them. The contact with real
Russia loosed them all. Through that new musical
orientation, they arose, each full of his own strength.

It was the contact of like with like that made them
expressive. For what they inwardly were was close
akin to the breath, the spirit, the touch, that had in-
vented those chants, and built those minarets and
wrought that armor and composed those epics. The
accent of Moussorgsky was in the grave and popular
melodies, in the liturgical incantations, before he was
born. His most original passages resemble nothing
so much as the rude, stark folk-song bequeathed to the
world by medieval Russia. Rimsky-Korsakoff's love
of brilliant, gay materials had been in generations and
generations of peasant-artists, in every peasant who
on a holiday had donned a gaudy, beribboned costume,

154 Borodin

centuries before the music of " Scheherazade " and
" Le Coq d'or " was conceived. So, too, the tempera-
ments and sensibilities of the others. They had but to
touch these emblems and reliques and rhythms to be-
come self-conscious.

It must have been in particular the old warrior, the
chivalric, perhaps even the Tartar imprint in the em-
blems of the Russian past that liberated Borodin. For
he is the old Tartar, the old savage boyar, of modern
music. In very person he was the son of military
feudal Russia. His photographs that exhibit the great
chieftain head, the mane and the savage, long Mon-
golian mustache in all their fiat contradiction of the
conventional nineteenth-century dress, the black and
star and ribbon of court costume, make one half credit
the legend that his family was of pure Circassian de-
scent, and had flowed down into the great Russian
maelstrom from out a Georgian stronghold. His idiom
bears strongly the imprint of that body; suggests
strongly that heredity. It is patently the expression
of a personality who desired exuberant bright sound
and color, needed the brandishing of blades and the
shrilling of Tartar fifes and the leaping dance of Tar-
tar archers, had nostalgia for the savage life that had
spawned upon the steppes. And as such it is distinct
from that of the other composers of the group. His
music has none of the piercingness and poignancy and
irony, none of the deep humility and grim resignation,

Borodin 155

so characteristic of Moussorgsky's. It has none of
the brilliant Orientalism of Balakirew and Cui, none
of Rimsky-Korsakoff's soft felicity and lambency and
light sensuousness. It is rude and robust and male,
full of angular movements and vigorous blows and
lusty, childlike laughter, and, at the same time, of a
singularly fine romantic fervor. It is almost the con-
trary of that of the neurotic, sallow Tchaikowsy of
the hysterical frenzies and hysterical self-pity and the
habits of morose delectation. If there is any symphony
that can be called pre-eminently virile and Russian,
it is assuredly Borodin's second, the great one in
B-minor. And in " Prince Igor " and the symphonic
poem " On the Steppes," for the first time, continental
Asia, with its sharp beat of savage drums and its
oceanic wastes of grass, its strong Kurdish beverages
and jerked steaks, comes into modern music.

And was not this restatement of the national char-
acter Borodin's great contribution to his age's life?
For has not the most recent time of all beheld a re-
surgence of the Russian spirit in the political field,
an attempted reconstitution of society in the light of
the just and fraternal and religious spirit with which
this folk has ever been endowed, and of which, in all
its misery, it has ever been aware? If there is any
teacher who dominates Russian thought and Russian
affairs to-day, it is Tolstoy. And from whom did Tol-
stoy learn more than from that conserver of the pris-

156 Borodin

tine and dominating Russian traits, the moujik? And
so men like Borodin who sought out the racial char-
acter and reflected it in their music seem to us almost
like outriders, like the tribesmen 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
summons to individual life. Borodin in particular
came upon the Russian people at a moment when, like
a tribe that has quit its fields in search of better
pasturage, and has wandered far and found itself in
barren and difficult and almost impassable ground, it
was bewildered and despondent, and felt itself lost and
like to perish in the wilderness. And while his folk
lay prone, he had arisen and mounted the encircling
ridge. And with a joyous cry, and the flaunting of a
banner, he called them 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 at least by the side of that of a Mozart
or a Moussorgsky, he succeeded in producing only a
single opera, " Prince Igor," two symphonies and the
torso of a third, a symphonic sketch, '' On the Steppes,"
two string quartets, and a score of songs. And many
of these works are incomplete. '' Prince Igor " is a
fragmentary composition, a series of not quite satis-
factorily conjoined numbers, a golden mosaic from
which whole groups of enameled bits are missing. In-
deed, Borodin had not even notated the overture when

Borodin 157

he died, and we know it thanks only to a pupil who
had heard him play it on the piano and recollected it
well enough to reconstruct it. Other of his works
that are complete are spotty, commingled dross and
gold. He was a curiously uneven workman. There
appear to have been whole regions of his personality
that remained unsensitized. Part of him seems to have
gone out toward a new free Russian music; part of
him seems to have been satisfied with the style of the
Italian operas in vogue in Russia during his youth. He
who in the dances from " Prince Igor " wrote some of
the most pungent, supple, wild of music could also
write airs sweetly Italian and conventional. The most
free and ruddy and brave of his pages are juxtaposed
with some of the most soft and timid. In his opera a
recitative of clear, passionate accent serves to intro-
duce a pretty cavatina; " Prince Igor's " magnificent
scene, so original and contained and vigorous, is fol-
lowed by a cloying duet worthy of a Tchaikowsky
opera. The adagio of the B -minor Symphony, lovely as
it is, has not quite the solidity and weight of the other
movements. The happy, popular and brilliantly origi-
nal themes and ideas of the first quartet are organized
with a distinct unskilfulness, while the artistic value
of the second is seriously damaged by the cheapness
of its cavatina. His workmanship continually reminds
one that Borodin was unable to devote himself en-
tirely to composition; that he could come to his writing

158 Borodin

table only at intervals, only in hours of recreation; and
that the government of the Tsar left him to support
himself by instructing in chemistry in the College of
Medicine and Surgery in Moscow, and kept him always
something of an amateur. Borodin the composer is
after all only the composer of a few fragments.

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

Rimsky-Korsakoff

The music of Rimsky-Korsakoff is like one of the
books, full of gay pictures, which are given to children.
It is perhaps the most brilliant of them all, a picture-
book illuminated in crude and joyous colors — bright
reds, apple greens, golden oranges and yellows — and
executed with genuine verve and fantasy. The Sla-
vonic and Oriental legends and fairy tales are illus-
trated astonishingly, with a certain humor in the mat-
ter-of-fact notation of grotesque and miraculous events.
The personages in the pictures are arrayed in bizarre
and shimmering costumes, delightfully inaccurate; and
if they represent kings and queens, are set in the midst
of a fabulous pomp and glitter, and wear crowns in-
crusted with large and impossible stones. Framing
the illustrations are border-fancies of sunflowers and
golden cocks and wondrous springtime birds, fash-
ioned boisterously and humorously in the manner of
Russian peasant art. Indeed, the book is executed
so charmingly that the parents find it as amusing as
do the children.

More than the loveliest, the gleefullest, of picture-
books the music is not. One must not go to Rimsky-
Korsakoff for works of another character. For, at
heart, he ignored the larger sort of speech, and was

159

l6o Rimsky-Korsakoff

content to have his music picturesque and colorful.
The childish, absurd Tsar in " Le Coq d'or," who de-
sires only to lie abed all day, eat delicate food, and
listen to the fairy tales of his nurse, is, after all, some-
thing of a portrait of the composer. For all its gay
and opulent exterior, its pricking orchestral timbres,
his work is curiously objective and crystallized, as
though the need that brought it forth had been small
and readily satisfied. None of Rimsky's scores is really
lyrical, deeply moving. The music of " Tsar Saltan,"
for instance, for all its evocations of magical cities
and wonder-towers and faery splendor, impresses one
as little more than theatrical scenery of a high decora-
tiveness. It sets us lolling in a sort of orchestra-stall,
wakes in us the mood in which we applaud amiably
the dexterity of the stage-decorator. How quickly the
aerial tapestry woven by the orchestra of ^' Le Coq
d'or " wears thin! How quickly the subtle browns
and saffrons and vermilions fade! How pretty and
tame beside that of Borodin, beside that of the
" Persian Dances " of Moussorgsky, beside that of
Balakirew, even Rimsky's Orientalism appears!
None of his music communicates an experience
really high, really poetic. There is no page of
his that reveals him straining to formulate such a
one.

His composition is never more than a graceful
arrangement of surfaces, the cunning and pleasing

Rimsky-Korsakoff i6l

presentation of matter chosen for its exotic rhythms
and shapes, its Oriental and peasant tang, its pungency.
The form is ever a thing of two dimensions. The musi-
cal ideas are passed through the dye-vats of various
timbres and tonalities, made to undergo a series of
interesting deformations, are contrasted, superficially,
with other ideas after the possibilities of technical vari-
ations have been exhausted. There is no actual devel-
opment in the sense of volumnear increase. In
" Scheherazade," for instance, the climaxes are purely
voluntary, are nothing other than the arbitrary thick-
ening and distention of certain ideas. And it is only
the spiciness of the thematic material, the nimbleness
and suavity of the composition, and, chiefly, the pi-
quancy of the orchestral speech, that saves the music
of Rimsky-Korsakoff from utter brittleness, and gives
it a certain limited beauty.

It is just this essential superficiality which makes
the place of the music in the history of Russian art
so ambiguous. Intentionally, and to a certain extent,
Rimsky^s work is autochthonous. He was one of
those composers who, in the middle of the last century,
felt descend upon them the need of speaking their
own tongue and gave themselves heartily to the labor
of discovering a music entirely Russian. His material,
at its best, approximates the idiom of the Russian folk-
song, or communicates certain qualities — an Oriental
sweetness, a barbaric lassitude and abandon — ad-

1 62 Rimsky-Korsakoff

mittedly racial. His music is full of elements — wild
and headlong rhythms, exotic modes — abstracted from
the popular and liturgical chants or deftly molded upon
them. For there was always within him the idea of
creating an art, particularly an operatic art, that would
be as Russian as Wagner's, for instance, is German.
The texts of his operas are adopted from Russian his-
tory and folklore, and he continually attempted to find
a musical idiom with the accent of the old Slavonic
chroncles and fairy tales. Certain of his works, par-
ticularly " Le Coq d'or," are deliberately an imitation
of the childish and fabulous inventions of the peasant
artists. And certainly none of the other members of
the nationalist group associated with Rimsky-Korsakoff
— not Moussorgsky, for all his emotional profundity;
nor Borodin, for all his sumptuous imagination — had
so firm an intellectual grasp of the common problem,
nor was technically so well equipped to solve it. None
of them, for instance, had as wide an acquaintance with
the folk-song, the touchstone of their labors. For
Rimsky-Korsakoff was something of a philosophical
authority on the music of the many peoples of the
Empire, made collections of chants, and could draw
on this fund for his work. Nor did any of the others
possess his technical facility. Moussorgsky, for in-
stance, had to discover the art of music painfully with
each step of composition, and orchestrated faultily all
his life, while Rimsky-Korsakoff had a natural sense

Rimsky-Korsakoff 163

of the orchestra, wrote treatises on the science of in-
strumentation and on the science of harmony, and de-
veloped into something of a doctor of music. Indeed,
when finally there devolved upon him, as general lega-
tee of the nationalist school, the task of correcting and
editing the works of Borodin and Dargomijsky and
Moussorgsky, he brought to his labor an eruditeness
that bordered dangerously on pedantry. Nor was his
learning only musical. He had a great knowledge of
the art and customs that had existed in Russia be-
fore the influences of western Europe repressed them,
of the dances and rites and sun worship that survived,
despite Christianity, as popular and rustic games. And
he could press them into service in his search for a
national expression. Like the Sultana in his symphonic
poem, he " drew on the poets for their verses, on the
folk-songs for their words, and intermingled tales and
adventures one with another."

Yet there is no score of Rimsky-Korsakoff 's, no one
of his fifteen operas and dozen symphonic works, which
has, in all its mass, the living virtue that informs a
single page of " Boris Godounow," the virtue of a
thing that satisfies the very needs of life and brings to
a race release and formulation of its speech. There is
no score of his, for all the tang and luxuriousness of
his orchestration, for all the incrustation of bright,
strange stones on the matter of his operas, that has
the deep, glowing color of certain passages of Boro-

164 Rimsky-Korsakoff

din's work, with their magical evocations of terrestrial
Asia and feudal Muscovy, their

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

For he was in no sense as nobly human of stature,
as deeply aware of the life about him, as Moussorgsky.
Nor did he feel within himself Borodin's rich and vivid
sense of the past. Cui was right when he accused
Rimsky of wanting " nerve and passionate impulse."
He was, after all, temperamentally chilly. " The
people are the creators," Glinka had told the young na-
tionalist composers, ^' you are but the arrangers."
It was precisely the vital and direct contact with the
source of all creative work that Rimsky-Korsakoff
lacked. There is a fault of instinct in men like him,
who can feel their race and their environment only
through the conscious mind. Just what in Rimsky's
education produced his intellectualism, we do not know.
Certainly it was nothing extraordinary, for society pro-
duces innumerable artists like him, who are fundamen-
tally incapable of becoming the instrument every cre-
ative being is, and of discovering through themselves
the consciousness of their fellows. Whatever its cause,
there is in such men a fear of the unsealing of the
unconscious mind, the depository of all actual and vital
sensations, which no effort of their own can overcome.
It is for that reason that they have so gigantic and

Rimsky-Korsakoff 165

unshakable a confidence in all purely conscious proc-
esses of creation, particularly in the incorporation of
a priori theories. So it was with Rimsky. There is
patent in all his work a vast love of erudition and a
vast faith in its efficacy. He is always attempting to
incarnate in the flesh of his music law abstracted
from classical works. Even Tchaikowsky, who was a
good deal of an intellectualist himself, and dubbed
" perfect," in a characteristically servile letter, every
one of the thirty practice fugues that Rimsky com-
posed in the course of a single month, complained that
the latter " worshiped technique " and that his work
was " full of contrapuntal tricks and all the signs of
a sterile pedantry." It was not that Rimsky was
pedantic from choice, out of a wilful perversity. His
obsession with intellectual formulas was after all the
result of a fear of opening the dark sluices through
which surge the rhythms of life.

If Rimsky-Korsakoff was not absolutely sterile, it
was because his intellectual quality itself was vivacious
and brilliant. Though he remained ever a stranger to
Russia and his fellows, as he did to himself, he became
the most observant of travelers. Though as the for-
eigner he perceived only the superficial and picturesque
elements of the life of the land — its Orientalism, its
barbaric coloring — and found his happiest expression
in a fantasy after the " Thousand Nights and a Night,"
he noted his impressions skilfully and vividly, with an

1 66 Rimsky-Korsakoff

almost virtuosic sense of his material. If he could not
paint the spring in music, he could at least embroider
the score of '' Sniegourochka " delightfully with bird-
calls and all manner of vernal fancies. If he could
not recreate the spirit of peasant art, he could at least,
as in " Le Coq d'or," imitate it so tastefully that, lis-
tening to the music, we seem to have before us one
of the pictures beloved by the Russian folk — a picture
with bright and joyous dabs of color, with clumsy
but gleeful depictions of battles and cavalcades and
festivities and banqueting tables loaded with fruits,
meats and flagons. It is indeed curious, and not a little
pathetic, to observe how keen Rimsky-Korsakoff's in-
telligence ever was. The satirization of the demoniacal
women of " Parsifal " and '' Salome " in the figure and
motifs of the Princess of Samarcand is deliciously light
and witty. Indeed, not only " Le Coq d'or," but most
of his work reveals his dry, real sense of humor. And
how often does he not point the direction in which
Russian music has subsequently advanced! His latter
style, with its mottled chromatic and Oriental modes,
its curious and bewildering intervals, is the veritable
link between the music of the older Russian group to
which he, roughly, belongs and that of the younger,
newer men, of Strawinsky in particular. Indeed, the
works of Strawinsky reveal incessantly how much the
master taught the pupil.

But if they reveal Rimsky's keenness, they reveal

Rimsky-Korsakoff 167

his limitations as well. They bring into sharpest re-
lief the difference between poetic and superficial ex-
pressiveness. For Strawinsky has in many instances
successfully handled materials which Rimsky not quite
satisfactorily employed. The former's early works, in
particular '' L'Oiseau de feu," and the first act of
the opera " Le Rossignol," related to Rimsky's in style
as they are, have yet a faery and wonder and flittergold
that the master never succeeded in attaining. The
music of " L'Oiseau de feu " is really a fantastic
dream-bird. " Petrouchka " has a brilHance and vivac-
ity and madness that makes Rimsky's scenes from pop-
ular life, his utilizations of vulgar tunes and dances
scarcely comparable to it. Nowhere in any of Rim-
sky's reconstructions of ethnological dances and rites,
neither in " Mlada " nor in " Sniegourochka," is
there anything at all comparable to the naked power
manifest in " Le Sacre du printemps." But it is par-
ticularly in his science of orchestration, the sense of
the instruments that makes him appear to defer to
them rather than to impose his will on them, that
Strawinsky has achieved the thing that his teacher
failed of achieving. For Rimsky, despite all his re-
markable sense of the chemistry of timbres, despite
his fine intention to develop further the science which
Berlioz brought so far, was prevented from minting
a really new significant orchestral speech through the
poverty of his invention. His orchestration is full of

i68 Rimsky-Korsakoff

tricks and mannerisms that pall. One hears the whis-
tling parabolas of the flutes and clarinets of " Schehe-
razade " in " Mlada," in " Sadko," in a half-dozen
works. The orchestra that paints the night-sky of
**' Mlada " rolls dangerously like that which paints the
sea of " Scheherazade " and " Tsar Saltan." The fa-
mous " Chanson indou " seems to float vaguely through
half his Oriental evocations. But the originality and
fecundity and inventiveness that he lacked, Strawinsky
to great degree possesses. And so it was given to the
pupil to enter the chamber outside of which the master
stood all his life, and could not enter, and saw only
by peering furtively through the chinks of the door.

Rachmaninoff

It was in an interview given at the beginning of his
recent American tour that M. Sergei Rachmaninoff
styled himself a '' musical evolutionist." The phrase,
doubtless uttered half in jest, is scarcely nice. It is
one of those terms that are so loose that they are
well-nigh meaningless. Nevertheless, there was sig-
nificance in M. Rachmaninoff's use of it. For he em-
ployed it as an apology for his work. His music is
evidently wanting in boldness. On the whole it is
cautious and traditional. Even those who are not pro-
fessionally on the side of the musical anarchs find it
somewhat unventuresome, too smooth and soft and
elegantly elegiac, too dull. And in substituting for
revolutionism a formula for musical progress less sug-
gestive of violent change, more suggestive of a process
like the tranquil, gradual and orderly unfolding of bud
into blossom, was not M. Rachmaninoff very lightly
and cleverly discrediting the apparently revolutionary
work of certain of his fellows, and seeking to reveal a
hitherto unsuspected solidity in his own?

However, it is questionable whether he was success-
ful, whether the implications of the phrase do quite
manage to manceuver his work into genuine importance.
No doubt, music does not invariably reform itself

169

lyo Rachmaninoff

through the process we call revolutionary. It is a
commonplace that there have been many composers
of primary rank who have originated no new syntax,
no new system of chords and key-relationships. It is
said that J. S. Bach himself did not invent a single
harmony. There have been composers of genius who
have done little to enlarge the physical boundaries
of their art, have accepted the grammar of music from
others, and have rounded an epoch instead of initiat-
ing a new one. Nevertheless, M. Rachmaninoff can-
not quite be included in their company. There is as
great a difference between him and composers of this
somewhat conservative type as there is between him
and the radical sort. For though the recomposition
of music does not necessarily consist in the establish-
ment of a new system, and can be fairly complete
without it, it does consist in the impregnation of tone
with new character and virtue.

Doubtless, M. Rachmaninoff is an accomplished and
charming workman. He is almost uniformly suave
and dexterous. The instances when he writes badly
are not frequent. The C-sharp minor Prelude is, after
all, something of a sport. No doubt, there are times, as
in so many of the passages of the new version of his
first piano concerto, when he seeks to dazzle with the
opulence and clangor and glare of tones. However,
as a rule, he writes politely. If the second concerto
is a trifle too soft and elegiac and sweet, a little too

Rachmaninoif 171

much like a mournful banqueting on jam and honey,
it is still most deftly and ingratiatingly made. On the
whole, even though his music touches us only super-
ficially it rarely fails to awaken some gratitude for its
elegance. But there is an essential that his music
wants. It wants the imprint of a decided and impor-
tant individuality. In all the elaborate score of '' The
Island of the Dead/^ in the very one of M. Rachmani-
noff's works that is generally deemed his best, there are
few accents that are either very large or very poign-
ant or very noble. The music lacks distinction, lacks
vitality. The style is strangely soft and unrefreshing.
Emotion is communicated, no doubt. But it is emo-
tion of a second or even third order. Nor is the music
of M. Rachmaninoff ever quite completely new-minted.
Has it a melodic line quite properly its own? One
doubts it. Many of the melodies of M. Rachmaninoff
have a Mendelssohnian cast, for all their Russian
sheen. Others are of the sort of sweet, spiritless silken
tune generally characteristic of the Russian salon
school. Nor can one discover in this music a distinctly
original sense of either rhythm of harmony or tone-
color. The E-minor Symphony, for all its competence
and smoothness, is full of the color and quality and
atmosphere of Tchaikowsky. It is Tchaikowsky with-
out the hysteria, perhaps, but also without the energy.
In all the music of M. Rachmaninoff there is some-
thing strangely twice-told. From it there flows the

172 Rachmaninoif

sadness distilled by all things that are a little
useless.

There are to be found in every picture gallery can-
vases attributed, not to any single painter, but to an
atelier, to the school of some great master. One finds
charming pieces among them. Nor are they invariably
the work of pupils who painted under the direction of
some famous man. Quite as often they are the handi-
work of artists who appeared independent enough to
their patrons and to themselves. Their names and
their persons were familiar to those who ordered pic-
tures from them. It is only that in the course of time
their names have come to be forgotten. For there is
in their canvases little trace of the substance that
causes people to cherish an individuality, and makes
a name to be remembered. Other personalities have
transpired through their brush-strokes, and have made
it evident that behind the man who held the brush
in his hand there was another who directed the strokes
— the man upon whom the artist had modeled him-
self, the personality he preferred to his own. It is
this reflectiveness that has caused the attribution of
the work to ateliers.

And had M. Rachmaninoff instead of being a musi-
cian been a painter, would not a like destiny await
his compositions? For do they not proceed from the
point of departure of the entire brilliant school of
piano-compositions? Are they not a sort of throw-

Rachmaninoff 173

back to the salon school, the school of velocity, of
effect, of whatever Rubinstein and Liszt could de-
sire? Are not the piano-pieces of M. Rachmaninoff
the result of a relationship to the instrument that is
fast becoming outmoded? There was some slight
justification for the pompous and empty work of his
models. The concerti, the often flashy and tinselly
pianoforte compositions of Liszt and Rubinstein were
the immediate and surface result of that deeper sense
of the instrument which arrived during the nineteenth
century, and intoxicated folk with the piano timbres,
and made them eager to hear its many voices in no
matter how crude a form. A whole school of facile
virtuosi arose in response to the demand. Since then,
however, we have gotten a subtler sense of the in-
strument. We no longer require so insensitive a dis-
play. And together with those rather gross piano-
works the piece par excellence characteristic of the
period, the brilliant piano-concerto with its prancing
instrument embedded in the pomp and clangor and
ululation of the band, has lost in favor steadily. The
modern men no longer write concerti. When they
introduce a pianoforte into the orchestra, they either,
like Brahms, treat it as the premier instrument, and
write symphonies, or, like Scriabine and Strawinsky,
reduce it to the common level. But M. Rachmaninoff
has not participated in this change of attitude. He
is still content with music that toys with the piano-

174 Rachmaninoff

forte. And he writes concert! of the old type. He
writes pieces full of the old astounding musical dis-
location. Phrases of an apparent intensity and lyri-
cism are negated by frivolous and tinkling passage-
work. Take away the sound and fury signifying
nothing from the third concerto, and what is left?
There was a day, perhaps, when such work served.
But another has succeeded to it. And so M. Rachmani-
noff comes amongst us like a very charming and
amiable ghost.

For that, however, let us not fail to be duly grate-
ful. Let us not fail to give thanks for the fact that
setting forever is the conception of music as an after-
dinner cordial, a box of assorted bonbons, bric-a-brac,
a titillation, a tepid bath, a performance that amuses
and caresses and whiles away a half-hour, an enchant-
ment for boarding-school misses, an opportunity for
virtuosi to glorify themselves.

One of the curious things about M. Rachmaninoff's
season is the fact that it has not only brought him
into prominence amongst us, but that it has brought
into relief other composers through him. It has
brought into relief the entire group of Russian musi-
cians to which he belongs. It has evaluated the pre-
tensions of the two conflicting schools of Russian
music nicely. The school of which M. Rachmaninoff
is perhaps the chief living representative, and which
was represented at various times by Rubinstein and

Rachmaninoff 175

Tchaikowsky and Arensky, is usually dubbed ^' uni-
versal " by its partisans. It is supposed to have its
traditions in general European 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 the opposing faction, the men who accepted only
the Russian folk-song as their touchstone, and sought
in their work to find a modern equivalent for it, the
music of this school was alien and sophisticated, as
sophisticated as the pseudo-French culture of the
Petrograd drawing-rooms. For them, the music of
Tchaikowsky, even, was the result of the manipulation
of themes of Slavic color according to formulas ab-
stracted from classical music. Without regard, how-
ever, for any question of musical theory; apart from
all question of the value for us of the science of the
classical masters, one finds oneself of this opinion.
For the music brought forward by the visit of the
composer who is at present in this country as envoy
of his school, convinces us that the work of the men
of his party, elegant and brilliant as it often is, is
the work of men essentially unresponsive to the ap-
peal of their compatriots. For them, as it is for
every Russian musician, Russia was without their win-
dows, appealing dumbly for expression of its wild, un-
governed energy, its misery, its rich and childish laugh-
ter, its deep, great Christianity. It wanted a music
that would have the accents of its rude, large-hearted

176 Rachmaninoff

speech, and that would, like its speech, express its
essential reactions, its consciousness. And some men
there were, Moussorgsky and Borodin, who were quick
enough of imagination to become the instruments of
their folk and respond to its need. And so, when we
would hear Russian speech, we go to them as we go
to Dostoievsky and to Tolstoy. It is in " Boris " and
^^ Prince Igor " as richly as it is in any work. But the
men of the other school did not hear the appeal. They
sat in their luxurious and Parisian houses behind closed
windows.

Scriabine

There are solemn and gorgeous pages in the sym-
phonic poems of Scriabine. And yet, despite their
effulgence, their manifold splendors, their hieratic ges-
tures, these works are not his most individual and
significant. Save only the lambent '' Prometheus,"
they each reveal to some degree the influence of Wag-
ner. The " Idyl " of the Second Symphony, for in-
stance, is dangerously close to the ^' Waldweben " in
" Siegfried," although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest
is rather more the perfumed and rose-lit woodland,
Wagner's the fresh primeval wilderness. The " Poeme
de Textase," with its oceanic tides of voluptuously en-
tangled bodies, is a sort of Tannhauser " Bacchanale "
modernized, enlarged, and intensely sharpened. For,
in spite of the fact that at moments he handled it
with rare sympathy, the orchestra was not his proper
medium. The piano was his instrument. It is only
in composition for that medium that he expressed
indelibly his exquisite, luminously poetic, almost dis-
quieting temper, and definitely recorded himself.

There have been few composers more finely con-
scious of the piano. There have been few who have
more fully plumbed its resources, few who have held
it in greater reverence, few who have hearkened more

177

178 Scriabine

solicitously to its voice that is so different from the
voices of other instruments. Of all piano music, only
that of Debussy and Ravel seems as thoroughly
steeped in the essential color of the medium, seems to
lie as completely in the black and white keys, part
of them, not imposed on them. And Scriabine, the
barbarian and romanticist, is even more free of the
hues of the keyboard than they, the Latins, the clas-
sicists. His works make one keenly aware of the
rhythmical, the formalistic limitations of Chopin's
piano pieces, of the steeliness of much of Brahms', of
the shallow brilliancy, the theatricality, of Liszt's.
They even make us feel at moments as though in them
had been realized the definitive pianistic style, that
the hour of transition to the new keyboard of quarter
tones was nigh. For Scriabine appears to have wak-
ened in the piano all its latent animality. Under his
touch it loses its old mechanical 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 had set with mysterious strength toward the in-
strument, till it became for him an eternally fresh
and marvelous experience, till between him and the
inanimate thing there came to be an interchange of
life. There is the rarest of science in his style, es-
pecially in that of his last period, when his own in-
dividuality broke so marvelously into flower. He wrote
for it as one of two persons who had shared life to-

Scriabine 179

gether might address the other, well aware with what
complexity and profundity a smile, a gesture, a brief
phrase, would reverberate. No one has caressed it
more lightly, more tenderly, more voluptuously. No
one has made of the piano-trill, for instance, more
luminous and quivering a thing. And because he was
so sensitive to his medium, the medium lured from out
him his creative strength.

He grew to his high poetic stature from an elegant
and aristocratic craftsman 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 us through
Chopin, Wagner, Liszt and Strauss; and develops al-
most logically out of it. And in the compositions of
his first period, the period that ends, roughly, with
the piano concerto, the allegiance is marked, the dis-
cipleship undeniable. The influence of Chopin is
ubiquitous. Scriabine writes mazurkas, preludes,
etudes, nocturnes and waltzes in his master's cool, po-
lite, fastidious general manner. These pieces, too,
might seem to have been written in order to be played
in noble salons lit by massive candelabra, to countesses
with bare shoulders. The twenty-four preludes Opus
II, for instance, are full of Chopinesque turns, of Cho-
pinesque morbidezza, of Chopinesque melodies. The
harmonic scheme rarely transgresses the limits which
Chopin set himself. The pieces are obviously the work
of one who in the course of concert-playing has come

8o Scriahine

to discover the finesses of the Pole's workmanship.
And yet, Cesar Cui's caustic description of the preludes
as " Bits filched from Chopin's trousseau," is eminently
unjust. For even in those days, when Scriabine was
a member of the Russian salon school, there were at-
tractive original elements in his compositions. There
is real poetry and freshness in these soft-colored pieces.
The treatment of the instrument is bold, and, at mo-
ments, more satisfactory than Chopin's. Scriabine, for
instance, gives the left hand a greater independence
and significance than does as a rule his master. Nor
does he indulge in the repetitions and recapitulations
that mar so many of the latter's works. His sense of
form is already alert. And through the silken melodic
line, the sweet, rich harmonies, there already makes
itself felt something that is to Chopin's spirit as Rus-
sian iron is to Polish silver.

It is perhaps only in the compositions subsequent to
Opus 50 that Scriabine emerges in the fullness of his
stature. For it is only in them that he finally aban-
doned the major-minor system to which he had hitherto
adhered, and substituted for it the other that per-
mitted his exquisite delicious sense of pianistic color,
his infinitely delicate gift of melody, his gorgeous, far-
spreading harmonic feeling, free play. And it is only
in these later pieces that he achieved the perfection
of form, particularly of the sonata form, of which the
Ninth Sonata is the magistral example, and which

Scriabine i8l

makes his craft comparable to Bach's in its mastery
of a medium, and enables one to mention the " Chro-
matic Fantasy and Fugue " and the Ninth Sonata justly
in a single breath. And yet, the compositions of the
middle period, the one that follows immediately the
early, immature, Chopinesque period, are scarcely less
rich and refined, scarcely less important. No doubt
the influence of Scriabine's masters, though consider-
ably on the wane, is still evident. The " Poeme sata-
nique " refines on Liszt. The Third Sonata, despite its
lambent andante, is patently the work of one who has
studied his Liszt and loves his Chopin. And yet, these
works are characteristically male and raging and proud.
And in all the works of this period there appears some-
thing new and magnificent that has scarcely before
informed piano music. There is a truly Russian depth
and vehemence and largeness in this now languid, now
mystical, now leonine music, that lifts it entirely out
of the company of the works of the Petrograd salon
school into that of those composers who made orchestra
and opera speak in the national tongue. The rhythms
are joyously, barbarically, at times almost frenetically,
free. They are finely various and depart almost en-
tirely from the one-two, one-two, the one-two-three,
one-two-three that makes monotonous so much of
Chopin. At moments, the tones of the piano march
with some of the now festive, now majestic, now
solemn, movement of the orchestral processionals of a

182 Scriahine

Moussorgsky and a Borodin. And one has the sense
of having encountered only in sumptuous Eastern
stuffs, in silken carpets and golden mosaics, or in the
orchestral faery of some of the Russian composers, in
the orchestral chemistry of, say, a Rimsky-Korsakoff,
such brimming, delicious colors. Nevertheless, the
voluptuousness and vehemence are held in fastidious
restraint. Scriabine is always the fine gentleman, in-
tolerant, for all the splendor of his style, of any excess,
of any exaggeration, of any breach of taste. And
throughout the work, there is evidence of the steady,
restless bourgeoning of the exquisite, disquieting, al-
most Chinese delicacy which in the work of the last
period attains its marvelous efflorescence.

These final works, these last sonatas and poems and
preludes of Scriabine are but the essentialization of
the personal traits adumbrated by the compositions of
the earlier periods. It is as if in adopting the system
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, he had managed to rid him-
self of all the influence of the classic masters, to give
every note that he employs an intense, poignant, new
value, and through that revolution to achieve form
comparable to the most eminent. His fantasy ranges
over the keyboard with complete freedom; he creates
new rhythms, new combinations of tones that cause the
hands of the performer to become possessed of a new

Scriabine 183

and curious intelligence, to make significant gestures,
and to move with a delightful life. And these latter
compositions are entirely structure, entirely bone.
There is a complete 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 the quavering first few bars. The vast resonant
peroration only gathers into a single, furious, tragic
pronouncement the material deployed in the body of
the work. Scarcely ever has the binary form, the
combat between two contradictory themes, been more
essentialized. Scarcely ever has the prelude-form been
reduced to simpler terms than in the preludes of Scria-
bine. These works are indeed radical. For they give
us a fresh glimpse 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 miracle of com-
munication through material form. A few sounds,
broken and elusive, are struck out of an instrument,
die away again. And yet, through those vibrations,
life for an instant is made incandescent. It is as
though much that has hitherto been shy and lonely
experience has undergone a sudden change into some-
thing clarified and universal. It is as though per-
former and auditor have themselves been transformed
into more sensitive instruments, and prepared to par-

184 Scriabine

ticipate more graciously in the common experience.
It is as though in each one the abihty to feel beauty
has been quickened, that each for an instant becomes
the man who has never before seen the spring come
over the land, and who, glancing upward, for the first
time beholds an apple-bough flowering against the blue.
And Scriabine fills one with the need of making won-
derful and winged gestures. It is as if for instants
he transforms one into strange and radiant and ecstatic
beings, into new and wonderful things.

For this music is full of the wizardry of perhaps
the most exquisite sensibility that has for a long while
disclosed itself in music. Perhaps only in the Far
East, perhaps only among the Chinese, have more
delicious and dainty and ecstatic tempers uttered
themselves in music. Beside this man, with his music
that is like clustering flowers breaking suddenly from
the cool and shadowy earth, or like the beating of
luminous wings in the infinite azure, or like the whis-
pers of one sinking from the world in mortal illness,
Debussy, even, seems cool, silvered by the fine tem-
perance of France. For Scriabine must have suffered
an almost inordinate subjugation to the manifestations
of beauty, must have been consumed with a passion
for communicating his burningly poignant adventures.
There are moments when he seems scarcely able to
speak, so intense, so enrapturing, is his voluptuous
sensation. Indeed, the sensuality is at times so in-

Scriabine 185

tensely communicated that it almost excites pain as
well as pleasure. If there is any music that seems
to hover on the borderland between ecstasy and suffer-
ing, it is this. One shrinks from it as from some too
poignant revelation. One cannot breathe for long in
this ether. Small wonder that Scriabine sought all
his life to flee into states of transport, to invent a re-
ligion of ecstasy. For one weighed with the terrible
burden of so vibrant a sensibility, there could be no
other means of existence.

And the gesture of flight is present throughout his
music. Throughout it, one hears the beating of wings.
Sometimes, it is the light flutter of glistening ephemer-
idae that wheel and skim delightfully through the lim-
pid azure. Sometimes it is the passionate fanning of
wings preparing themselves for swift sharp ascents.
Sometimes, it is the drooping of pinions that sink
brokenly. For all these pieces are " Poemes ailes,"
flights toward some island of the blest. They are all
aspirations " vers la flamme," toward the spiritual fire
of joy, toward the paradise of divine pleasure and
divine activity. The Fifth Sonata is like the mar-
shaling of forces, the mighty spring of some radiant
flyer launching himself into the empyrean. White
gleaming pinions wheel and hover in the godlike close
of the " Poeme divine." Impotent caged wings poise
themselves for flight in the mystic Seventh Sonata,
beat for an instant, are ominously still. Sometimes,

1 86 Scriabine

as in the Eighth Sonata, Scriabine is like a gorgeous
tropical bird preening himself in the quivering river
light. Sometimes he is a seraphic creature outspread-
ing his mighty pinions to greet some tremendous spirit
sunrise. And in those last, bleeding, agonizing pre-
ludes, there is still the breath of flight. But this
time it is another motion. Is it '^ the wind of
death's imperishable wing "? Is it the blind hov-
ering of the spirit that has quit its earthly habi-
tation in the moment of dissolution? One cannot
tell.

And it was the flight of ecstasy that he sought to
achieve in his symphonic poems. He had made for
himself a curious personal religion, a bizarre mixture of
theosophy and neoplatonism and Bergsonian philoso-
phy, a faith that prescribed transport; and these works
were in part conceived as rituals. They were planned
as ceremonies of elevation and deification by ecstasy,
in which performers and auditors engaged as active
and passive celebrants. Together they were to ascend
from plane to plane of delight, experiencing divine
struggle and divine bliss and divine creativity. The
music was to call the soul through the gate of the
sense of hearing, to lead it, slowly, hieratically, up
through circle after circle of heaven, until the mystical
gongs boomed and the mass emotion reached the
Father of Souls, and was become God. With Jules
Romains, Scriabine would have cried to his audiences:

Scriahine 1 87

" 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;
lis garderont au front comme une croix de cendre
Le vestige du dieu que tu es maintenant! "

In " Prometheus " he introduces a clavier a lumiere
into his orchestra, vainly hoping to induce the ecstasy
through color as well as sound, and after his death
there was found among his papers a sketch for a " Hys-
teria '' 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 him to achieve this
work. The theosophic programs of his orchestral
works are, after all, innocuous. Much of the half-mys-
tical, half-sensual coloration of his orchestra is due
them. And had the score of the " Hysteria " been
as much an improvement over that of " Prometheus "
as " Prometheus " is over the other symphonic works,
Scriabine might indeed have proved himself as eminent
a writer for the orchestra as for the piano.

It is indeed likely that to-morrow the world will
find in his piano-works its new Chopin, that Scriabine
will shortly be given the place once occupied by the
other. For not only is he in many ways the artistic
superior of the man who once was his master. He is,

88 Scriabine

as well, one of the beings in which the age that is
slowly expiring about us became conscious and artic-
ulate. Russia bore him, it is true, elemented him,
gave him her childlike tenderness and barbaric rich-
ness and mystic light. But in developing out of the
Russian '' universal " school into perfect liberty and
individuality, he became indeed a universal expression,
the first really produced by the group. He became,
like the intensely '' national " Strawinsky, one of those
men into whom an age enters. He is symbolic of his
time. He seems to have felt his age's life in its in-
tensest form. The hour that created him was an hour
in which the power of feeling had waxed inordinately,
almost to the point of hampering action, when an
Asiatic delicacy had begun to be manifest in Western
character, when the fusion of Europe and Asia was
commencing to make itself felt. And in Scriabine, that
new intensity of sensation attained something near to
heroic supernatural stature. What was beautiful and
sick in his age entered into his art. Through it, we
learn, 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 Schick-
sal," Thomas Mann once wrote. For Scriabine, the
awakening of that aerial palpitant sensibility was such.
It devoured him like a fire. One shudders as well
as marvels at the destiny of one who came to feel
life as it is felt in those last quivering poems — " Guir-

Scriabine 189

landes," " Flammes sombres," he entitles them, — or in
the mysterious Tenth Sonata, that glows with the fever-
ish light of the dream, or in those last haunted pre-
ludes. Existence for the man who could write such
music, in which unearthly rapture contrasts with un-
earthly suffering, must have been a sort of exquisite
martyrdom. The man must have been indeed a nerve
exposed. And, like a fragile thing suddenly ignited,
he flared up, fiercely, magnificently, and went out.

Strawinsky

The new steel organs of man have begotten their
music in " Le Sacre du printemps." For with Stra-
winsky, the rhythms of machinery enter musical art.
With this his magistral work a new chapter of music
commences, the spiritualization of the new body of
man is manifest. Through Debussy, music had liqui-
fied, become opalescent and impalpable and fluent. It
had become, because of his sense, his generation's
sense, of the infirmity of things, a sort of symbol of
the eternal flux, the eternal momentariness. It had
come to body forth all that merges and changes and
disappears, to mirror the incessant departures and eva-
nescences 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 of the world. But through Stra-
winsky, there has come to be a music stylistically well-
nigh the reverse of that of the impressionists. Through
him, music has become again cubical, lapidary, mas-
sive, mechanistic. Scintillation is gone out of it. The
delicate, sinuous melodic line, the glamorous sheeny
harmonies, are gone out of it. The elegance of De-
bussy, the golden sensuality, the quiet, classic touch,

191

192 Straw ins ky

are flown. Instead, there are come to be great, weighty,
metallic masses, molten piles and sheets of steel and
iron, shining adamantine bulks. Contours are become
grim, severe, angular. Melodies are sharp, rigid,
asymmetrical. Chords are uncouth, square clusters of
notes, stout and solid as the pillars that support roofs,
heavy as the thuds of triphammers. Above all, there
is rhythm, rhythm rectangular and sheer and emphatic,
rhythm that lunges and beats and reiterates and dances
with all the steely perfect tirelessness of the machine,
shoots out and draws back, shoots upward and shoots
down, with the inhuman motion of titanic arms of
steel. Indeed, the change is as radical, as complete,
as though in the midst of moonlit noble gardens a giant
machine had arisen swiftly from the ground and in-
undated the night with electrical glare and set its
metal thews and organs and joints relentlessly whir-
ring, relentlessly functioning.

And yet, the two styles, Debussy's and Strawinsky's,
are related. Indeed, they are complementary. They
are the reactions to the same stimulus of two funda-
mentally different t3^es of mind. No doubt, between
the two men there exist differences besides those of
their general fashions of thinking. The temper of De-
bussy was profoundly sensuous and aristocratic and
contained. That of Strawinsky is nervous and ironic
and violent. The one man issued from an unbroken
tradition, was produced by generations and generations

Strawinsky 193

of gentlemen. The other is one of those beings who
seem to have been called into existence solely by the
modern way of life, by express trains and ocean grey-
hounds, by the shrinkage of continents and the vibra-
tion of the twentieth-century world. But the chief
difference, the difference that made " Le Sacre du
printemps " almost antithetical to '' Pelleas et Meli-
sande," is essentially the divergence between two car-
dinal manners of apprehending life. Debussy, on the
one hand, seems to be of the sort of men in whom the
center of conscience is, figuratively, sunken; one of
those who have within themselves some immobility
that makes the people and the things about them ap-
pear fleeting and unreal. For such, the world is a far
distant thing, lying out on the rims of consciousness,
delicate and impermanent as sunset hues or the lights
and gestures of the dream. The music of Debussy is
the magistral and classic picture of this distant and
glamorous procession, this illusory and fantastical and
transparent show, this thing that changes from mo-
ment to moment and is never twice the same, and
flows away from us so quickly. But Strawinsky, on
the other hand, is in the very midst of the thing so
distant from the other man. For him, the material
world is very real, sharp, immediate. He loves it,
enjoys it, is excited by its many forms. He is vividly
responsive to its traffic. Things make an immediate
and biting impression on him, stimulate in him pleas-

194 Strawinsky

ure and pain. He feels their edge and knows it hard,
feels their weight and knows it heavy, feels their
motion in all its violence. There is in Strawinsky an
almost frenetic delight in the processes that go on
about him. He goes through the crowded thorough-
fares, through cluttered places, through factories,
hotels, wharves, sits in railway trains, and the glare
and tumult and pulsation, the engines and locomotives
and cranes, the whole mad phantasmagoria of the
modern city, evoke images in him, inflame him to re-
produce them in all their weight and gianthood and
mass, their blackness and luridness and power. The
most vulgar things and events excite him. The traffic,
the restlessness of crowds, the noise of vehicles, of
the clatter of horses on the asphalt, of human cries
and calls sounding above the street-bass, a couple of
organ grinders trying to outplay each other, a brass
band coming down the avenue, the thunder of a rail-
way train hurling itself over leagues of steel, the sirens
of steamboats and locomotives, the overtones of fac-
tory whistles, the roar of cities and harbors, become
music to him. In one of his early orchestral sketches,
he imitates the buzzing of a hive of bees. One of his
miniatures for string-quartet bangs with the beat of
the wooden shoes of peasants dancing to the snarling
tones of a bagpipe. Another reproduces the droning
of the priest in a little chapel, recreates the scene al-
most cruelly. And the score of '' Petruchka " is alive

Strawinsky 195

marvelously with the rank, garish life of a cheap fair.
Its bubbhng flutes, seething instrumental caldron, con-
certina-rhythms and bright, gaudy colors conjure up
the movement of the crowds that surge about the
amusement booths, paint to the life the little flying
flags, the gestures of the showmen, the bright balloons,
the shooting-galleries, the gipsy tents, the crudely
stained canvas walls, the groups of coachmen and
servant girls and children in their holiday finery. At
moments one can even smell the sausages frying.

For Strawinsky is one of those composers, found
scattered all along the pathway of his art, who aug-
ment the expressiveness of music through direct imita-
tion of nature. His imagination seems to be free,
bound in nowise by what other men have adjudged
music to be, and by what their practice has made it
seem. He comes to his art without prejudice or pre-
conception of any kind, it appears. He plays with its
elements as capriciously as the child plays with paper
and crayons. He amuses himself with each instrument
of the band careless of its customary uses. There are
times when Strawinsky comes into the solemn conclave
of musicians like a gamin with trumpet and drum.
He disports himself with the infinitely dignified string-
quartet, makes it do light and acrobatic things. There
is one interlude of " Petruchka " that is written for
snare-drums alone. His work is incrusted with cheap
waltzes and barrel-organ tunes. It is gamy and racy

196 Strawinsky

in style; full of musical slang. He makes the orchestra
imitate the quavering of an old hurdy-gurdy. Of late
he has written a ballet for eight clowns. And he is
reported to have said, " I should like to bring it about
that music be performed in street-cars, while people
get out and get in." For he finds his greatest enemy
in the concert-room, that rut that limits the play of
the imagination of audiences, that fortress in which
all of the intentions of the men of the past have es-
tablished themselves, and from which they dominate
the musical present. The concert-room has succeeded
in making music a drug, a sedative, has created a " mu-
sical attitude " in folk that is false, and robbed musical
art of its power. For Strawinsky music is either an
infection, the communication of a lyrical impulse, or
nothing at all. And so he would have it performed
in ordinary places of congregation, at fairs, in taverns,
music-halls, street-cars, if you will, in order to enable
it to function freely once again. His art is pointed to
quicken, to infect, to begin an action that the listener
must complete within himself. It is a sort of musical
shorthand. On paper, it has a fragmentary look. It
is as though Strawinsky had sought to reduce the ele-
ments of music to their sharpest and simplest terms,
had hoped that the " development " would be made by
the audience. He seems to feel that if he cannot
achieve his end, the communication of his lyrical im-
pulse, with a single strong motif, a single strong move-

Strawinsky 197

ment of tones, a single rhythmic start, he cannot
achieve it at all. So we find him writing songs, the
three Japanese lyrics, for instance, that are epigram-
matic in their brevity; a piece for string-quartet that
is played in fifty seconds; a three-act opera that can
be performed in thirty minutes.

But it is no experiment in form that he is making.
He seems to bring into music some of the power of
the Chinese artists who, in the painting of a twig, or
of a pair of blossoms, represent the entire springtide.
He has written some of the freshest, most rippling,
delicate music. Scarcely a living man has written
more freshly or humorously. April, the flowering
branches, the snowing petals, the clouds high in the
blue, are really in the shrilling little orchestra of the
Japanese lyrics, in the green, gurgling flutes and watery
violins. None of the innumerable Spring Symphonies,
Spring Overtures, Spring Songs, are really more ver-
nal, more soaked in the gentle sunshine of spring, are
more really the seed-time, than the six naive piping
measures of melody that introduce the figure of the
'^ Sacre " entitled " Rondes printanieres." No doubt,
in venturing to write music so bold and original in
esthetic, Strawinsky was encouraged by the example
of another musician, another Russian composer.
Moussorgsky, before him, had trusted in his own inno-
cence instead of in the wisdom of the fathers of the
musical church, had dared obey the promptings of

198 Strawinsky

his own blood and set down chords, melodies, rhythms,
just as they sang in his skull, though all the Vv^orld rise
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 expres-
sion of an innocence comparable indeed to that of
his great predecessor. " Le Sacre du printemps " is
what its composer termed it. It is " an act of faith."
And so, free of preconceptions, Strawinsky was able
to let nature move him to imitation. Just as Picasso
brings twentieth-century nature into his still lives, so
the young composer brings it into his music. It is
the rhythm of machinery that has set Strawinsky the
artist free. All his life he has been conscious of these
steel men. Mechanical things have influenced his art
from the beginning. It is as though machinery had
revealed him to himself, as though sight of the func-
tioning of these metal organisms, themselves but the
extension of human bones and muscles and organs,
had awakened into play the engine that is his proper
body. For, as James Oppenheim has put it in the in-
troduction to " The Book of Self," " Man's body is
just as large as his tools, for a tool is merely an exten-
sion of muscle and bone; a wheel is a swifter foot, a

Strawinsky 199

derrick a greater hand. Consequently, in the early
part of the century, the race found itself with a new
gigantic body." It is as though the infection of the
dancing, lunging, pumping piston-rods, walking beams,
drills, has awakened out of Strawinsky a response and
given him his power to beat out rhythm. The machine
has always fascinated him. One of his first original
compositions, written while he was yet a pupil of Rim-
sky-Korsakoff' s, imitates fireworks, distinguishes what
is human in their activity, in the popping, hissing, ex-
ploding, in the hysterical weeping of the fiery foun-
tains, the proud exhibitions and sudden collapses of
the pin- wheels. It is the machine, enemy of man,
that is pictured by " The Nightingale," that curious
work of which one act dates from 1909, and two from
1 9 14. Strawinsky had the libretto formed on the tale
of Hans Christian Andersen which recounts the ad-
ventures of the little brown bird that sings so beauti-
fully that the Emperor of China bids it to his court.
Strawinsky's nightingale, too, comes to the palace and
sings, and all the ladies of the entourage fill their
mouths with water in the hopes of better imitating
the warbling of the songster. But then there enter
envoys bearing the gift of the Emperor of Japan, a
mechanical nightingale that amuses the court with its
clockwork antics. Once more the emperor commands
the woodland bird to sing. But it is flown. In his
rage the emperor banishes it from his realm. Then

200 Strawinsky

Death comes and sits at the emperor's bedside, and
steals from him crown and scepter, till, of a sudden,
the Nightingale returns, and sings, and makes Death
relinquish his spoils. And the courtiers who come into
the imperial bedchamber expecting to find the mon-
arch dead, find him well and glad in the morning
sunshine.

And in his two major works, " Petruchka " and
" Le Sacre du printemps," Strawinsky makes the ma-
chine represent his own person. For the actions of
machinery woke first in the human organism, and
Strawinsky intensifies consciousness of the body by
referring these motions to their origin. " Petruchka "
is the man-machine seen from without, seen unsympa-
thetically, in its comic aspect. Countless poets before
Strawinsky have attempted to portray the puppet-like
activities of the human being, and " Petruchka " is
but one of the recent of innumerable stage-shows that
expose the automaton in the human soul. But the
puppet-show of Strawinsky is singular because of its
musical accompaniment. For more than even the
mimes on the stage, the orchestra is full of the spirit
of the automaton. The angular, wooden gestures of
the dolls, their smudged faces, their entrails of saw-
dust, are in the music ten times as intensely as they
are upon the stage. In the score of " Petruchka "
music itself has become a little mannikin in parti-
colored clothes, at which Strawinsky gazes and laughs

Strawinsky 201

as a child laughs at a funny doll, and makes dance
and tosses in the air, and sends sprawling. The score
is full of the revolutions of wheels, of delicate clock-
work movements, of screws and turbines. Beneath
the music one hears always the regular, insistent,
maniacal breathing of a concertina. And what in it
is not purely mechanistic nevertheless completes the
picture of the world as it appears to one who has
seen the man-machine in all its comedy. The stage
pictures, the trumpery little fair, the tinsel and pa-
thetic finery of the crowds, the dancing of the human
ephemeridse a moment before the snow begins to fall,
are stained marvelously deeply by the music. The
score has the colors of crudely dyed, faded bunting.
It has 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 from without, and unsympathetically, but
from within. So far, it is Strawinsky 's masterwork,
the completest and purest expression of his gienius.
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 sig-
nal largeness and powerfulness. The rhythmic ele-
ment, already fresh and free in the scherzo of
" L'Oiseau de feu " and throughout " Petruchka," at-
tains virile and magistral might in it, surges and thun-
ders with giant vigor. The instrumentation, magical

202 Strawinsky

with all the magic of the Russian masters in the earlier
ballets, here is informed by the sharpness, hard-
ness, nakedness which is originally Strawinsky's. Be-
sides, the latter work has the thing hitherto lacking
somewhat in the young man's art — grandeur and
severity and ironness of language. In it he stands
completely new, completely in possession of his powers.
And in it the machine operates. Ostensibly, the action
of the ballet is laid in prehistoric times. Ostensibly,
it figures the ritual with which a tribe of stone-age
Russians consecrated the spring. Something of the
sort was necessary, for an actual representation of
/ machines, a ballet of machines, would not have been
as grimly significant as the angular, uncouth gestures
of men, would by no means have as nakedly revealed
the human engine. Here, in the choreography, every
fluid, supple, curving motion is suppressed. Every-
thing is angular, cubical, rectilinear. The music
pounds with the rhythm of engines, whirls and spirals
like screws and fly-wheels, grinds and shrieks like
laboring metal. The orchestra is transmuted to steel.
Each movement of the ballet correlates the rhythms of
machinery with the human rhythms which they pro-
long and repeat. A dozen mills pulsate at once. Steam
escapes; exhausts breathe heavily. The weird orches-
tral introduction to the second scene has all the op-
pressive silence of machines immobile at night. And in
the hurtling finale the music and the dancers create a

Strawinsky 203

figure that is at once the piston and a sexual action.
For Strawinsky has stripped away from man all that
with which specialization, differentiation, have covered
him, and revealed him again, in a sort of cruel white
light, a few functioning organs. He has shown him
a machine to which power is applied, and which labors
in blind obedience precisely like the microscopic
animal that eats and parturates and dies. The spring
comes; and life replenishes itself; and man, like seed
and germ, obeys the promptings of the blind power
that created him, and accomplishes his predestined
course and takes in energy and pours it out again.
But, for a moment, in " Le Sacre du printemps," we
feel the motor forces, watch the naked wheels and
levers and arms at work, see the dynamo itself.

The ballet was completed in 19 13, the year Stra-
winsky was thirty-one years old. It may be that the
work will be succeeded by others even more original,
more powerful. Or it may be that Strawinsky has
already written his masterpiece. The works that he
has composed during the war are not, it appears,
strictly new developments. Whatever enlargement of
the field of the string quartet the three little pieces
which the Flonzaleys played here in 191 5 created, there
is no doubt that it was nothing at all to compare with
the innovation in orchestral music created by the great
ballet. And, according to rumor, the newest of Stra-
winsky's work, the music-hall ballet for eight clowns,

204 Strawinsky

and the work for the orchestra, ballet and chorus en-
titled " Les Noces villageoises/' are by no means as
bold in style as " Le Sacre," and resemble " Pe-
truchka " more than the later ballet. But, whatever
Strawinsky's future accomplishment, there can be no
doubt that with this one work, if not also with
" Petruchka," he has secured a place among the true
musicians. It is doubtful whether any living com-
poser has opened new musical land more widely than
he. For he has not only minted music anew. He has
reached a point ahead of us that the world would have
reached without him. That alone shows him the genius.
He has brought into music something for which we
had long been waiting, and which we knew must one
day arrive. To us, at this moment, " Le Sacre du
printemps " appears one of those compositions that
mark off the musical miles.

Mahler

Almost simultaneously with the rise of Russian music
and the new birth of French music, that of Germany
has deteriorated. The great line of composers which
descended from Bach and Haendel for two centuries
has wavered and diminished visibly during the last
three decades. The proud tradition seems to have
reached a temporary halt in Wagner and Bruckner and
Brahms. It may be that modern Germany is a diffi-
cult terrain, that the violent change in conditions of
life, the furious acceleration, has created, for the time
being, a soil unusually inimical to the disclosure of
perfect works of art. The blight on the entire new
generation of composers would seem to point to some
such common cause. There is, no doubt, a curious
coincidence in the fact that in each of the four chief
German musicians of the recent period there should
be manifest in some degree a failure of artistic instinct.
The coarsening of the craftsmanship, the spiritual
bankruptcy, of the later Strauss, the grotesque pedantry
of Reger, the intellectualism with which the art of
Schoenberg has always been tainted, and by which
it has been corrupted of late, the banality of Mahler,
dovetail suspiciously. And yet, it is probable that the
cause lies otherwhere, and that the conjunction of

205

2o6 Mahler

these four men is accidental. There have been, after
all, few environments really friendly to the artist;
most of the masters have had to recover from a " some-
thing rotten in the state of Denmark," and many of
them have surmounted conditions worse than those
of modern Bismarckian Germany. The cause of the
unsatisfactoriness of much of the music of Strauss
and Schoenberg, Reger and Mahler, is doubtless to
be found in the innate weakness of the men themselves
rather more than in the unheal thiness of the atmos-
phere in which they passed their lives.

Still, the case of Mahler makes one hesitate a while
before passing judgment. Whereas it is probable that
Richard Strauss would have deteriorated no matter
how friendly the age in which he lived, that Reger
would have been just as much a pedant had he been
born in Paris instead of in Bavaria, that Schoenberg
would have developed into his mathematical frigidity
wherever he resided, it is possible that Mahler's fate
might have been different had he not been born in
the Austria of the i86o's. For if Mahler's music is
pre-eminently a reflection of Beethoven's, if he never
spoke in authentic accents, if out of his vast dreams
of a great modern popular symphonic art, out of his
honesty, his sincerity, his industry, his undeniably
noble and magnificent traits, there resulted only those
unhappy boring colossi that are his nine symphonies,
it is indubitably, to a great extent, the consequence

Mahler 207

of the 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 of the Hebrew language quite as
much as that of any tongue spoken by the peoples
of Europe. It decreed that, whatever the history of
the art he practised, whatever the character of the
age in which he lived, he could not impress himself
upon his medium without impregnating it with the
traits he inherited from his ancestors. It decreed that
in speaking he would have to suffuse musical art with
the qualities and characteristics engraved in the stock
by the history and vicissitudes of his race, by its age-
long sojourn in the deserts of Arabia and on the bar-
ren hills of Syria, by the constraint of its religion and
folkways, by its titanic and terrible struggle for sur-
vival against the fierce peoples of Asia, by the mar-
velous vitality and self-consciousness and exclusive-
ness that carried it whole across lands and times, out
of the eternal Egypt through the eternal Red Sea. But
it was just the racial attributes, the racial gesture and
accent, that a man in Mahler's position found in-
ordinately difficult to register. For Austrian society
put a great price on his suppression of them. It per-
mitted him to participate in its activities only on the
condition that he did not remind it continually of his

2o8 Mahler

alienhood, of his racial consciousness. It permitted
him the sense of equality, of fraternity, of citizenship,
only on the condition that he should seek to suppress
within himself all awareness of his descent and char-
acter and peculiarities, and attempt to identify himself
with its members, and try to feel just as they felt
and speak just as they spoke.

For if Austro-German society had admitted the Jews
to civil rights, it had made them feel as never before
the old hatred and malediction and exclusion. The
walls of the ghettos had, after all, prevented the Jew
from feeling the full force of the disability under which
he labored, insomuch as they had repressed in him
all desire to mingle in the life of the country in which
he found himself. But in exciting his gregariousness,
in appearing to allow him to participate in the public
life, in both inviting and repelling him, a community
like that of Austria, still so near the Middle Ages, m.ade
him feel in all its terrible might the handicap of race,
the mad hatred and contempt with which it punished
his descent. And it is but natural that amongst those
very Jews best fitted to take part in affairs, and con-
sequently most sensitive to the ill-will that barred them
from power and success, there should be aroused, de-
spite all conscious efforts neither to surrender nor to
shrink, an unconscious desire to escape the conse-
quences of the thing that stamped them in the eyes of
the general as individuals of an inferior sort; to inhibit

Mahler 209

any spiritual gesture that might arouse hostility; and
to ward off any subjective sense of personal inferiority
by convincing themselves and their fellows that they
possessed the traits generally esteemed.

So a ruinous conflict was introduced into the soul
of Gustav Mahler. In the place of the united self,
there came to exist within him two men. For while
one part of him demanded the free complete expression
necessary to the artist, another sought to block it for
fear that in the free flow the hated racial traits would
appear. For Mahler would have been the first to have
been repelled by the sound of his own harsh, haughty,
guttural, abrupt Hebrew inflection. He would have
been the first to turn in contempt from his own ges-
tures. There was in him the frenetic unconscious de-
sire to rid himself of the thing he had come to believe
inferior. And rather than express it, rather than speak
in his proper idiom, he made, unaware to himself, per-
haps, the choice of speaking through the voices of other
men, of the great German composers; of imitating
them instead of developing his own personality; of
accepting sterility and banality and impotence rather
than achieving a power of speech.

And so his work became the doubtful and bastard
thing it is, a thing of lofty and original intentions un-
realized, of large powers misapplied, of great and re-
spectable creative efforts that did not succeed in bring-
ing into being anything really new, really whole. Of

2IO Mahler

what Mahler might have achieved had he not been
the divided personality, his symphonies, even as they
stand, leave no doubt. If Mahler is not a great man,
he is at least the silhouette of one. The need of ex-
pression that drove him to composition was indubitably
mighty. The passion with which he addressed himself
to his labor despite all discouragement and lack of
success, the loftiness and nobleness of the task which
he set for himself, the splendor of the intentions, re-
veal how fierce a fire burnt in the man. He was not
one of those who come to music to form little jewels.
On the contrary, in gesture he was ever one of the
eminently faithful. He came to music to create a great,
simple, popular symphonic art for these latter days, a
thing of broad lines and simple contours and spiritual
grandeur. He sought to express sincerely his deep,
real sorrow, his choking homesickness for the some-
thing which childhood seems to possess and maturity
to be without; to dream himself into childlike, para-
disaic joys and wake himself to faith and action once
again. He attempted to create a musical language that
would be gigantic and crude and powerful as Nature
herself; tried to imbue the orchestra with the Dionys-
iac might of sun and winds and teeming clay; wished
to be able to say of his symphonies, " Hier rorht die
Natur." To a friend who visited him at his country
house in Toblach and commented upon the mountains
surrounding the spot, Mahler jestingly replied, " Ich

Mahler 21 1

hab' sie alle fortcomponiert." And he had large and
dramatic programs for his symphonies. The First
should have been a sort of Song of Youth, a farewell
to the thing that is alive in us before we meet the
world, and is shattered in the collision. The Second
should have been the Song of Death, the music of the
knowledge of death. The Third was conceived as a
Song of the Great Pan — his '' gaya scienza," Mahler
would have liked to call it. In the Fourth he sought
to open the heart of a child; in the Sixth, to voice his
desolation and loneliness and hopelessness; in the
Eighth, to perform a great religious ceremony; in
" Das Lied von der Erde " to write his " Tempest,"
his epilogue.

And in general plan, his symphonies are original
enough. Mahler was completely emancipated of all
the old prejudices concerning the nature of the sym-
phony. He conceived the form anew. " Mir heiszt
Symphonic," he is reported to have said, " mit alien
mitteln der vorhandenen Technik mir eine Welt auf-
bauen." He conceived the form particularly with ref-
erence to the being, the exigencies, the frame, of the
modern concert hall. He realized that the shortness of
the classic symphonies handicaps them severely in the
present day. For modern audiences require an hour
and a half or two hours of musical entertainment. In
order to fill the concert programs, the symphony has
to be associated with other works. In consequence it

212 Mahler

loses in effectiveness. So, taking hints from the
Ninth of Beethoven and the " Romeo " of Berlioz,
Mahler boldly planned symphonies that could stand
alone and fill an evening. Beginning with his Second,
he increased the number of movements, dropping the
inevitable suite of allegro, andante, scherzo, rondo;
prescribed intermissions of a certain length; and added
choruses and vocal solos to give the necessary relief
to the long orchestral passages. In the Second, he
placed between an allegretto and a scherzo a soprano
setting of one of the lyrics out of " Des Knaben Wun-
derhorn," and concluded the work with a choral set-
ting of one ode of Klopstock's. In the Third Sym-
phony, he preceded the orchestral finale with an alto
solo composed on " Das Trunkene Lied " of Nietzsche,
and with a chorus employing the words of another of
the naive poems in the anthology of Arnim and Bren-
tano. 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 never-
theless managed to vary and expand the conventional
suite by preceding the first allegro with a march, and
separating and relieving the gargantuan scherzo and
rondo with an adagietto for strings alone.

His material he organized fairly independently of
the old rules. He was one of those who seem to have
learned from Liszt that the content of a piece must

Mahler 213

condition its form. Mahler's symphonies resemble
symphonic poems. They are essentially dramatic in
character. Although he strove continually for classic
form, his works nevertheless reveal their programmatic
origin. He was at heart one of the literary composers.
But he was a better craftsman than most of them are.
He was a finer workman than Strauss, for instance.
His scores are much more bony. They are free of the
mass of insignificant detail that clutters so many of
Strauss's. He could asseverate with some justice, " I
have never written an insincere note." And although
his orchestration is not revolutionary, and is often
commonplace enough, he nevertheless oftentimes em-
ployed an instrumental palette distinctly his own. He
utilized instead of the violin the trumpet as premier
instrument of the band; achieved all manner of bril-
liant effects with it. He increased the variety and use-
fulness of the instruments of percussion, forming out
of them a new family of instruments to balance the
families of the strings, brass, and wood-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 a bass-drum, tri-
angle and cymbals in the supplementary. In the
Eighth Symphony, the instruments of percussion form
a little band by themselves. And he utilized the com-
mon instruments in original fashion, made the harps

214 Mahler

imitate bells, the wood-wind blow fanfares, the horns
hold 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 sym-
phonies, honest and dignified as some of them are,
that exists as fresh, new-minted, vivid music. His
genius never took musical flesh. His scores are lam-
entably weak, often arid and banal. There is surely
not another case in musical history in which indubi-
table genius, a mighty need of expression, a distinctly
personal manner of sensation, a respectable musical
science, a great and idealistic effort, achieved results
so unsatisfactory. One wonders whether Mahler the
composer was not, after all, the greatest failure in
music. If there is any music that is eminently Kapell-
meistermusik, eminently a routine, reflective, dusty
sort of musical art, it is certainly Mahler's five latter
symphonies. The musical Desert of Sahara is surely
to be found in these unhappy compositions. They are
monsters of ennui, and by their very pretentiousness,
their gargantuan dimensions, throw into crudest relief
Mahler's essential sterility. They seek to be colossal
and achieve vacuity chiefly. They remind one of
nothing so much as the huge, ugly, misshapen " giants "
that stand before the old Palace in Florence, work of
the obscure sculptor who thought to outdo Michel-
angelo by sheer bulk. And the first four of his sym-

Mahler 215

phonies, though less utterly banal and pedantic, are
still amorphous and fundamentally second-hand. For
Mahler never spoke in his own idiom. His style is
a mongrel affair. The thematic material is almost
entirely derivative and imitative, of an unequaled
mediocrity and depressingness. One wonders whether
indeed there has ever been a respectable composer who
has utilized ideas as platitudinous as the ones em-
ployed in the first movement of the First Symphony,
or the brassy, pompous theme that opens the Eighth,
or the tune to which in the latter work the mystic
stanza beginning

" Alles vergangliche
1st nur ein Gleichnisz "

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

2i6 Mahler

But, for the most part, it is precisely the personal
tone that his music completely lacks. For he was
never himself. He was everybody and nobody. He
was forever seeking to be one composer or another,
save only not Gustav Mahler. The fatal assimilative
power of the Jew is revealed nowhere in music more
sheerly than in the style of Mahler. Romain Rolland
discovers alone in the Fifth Symphony reminiscences
of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, Bach and Chabrier.
Schubert flits persistently through Mahler's scores, par-
ticularly through that of the Third Symphony, whose
introductory theme for eight horns recalls almost
pointedly the opening of the C-major of Schubert,
without, however, in the least recapturing its effec-
tiveness. Bruckner, Mahler's teacher, is also inces-
santly reflected by these works, by the choral themes
which Mahler is so fond of embodying in his com-
positions, and, more particularly, by the length and
involutions of so many of the themes of his later
symphonies. For, like Bruckner's, they appear chosen
with an eye to their serviceability for contrapuntal de-
formation and dissection. Wagner, Haydn, Schumann
and Brahms, the sentimental Wienerwald Brahms, also
pass incessantly through these scores. But it was
Beethoven whom Mahler sought chiefly to emulate.
Over his symphonies (and it is a curious fact that
Mahler, like the three men that he most frequently
imitated, Schubert, Bruckner, and Beethoven, wrote

Mahler 217

just nine symphonies), over his entire work, his songs
as well as his orchestral pieces, there lies the shadow
of the Master of Bonn. Mahler was undoubtedly
Beethoven's most faithful disciple. All his life he
was seeking to write the '' Tenth Symphony," the sym-
phony that Beethoven died before composing. He
was continually attempting to approximate the other's
grand, pathetic tone, his broad and self-righteous man-
ner. His music is full of but slightly disguised quo-
tations. The trumpet-theme that ushers in Mahler's
Fifth Symphony, for instance, appears the result
of an attempt to cross the theme of the funeral
march of the " Eroica Symphony " with the famous
four raps of Beethoven's Fifth. In the first movement
of the Second Symphony, just before the appearance on
the oboe of the scarcely disguised " Sleep " motif from
" Die Walkiire," a theme almost directly lifted out
of Beethoven's violin concerto is announced on the
'cellos and horns. And the andante of the same sym-
phony derives from both the allegretto of Beethoven's
Eighth and the andante of his " Pastoral Symphony ";
might, indeed, figure as a sort of " Szene am Bach "
through which there flow the yellowish tides of the
Danube. Beethoven is recalled by some of Mahler's
triumphant finales, particularly by those of the Fifth
and Seventh Symphonies, and by many of Mahler's
adagio passages. " Es sucht der Bruder seinen Bru-
der," oh, how often and at what length through

21 8 Mahler

Mahler's symphonies, and with what persistency on
the tenor trumpet! And how often in them does not
the German family man take his children walking in
the woods of a Sunday afternoon and bid them wor-
ship their Creator for having implanted the Love of
Virtue in the Human Heart!

Just as it was inevitable that Mahler, instead of
developing his own artistic individuality, should seek
all his life to identify himself with certain other com-
posers, so, too, it was inevitable that it should be
Beethoven whom he would most sedulously emulate.
For not only was Beethoven the great classic presence
of the German concert hall, and deemed, 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, the one spiritually most akin to Mahler. For
Beethoven was also one of those who wish to endow
their art with moral grandeur, give it power to rouse
the noblest human traits, to make it communicate
ethical and philosophical conceptions. He, too, came
to his art with a magnanimous hope of invigorating
and consoling and redeeming his brothers, of healing
the wounds of life and binding all men in the bonds
of fraternity. Torn between desire of self-expression,
and fear of self-revelation, Mahler found the solu-
tion of his conflict in this particular piece of self-identi-
fication.

And had Mahler been able really to be himself

Mahler 219

alone, to develop his own individuality, he would no
doubt have been the thing he most desired to be, and
given the world a new Beethoven. But, as imitator,
he is far from being Beethoven! Whatever
Beethoven's limitations (and they were many,
for all that the worshiping crowd may say), he
nevertheless had in extraordinary degree two things
which Mahler eminently lacked — inventive genius and
a giant peasant strength. He was able to cope vig-
orously with the gigantic programs he set for him-
self. At moments, no doubt, as in the C-minor Sym-
phony and so many of his piano-sonatas, one is re-
pelled by a certain indefinable pompousness and self-
righteousness and exasperated by the obviousness and
dullness and heaviness of his art. The finale of the
Ninth Symphony with its blare and crash, its chorus
screaming on high C, its Turkish March with cymbals
and bass-drum, is not entirely inspired, most folk
will agree. And yet, for all his shortcomings, the
wonders of Beethoven are innumerable. There are the
many quartets with their masterly invention and com-
position, the First and Sixth Symphonies with their
immortal youth and freshness, their hearty strength
and simplicity, the deeply beautiful passages and move-
ments to be found in nearly every one of his works.
There is all the wonderful solidity that Mahler, for
instance, never achieved. For in poor Mahler's work
we feel only the intention, rarely the achievement. We

220 Mahler

feel him agonizedly straining, pushing and laboring,
trying to manufacture his banal thematic material into
music by the application of all the little contrapuntal
formulas. We find him relying finally upon physical
apparatus, upon sheer brute force. His symphonies
abound in senseless repetitions, in all sorts of eye-
music. And in the Eighth Symphony, the apotheosis
of his reliance on the physical, he calls for a chorus of
a thousand men, women and children, and at the end,
I believe, the descent of the Holy Ghost. But the ulti-
mate effect is exactly the reverse of what Mahler
planned. The very size of the apparatus throws into
cruelest relief his weariness and uncreativeness. For
a moment, a work like the Eighth Symphony stuns the
auditor with its sheer physical bulk. After all, one
does not hear a thousand voices singing together every
day, and the brass and the percussion are very bril-
liant. Soon, nevertheless, there insinuates itself the
realization that there is in this work neither the all-
creating spirit the composer so magniloquently invokes,
nor the heaven he strives so ardently to attain. They
are in the music of a score of other composers. For
these men had lived. And it was to real life that
Mahler never attained.

If his music expresses anything at all, it expresses
just the characteristics that Mahler was most anxious
to have it conceal. Life is the greatest of practical
jokers, and Mahler, in seeking to escape his racial

Mahler 221

traits, ended by representing nothing so much as the
Jew. For if there is anything visible behind the music
of Mahler, it is the Jew as Wagner, say, describes
him in " Das Judentum in der Musik,'' the Jew who
through the superficial assimilation of the traits of
the people among whom he is condemned to live, and
through the suppression of his own nature, becomes
sterile. It is the Jew consumed by malaise and home-
sickness, by impotent yearning for the terrain which
will permit him free expression, and which he conceives
as an otherwheres, or as a dream-Palestine. It is the
Jew unable to feel faith or joy or content because he
is unable to live out his own life. It is the Jew
consumed by bitterness because he is perpetually un-
true to himself. It is the Jew afraid to die because
he has never really lived himself out. It is the Jew
as he is when he wants most to cease being a Jew.
Mahler could have seemed no more the Jew had he
expressed himself in all his Hebraic fervor instead of
singing about Saint Peter in Heaven and seeking to
reconcile Rhabanus Maurus and Goethe in a " higher
synthesis." Only, it would have been good music in-
stead of a nondescript and mongrel thing that he com-
posed. All that he really attained by hampering him-
self was sterility.

And, in the end, we are forced to conclude that it
was not solely the environment, however much that fa-
vored it, that condemned Mahler to sterility. Did we

222 Mahler

have no example of a Jewish musician attaining crea-
tivity through the frank expression of his Semitic char-
acteristics, we might presume that no choice existed
for Mahler, and that it is inevitable that the Jew,
whenever he essays the grand style, becomes just what
Wagner called him in his brilliant and brutal pamphlet,
a pretender. But, fortunately, such an example does
exist. Geneva, " la ville Protestante," that saw unclose
the art of Ernest Bloch, was, after all, not much more
eager to welcome a Jewish renaissance than was the
Vienna of Gustav Mahler. But some inner might that
the elder man lacked gave the young Genevese com-
poser the courage to speak out, and to attain salva-
tion. It was, after all, a sort of intelligence, a sense
of reality, a real overwhelming spiritual strength that
Mahler lacked. For all his immense capacities, he was
a weak man. He permitted his environment to ruin
him.

Reger

The copies of most of Max Reger^s compositions are
ornamented with a cover design representing Bee-
thoven's death-mask wreathed with laurel. It was in
all sincerity that his publishers placed that decoration
there. For there was a moment when Reger excited
high hopes. At the time when he appeared, the cause
of " absolute " music seemed lost. Musical modernity
and the programmatic form had come to seem insep-
arable. The old classical forms were being supplanted
by those of Wagner, Liszt and Strauss. Not that there
was a paucity of bespectacled doctors of music who
felt themselves called to compose " classical " works.
But the content of their work was invariably formal.
Reger, however, seemed able to effect a union between
the modern spirit and the forms employed by the mas-
ters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He,
the troubled, nervous, modern man, wrote with fluency
fugues and double fugues, chaconnes and passacagHe,
concerti grossi and variations. He seemed to have
mastered the secrets of the old composers, to be con-
tinuing their work, developing their thought and style.
He excelled in the control of what appeared to be the
technicalities of composition. Had he not, in his " Con-
tributions to the Theory of Harmony," proposed one

223

224 Reger

hundred examples of cadences modulating from the
common chord of C-major through every possible key
and transpository sequence? Had he not written two
books of canons displaying the most amazing technical
ingenuities; found it simple, as in his " Sinfonietta,"
to keep five or six strands of counterpoint going? And
so, believing that he was about to do for the music
of the post- Wagnerian period what Brahms had done
for that of the romantic period, the musical conserva-
tives and traditionalists rallied to him. He was ac-
claimed by a large public lineal successor of the three
great " B's " of music. Quite in the manner that they
had once opposed Brahms to the composer of " Par-
sifal," the partisans of musical absolutism elevated
Reger as a sort of anti-pope to Richard Strauss.
Whole numbers of musical reviews were devoted to
the study and discussion of his art in all its ramifica-
tions. Reger seemed on the verge of gaining a place
among the immortals. And his publishers placed on
the covers of his compositions the design that sym-
bolized the great things they thought the man achiev-
ing, and the high heavens for which they believed him
bound.

The success was momentary only. Long before he
died, the world had found in Max Reger its musical
bete noire. Closer acquaintance with his art had not
ingratiated him with his public. Indeed, concert-audi-
ences had become bored to the point of exasperation

Reger 225

with his classicizing compositions. To most folk, it
appeared as though the man saw no other end in com-
position than the attainment of the opus-number One
Thousand. And although his works are rife with the
sort of technical problems and solutions which those
initiated into musical science are supposed to relish,
few musicians found them really attractive. Reger
made various attempts to regain the favor he had lost.
They were unavailing. Even when he turned his back
on the absolutists and wrote programmatic music, ro-
mantic suites that begin with Debussy-like low flutes
and end with trumpet blasts that recall the sunrise
music of "■ Also Sprach Zarathustra," ballet suites that
seek to rival the '' Carnaval " of Schumann and the
waltzes in '' Der Rosenkavalier," '' Bocklin " suites
that pretend to translate into tone some of the Swiss
painter's canvases, he only intensified the general ill-
will. People who knew him whisper that he realized
his failure, and in consequence took to emptying the
vats of beer that finally drowned him. And on the
occasion of his death, valediction went no further than
frigidly applauding his creditable work for the organ,
his erudition and productivity that almost rival those
of the eighteenth-century composers. The final at-
tempt to interest the public in his work, made during
the succeeding season, brought but few people to re-
pent of their former indifference. A revival of interest
is scarcely to be expected.

226 Reger

For it was not a Brahms the world had gotten again.
Indeed, it was a personality of just the sort that
Brahms was not. The resemblance was of the most
superficial. Both men went to school to Bach and the
polyphonic masters. Both were traditionalists. There
the kinship ends. For the one was a poet, a sturdily
living, rich and powerful person. The other was es-
sentially a harsh and ugly being, eminently wanting the
divine flame. For Brahms, erudition was only a means
to his end, a fortification of his personal mode of ex-
pression. He saw that the weaknesses of many of
the romantic composers, his kin, of Schumann his
spiritual father in particular, were due their want of
organizing power, their helplessness in the larger forms.
And eager to achieve large, solid, resisting form in
his own work, he went to the great masters of musical
science, to Beethoven and Haydn and in particular to
Bach, to learn of them, that he might do for his day
something of what they had done for theirs. And he
was able to assimilate vast quantities of his learning,
and make it part of his flesh and bone. At times, no
doubt, one is painfully aware of his erudition, pain-
fully aware that he is applying principles learned from
Beethoven and Bach, manipulating his music out of no
inner necessity. At times, his music does smell of the
lamp. And yet, how completely those juiceless mo-
ments are outbalanced by the mass of his living, fra-
grant, robust song! With what rareness the pedant

Reger 227

in Brahms emerges! Behind this music there is al-
most always visible the great, grave, passionate, re-
signed creature that was Brahms, the man who sought
with all his might to hold himself firm and erect and
unyielding before the hideous onslaughts of life, the
man who lived without hope of fulfilment, loved with-
out hope of consummation, and yet knew that it was
enough fulfilment, enough consummation to have
loved, to have been touched with a radiant dream;
the man who prayed only that his heart might not
wither, and that he might never cease to long and
dream and feel the hurt and solace of beauty and
have the power to sing. And in his music there is
almost always the consolation of the great forests, the
healing of the trees and silences, the cooling hands of
the earth, the everlasting yea-saying to love and
beauty, the manly resignation, the leave-taking from
dreams and life. All this music says, '^ Song is
enough."

But no such goodly presence glimmers through the
music of Max Reger. No sturdy bardic spirit vibrates
in it. This Reger is a sarcastic, churlish fellow, bitter
and pedantic and rude. He is a sort of musical Cy-
clops, a strong, ugly creature bulging with knotty and
unshapely muscles, an ogre of composition. He has
little delicacy, little finesse of spirit. In listening to
these works with their clumsy blocks of tone, their
eternal sunless complaining, their lack of humor where

228 Reger

they would be humorous, their lack of passion v/here
they would be profound, their sardonic and monoto-
nous bourdon, one is perforce reminded of the photo-
graph of Reger which his publishers place on the cover
of their catalogue of his works, the photograph that
shows something that is like a swollen, myopic beetle
with thick lips and sullen expression crouching on an
organ-bench. There is something repulsive as well
as pedantic in this art. The poetry, the nobility, the
moderation and cleanness of line of Brahms is absent.
Instead, there is a sort of brutal coldness, the coldness
of the born pedant, a prevalence of bad humor, a pov-
erty of invention and organizing power that conceals
itself under an elaborate and complex and erudite sur-
face. The strong, calm, classic beauty of Brahms is
wanting. For all its air of subtlety and severity and
profundity, its learned and classicizing manner, the
music of Reger is really superficial. The man only
seldom achieves form. Generally, for all the complex
and convulsive activity of his music, nothing really
progresses, develops, happens in it. Above all, the
stylistic severity of Brahms in Reger has become a
confusion of styles; an absence of style. The classic
has become the baroque.

Reger is one of the men who develop muscles
that hamper all grace and freedom of activity.
One cannot help feeling that he went to the
classic masters for their formulas in order to make

Reger 229

of composition chiefly a mental exercise, that he
accepted so many rules and manners and turns in
order to free himself of the necessity of making free
and full and spontaneous movements. With Reger,
creation becomes routine. His works are stereotyped;
stale terribly quickly. There are moments when
one wonders whether he understood at all what
creation is. For certainly, three-quarters of his com-
positions seem written out of no inner necessity, bring
no liberation in their train. They are like mathemat-
ical problems and solutions, sheer brain-spun and un-
lyrical works. One is ever conscious in Reger that he
is solving contrapuntal problems in order to astonish
the vulgar herd of the professors. Reger certainly
knew the art of talking with an astonishing show of
logic, and yet saying nothing. Perhaps he talked
continuously in order not to have to reflect. And for
all his erudition, he understood his masters intellectu-
ally only. He felt himself called upon to continue the
work of the three great '' B's," and yet never under-
stood the grand spirit that animated their art. Strauss,
with his fine conduct of instruments through the
score of " Salome," is nearer the spirit of Bach than
Reger with all his fugues and double fugues ever got.
No doubt, Reger loved the mathematical solidity
and balance of the older music, and therefore sought
to assimilate it. But he did more than just learn of
it, as Brahms had done. He sought to rival the great

230 Reger

men of the past on their own ground, to do what they
did better than they had done it, to be able to say,
^' See, I can do the trick, too ! " So we find him writ-
ing counterpoint for the sake of the learnedness and
presumable respectability, rather than as a piece of
expression. His compositions are overburdened and
cluttered and marred by all sorts of erudite turns and
twists and manoeuvers. The man's entire attention
seems to have been set on making his works astonish
the learned and make mad the simple. Even a slight
song like " Wenn die Linde bliiht " is decked with
contrapuntal felicities. He copies the mannerisms of
the composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, contorts his compositions with all manner of
outmoded turns. He appears to have come to his work-
table inevitably with his mind full of the compositions
he had been studying. His impulse seems always a re-
flected thing, a desire to compete with some one on
that person's terms. He writes fugues for organs and
sonatas for violin solo under the influence of Bach,
concerti grossi under the influence of Haendel, varia-
tions under that of Mozart, sonatas under that of
Brahms. In vain one searches for a perfectly indi-
vidual style throughout his w^orks. The living man is
buried under the mass of badly assimilated learning.
Even at best, in the Hiller variations, in some of the
string trios and organ fugues, some of his grave ada-
gios, even in some of his sardonic and turbulent scherzi

Reger 231

(perhaps his most original contributions), his art is
rather more a refinement on another art than a fresh
and vital expression. In him, education had produced
the typical pedant, a pedant of Cyclopean muscularity,
perhaps, but nevertheless a pedant.

And so, instead of being Brahms's successor, Reger
is to-day seen as the very contrary of Brahms. It
is not that fugues and concerti in the olden style can-
not be written to-day, that modern music and the an-
tique forms are incompatible. It is that Reger was
very little the artist. He mistook the material vesture
for the spirit, thought that there were formulas for
composition, royal roads to the heaven of Bach and
Mozart. Something more of humanity, sympathy for
man and his experiences, inner freedom, might have
saved him. But it was just the poetic gift that the
man was lamentably without. And so, freighted with
too much erudition and too little wisdom, Reger went
aground.

Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg of Vienna is the great troubling
presence of modern music. His vast, sallow skull
lowers over it like a sort of North Cape. For with
him, with the famous cruel five orchestral and nine
piano pieces, we seem to be entering the arctic zone
of musical art. None of the old beacons, none of the
old stars, can guide us longer in these frozen wastes.
Strange, menacing forms surround us, and the light
is bleak and chill and faint. The characteristic com-
positions of Strawnisky and Ornstein, too, have no
tonality, lack every vestige of a pure chord, and ex-
hibit unanalyzable harmonies, and rhythms of a vio-
lent novelty, in the most amazing conjunctions. But
they, at least, impart a certain sense of liberation.
They, at least, bear certain witness to the emotional
flight of the composer. An instinct pulses here, an
instinct barbarous and unbridled, if you will, but in-
dubitably exuberant and vivid. These works have a
necessity. These harmonies have color. This music
is patently speech. But the later compositions of
Schoenberg withhold themselves, refuse our contact.
They baffle with their apparently wilful ugliness, and
bewilder with their geometric cruelty and coldness.
One gets no intimation that in fashioning them the

233

234 Schoenherg

composer has liberated himself. On the contrary, they
seem icy and brain-spun. They are like men formed
not out of flesh and bone and blood, but out of glass
and wire and concrete. They creak and groan and
grate in their motion. They have all the deathly pal-
lor of abstractions.

And Schoenberg remains a troubling presence as long
as one persists in regarding these particular pieces as
the expression of a sensibility, as long as one persists
in seeking in them the lyric flight. For though one
perceives them with the intellect one can scarcely feel
them musically. The conflicting rhythms of the third
of the " Three Pieces for Pianoforte " clash without
generating heat, without, after all, really sounding.
No doubt, there is a certain admirable uncompromis-
ingness, a certain Egyptian severity, in the musical line
of the first of the " Three." But if there is such a thing
as form without significance in music, might not these
compositions serve to exemplify it? Indeed, it is only
as experiments, as the incorporation in tone of an ab-
stract and intellectualized conception of forms, that
one can at all comprehend them. And it is only in
regarding him as primarily an experimenter that the
later Schoenberg loses his incomprehensibility, and
comes somewhat nearer to us.

There is much in Schoenberg's career that makes
this explanation something more than an easy way
of disposing of a troublesome problem, makes it, in-

Schoenberg 235

deed, eminently plausible. Schoenberg was never the
most instinctive and sensible, the least cerebral and
intellectualizing of musicians. For just as Gustav
Mahler might stand as an instance of musicianly tem-
perament fatally outweighing musicianly intellect, so
Arnold Schoenberg might stand as an example of the
equally excessive outbalancing of sensibility by brain-
stuff. The friendship of the two men and their mu-
tual admiration might easily be explained by the fact
that each caught sight in the other of the element he
wanted most. No doubt, the works of Schoenberg's
early period, which extends from the songs, Op. i,
through the " Kammer symphonic," Op. 9, are full of a
fervent lyricism, a romantic effusiveness. " Gurre-
lieder," indeed, opens wide the floodgates of romanti-
cism. But these compositions are somewhat unchar-
acteristic and derivative. The early songs, for in-
stance, might have proceeded from the facile pen of
Richard Strauss. They have much of the Straussian
sleepy warmth and sweet harmonic color, much of the
Straussian exuberance which at times so readily de-
generates into the windy pride of the young bourgeois
deeming himself a superman. It was only by accident
that " Freihold " was not written by the Munich tone-
poet. The orchestral poem after Maeterlinck's
" Pelleas " is also ultra-romantic and post- Wagnerian.
The trumpet theme, the " Pelleas " theme, for in-
stance, is lineally descended from the " Walter von

236 Schoenherg

Stolzing " and " Parisfal " motives. The work reveals
Schoenberg striving to emulate Strauss in the field of
the symphonic poem; striving, however, in vain. For
it has none of Strauss^s glitter and point, and is
rather dull and soggy. The great, bristling, pathetic
climax is of the sort that has become exasperating and
vulgar, rather than exciting, since Wagner and Tchai-
kowsky first exploited it. On the whole, the work
is much less '' Pelleas et Melisande " than it is
" Pelleas und Melisanda." And the other works of
this period, more brilliantly made and more opulently
colored though they are, are still eminently of the ro-
mantic school. The person who declared ecstatically
that assisting at a performance of the string sextet,
" Verklarte Nacht," resembled " hearing a new ' Tris-
tan,^ " exhibited, after all, unconscious critical acumen.
The great cantata, " Gurrelieder," the symphonic set-
ting of Jens Peter Jacobsen's romance in lyrics, might
even stand as the grand finale of the whole post- Wag-
nerian, ultra-romantic period, and represent the mo-
ment at which the whole style and atmosphere did its
last heroic service. And even the " Kammersym-
phonie," despite all the signs of transition to a more
personal manner, despite the increased scholasticism of
tone, despite the more acidulous coloration, despite the
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

Schoenberg 237

first speaks his proper tongue. And in revealing him,
the work demonstrates how theoretical his intelligence
is. No doubt, the D-minor Quartet is an important
work, one of the most important of chamber compo-
sitions. Certainly, it is one of the great pieces of
modern music. It gives an unforgettable and vivid
sense of the voice, the accent, the timbre, of the hur-
tling, neurotic modern world; hints the coming of a
free and subtle, bitter and powerful, modern musical
art. As a piece of construction alone, the D-minor
Quartet is immensely significant. The polyphony is
bold and free, the voices exhibiting an independence
perhaps unknown since the days of the madrigalists.
The work is unified not only by the consolidation of
the four movements into one, but as well by a central
movement, a " durchflihrung " which, introduced be-
tween the scherzo and the adagio, reveals the inner
coherence of all the themes. There is no sacrifice of
logic to the rules of harmony. Indeed, the work is
characterized by a certain uncompromisingness and
sharpness in its harmonies. The instrumental coloring
is prismatic, all the registers of the strings being util-
ized with great deftness. Exclusive of the theme of
the scherzo, which recalls a little overmuch the Teu-
tonic banalities of Mahler^s symphonies, the quality
of the music is, on the whole, grave and poignant and
uplifted. It has a scholarly dignity, a magistral rich-
ness, a chiaroscuro that at moments recalls Brahms,

238 Schoenberg

though Schoenberg has a sensuous melancholy, a deli-
cacy and an Hebraic bitterness that the other has not.
Like so much of Brahms, this music comes out of
the silence of the study, though the study in this case
is the chamber of a Jewish scholar more than that
of a German. Were the entire work of the fullness
and lyricism of the last two movements; were it
throughout as impassioned as is the broad gray clamant
germinal theme that commences the work and sweeps
it before it, one might easily include the composer in
the company of the masters of musical art.

Unfortunately, the magnificent passages are inter-
spersed with unmusical ones. It is not only that the
work does not quite " conceal art," that it smells over-
much of the laboratory. It is that portions of it are
scarcely " felt '^ at all, are only too obviously carpen-
tered. The work is full of music that addresses itself
primarily to professors of theory. It is full of writing
dictated by an arbitrary and intellectual conception
of form. There is a great deal of counterpoint in it
that exists only for the benefit of those who " read ''
scores, and that clutters the work. There are whole
passages that exist only in obedience to some scholastic
demand for thematic inversions and deformations.
There is an unnecessary deal of marching and counter-
marching of instruments, an obsession with certain
rhythms that becomes purely mechanical, an intensi-
fication of the contrapuntal pickings and peckings that

Schoenherg 239

annoy so often in the compositions of Brahms. It is
Schoenberg the intellectualist, Schoenherg the Doctor
of Music, not Schoenberg the artist, who obtains
here.

And it is he one encounters almost solely in the
music of the third period, the enigmatical little pieces
for orchestra and piano. It is he who has emerged
victorious from the duel revealed by the D -minor Quar-
tet. Those grotesque and menacing little works are
lineally descended from the intellectualized passages
of the great preceding one, are, indeed, a complete
expression of the theoretical processes which called
them into being. For while in the quartet the scho-
lasticism appears to have been superimposed upon a
body of musical ideas, in the works of the last period
it appears well-nigh the generative principle. These
latter have all the airlessness, the want of poetry, the
frigidity of things constructed after a formula, dar-
ing and brilliant though that formula is. They make
it seem as though Schoenberg had, through a process
of consideration and thought and study, arrived at the
conclusion that the music of the future would, in the
logic of things, take such and such a turn, that tonal-
ity as it is understood was doomed to disappear, that
part-writing would attain a new independence, that
new conceptions of harmony would result, that rhythm
would attain a new freedom through the influence of
the new mechanical body of man, and had proceeded

240 Schoenberg

to incorporate his theories in tone. One finds the ex-
perimental and methodical at every turn throughout
these compositions. Behind them one seems invariably
to perceive some one sitting before a sheet of music
paper and tampering with the art of music; seeking
to discover what would result were he to accept as
harmonic basis not the major triad but the minor ninth,
to set two contradictory rhythms clashing, or to sharpen
everything and maintain a geometric hardness of line.
One always feels in them the intelligence setting forth
deliberately to discover new musical form. For all
their apparent freedom, they are full of the oldest
musical procedures, abound in canonic imitations, in
augmentations, and diminutions, in all sorts of grizzled
contrapuntal manoeuvers. They are head-music of
the most uncompromising sort. The " Five Orchestral
Pieces " abound in purely theoretical combinations
of instruments, combinations that do not at all sound.
" Herzgewachse," the setting of the poem of Maeter-
linck made contemporaneously with these pieces, makes
fantastic demands upon the singer, asks the voice to
hold high F pppp^ to leap swiftly across the widest
intervals, and to maintain itself over a filigree accom-
paniment of celesta, harmonium and harp. But it is
in the piano-music that the sonorities are most rudely
neglected. At moments they impress one as nothing
more than abstractions from the idiosyncrasies and
mannerisms of the works of Schoenberg's second period

Schoenberg 241

made in the hope of arriving at definiteness of style
and intensity of speech. They smell of the synagogue
as much as they do of the laboratory. Beside the Doc-
tor of Music there stands the Talmudic Jew, the man
all intellect and no feeling, who subtilizes over musical
art as though it were the Law.

The compositions of this period constitute an artis-
tic retrogression rather than an advance. They are
not " modern music " for all their apparent stylistic
kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine and
Ornstein. Nor are they " music of the past." They
belong rather more to the sort of music that has no
more relation with yesteryear than it has with this
or next. They belong to the sort that never has youth
and vigor, is old the moment it is produced. Their
essential inexpressiveness makes almost virtueless the
characteristics which Schoenberg has carried into them
from out his fecund period. The severity and boldness
of contour, so biting in the quartet, becomes almost
without significance in them. If there is such a thing
as rhythmless music, would not the stagnant orchestra
of the " Five Orchestral Pieces " exemplify it? The
alternately rich and acidulous color is faded; an icy
green predominates. And, curiously enough, through-
out the group the old romantic allegiance of the earliest
Schoenberg reaffirms itself. Wotan with his spear
stalks through the conclusion of the first of the " Three
Pieces for Pianoforte." And the second of the series.

242 Schoenherg

a composition not without its incisiveness, as well as
several of the tiny " Six Piano Pieces," Op. 19, re-
call at moments Brahms, at others Chopin, a Chopin
of course cadaverous and turned slightly green.

It may be that by means of these experiments
Schoenberg will gird himself for a new period of cre-
ativity just as once indubitably by the aid of experi-
ments which he did not publish he girded himself for
the period represented by the D-minor Quartet. It
may be that after the cloud of the war has completely
lifted from the field of art, and a normal interchange
is re-established it will be seen that the monodrama.
Op. 20, '' Die Lieder des ^ Pierrot Lunaire,' " which
was the latest of his works to obtain a hearing, was in
truth an earnest of a new loosing of the old lyrical im-
pulse so long incarcerated. But, for the present, Schoen-
berg, the composer, is almost completely obscured
by Schoenberg, the experimenter. For the present, he
is the great theoretician combating other theoreticians,
the Doctor of Music annihilating doctor-made laws.
As such, his usefulness is by no means small. He
speaks with an authority no less than that of his ad-
versaries, the other and less radical professors. He,
too, has invented a system and a method; his " Har-
monielehre," for instance, is as irrefragable as theirs;
he can quote scripture with the devil. He is at least
demolishing the old constraining superstitions, and in
so doing may exercise an incalculable influence on the

Schoenberg 243

course of music. It may be that many a musician of
the future will find himself the better equipped because
of Schoenberg^s explorations. He is undoubtedly the
most magistral theorist of the day. The fact that he
could write at the head of his treatise on harmony,
^' What I have here set down I have learned from
my pupils," independently proves him a great teacher.
It is probable that his later music, the music of his
puzzling " third period," will shortly come to be con-
sidered as simply a part of his unique course of in-
struction.

Sibel

lUS

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

Air blows through the music of Sibelius, quickens
even the slightest of his compositions. There are cer-
tain of his songs, certain of his orchestral sketches,
that would be virtueless enough were it not for the
windy freshness that pervades them. Out of all his
works, even out of the most commonplace, there pro-
ceeds a far and resonant space. Songs like " To the
Evening," ^' Call," " Autumn Sundown," whatever
their ultimate musical value, seem actually informed
by the northern evening, seem to include within their
very substance the watery tints of the sky, the naive

245

246 Sibelius

fragrance of forests and meadows, the tintinnabulation
drifting through the still air of sunset. It is as though
Sibelius were so sensible to the quality of his native
earth that he knows precisely in what black and mas-
sive chords of the piano, say, lie the silence of rocks
and clouds, precisely what manner of resistance be-
tween chant and piano can make human song ring as
in the open. But it is in his orchestral works, for
he is determined an orchestral writer, that he has fixed
it most successfully. There has been no composer,
not Brahms in his German forest, nor Rameau amid
the poplars of his silver France, not Borodin on his
steppes, nor Moussorgsky in his snow-covered fields
under the threatening skies, whose music gives back
the colors and forms and odors of his native land more
persistently. The orchestral compositions of Sibelius
seem to have passed over black torrents and desolate
moorlands, through pallid sunlight and grim primeval
forests, and become drenched with them. The instru-
mentation is all wet grays and blacks, relieved only
by bits of brightness wan and elusive as the northern
summer, frostily green as the polar lights. The works
are full of the gnawing of bassoons and the bleakness
of the English horn, full of shattering trombones and
screaming violins, full of the sinister rolling of drums,
the menacing reverberation of cymbals, the icy glitter-
ing of harps. The musical ideas of those of the com-
positions that are finely realized recall the ruggedness

Sibelius 247

and hardiness and starkness of things that persist in
the Finnish winter. The rhythms seem to approach
the wild, unnumbered rhythms of the forest and the
wind and the flickering sunlight. Music has forever
been a movement " up to nature," and Schoenberg's
motto is but the precision of a motive that has gov-
erned all composers. But Sibelius has written music
that seems to come as the very answer to the call, and
to be the North indeed.

Such a discovery of nature was necessarily a part
of his self-revelation. For Sibelius is essentially the
Norseman. For all his personal accomplishment, his
cultural position, he is still the Finnish peasant, pre-
serving intact within himself the racial inheritance.
Other musicians, having found life still a grim brief
welter of bloody combats and the straining of high,
unyielding hearts and the falling of sure inalienable
doom, have fancied themselves the successors of the
Skalds, and dreamt themselves within the gray prime-
val North. But, in the presence of Sibelius, they seem
only too evidently men of a gentler, later generation.
Beside his, their music appears swathed in romantic
glamour. For there are times when he comes into the
concert-room like some man of a former age, like some
spare, knotted barbarian from the world of the sagas.
There are times when he comes amongst us like one
who might quite conceivably have been comrade to
pelted warriors who fought with clubs and hammers,

248 Sibelius

like one who might have beaten out a rude music by
black, smoking hearthsides quite as readily as made
tone-poems for the modern concert-room. And his
music with its viking blows and wild, crying accents,
its harsh and uncouth speech, sets us without circum-
stance in that sunken world, sets us in the very midst
of the stark men and grave, savage women for whom
the sagas were made, so that we can see them in all
their hurtling strength and rank barbarity, can well-
nigh touch them with the fingers of our hands. And
because Sibelius 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 its century-long adjustment. It is the North
that has given him his profound experience. Its
rhythms have distinguished him. Its color, and the
color of his spirit, are twin. And so he turns toward
it as to a mirror. Like that of the hero of his tone-
poem, his life is a long journey toward Finland. Con-
tact with Finnish earth gives him back into his own
hands. It is the North, the wind and the moorland
and the sea, that gathers the fragments of his broken
soul, and makes him whole again.

It was with the sanction of a people that Sibelius
came to his task. For centuries before his birth the
race that bore him had lain prone upon its inclement
coasts. But now a new vigor was germinating within

Sibelius 249

it. Youth had overtaken it once more, and filled it
with the desire of independence. Chained to the Rus-
sian Empire, it was reaching out toward all that could
give it the strength to persist and endure, toward all
that could give it knowledge of its proper soul. And
so Sibelius, in the search for the expression of his own
personality, so much at one with that of his fellows,
was traveling in the common way. The word that he
was seeking, the word that should bring fulfilment to
his proper soul, was deeply needed by his fellows. In-
articulate thousands, unaware though they were of
his existence, awaited his work, wanted the sustenance
it could give. And, certainly, the sense of the need-
fulness of his work, the sense of the large value set
upon his best and purest attainments by life itself,
must have been with Sibelius always, must have sup-
plied him with a powerful incentive and made enor-
mously for his achievements. He must have felt all
the surge of the race driving him. He must have had
continually the marvelous stimulus of feeling about
him, for all the night and the cold, the forms of com-
rades straining toward a single lofty goal, felt him-
self one of an army of marching men. This folk, far
in its past, had imagined the figure of a hero-poet,
Vainemunden, and placed in his hands an instrument
" shaped out of very sorrow," and attributed magical
power to his song. And Sibelius, bowed over his
music-paper, must have felt the dream stir within him.

2^0 Sibelius

must have felt incarnate within himself, however in-
completely, that mysterious image, and so proceeded
with his work everlastingly assured that all he actu-
ally accomplished woke from out of the heart of the
people, and responded to its immemorial need.

Out of such an impulse his art has come. No doubt,
some of it is not the response entirely worthy of so
high a stimulus. Few modern composers of eminence
are as singularly uneven as Sibelius. Moods like that
which mothered the amiable elegance of the " Valse
Triste " and that which produced the hard and naked
essentiality of the Fourth Symphony are almost for-
eign to each other. The creative power itself is ex-
traordinarily fitful in him. It is as if, for all his
physical robustness, he has not quite the spiritual in-
defatigability of the major artist. He has not that
inventive heat that permits the composer of indis-
putably the first rank to realize himself unflaggingly
in all his independence and intensity. Too often Si-
belius's individuality is cluttered and muffled by that
of other men. No doubt every creative artist passes
through a period of submission to alien faiths. But
in Sibelius there appear to exist two distinct per-
sonalities, the one strong and independent, the other
timid and uninventive, who dominate him alternately.
Even some of the music contemporaneous with the
magnificent Fourth Symphony is curiously ineffectual
and pointless. True, the color, the air and tone of

Sibelius 251

the North are never entirely absent from his work. His
songs invariably recapture, sometimes almost miracu-
lously, the dark and mourning accents of the Scandi-
navian folk-song. For all the modernity of medium
they are simple and sober. Moreover, in those of his
compositions that approach banality most closely, there
is a certain saving hardness and virility and honesty.
Unlike his neighbor, Grieg, he is never mincing and
meretricious. We never find him languishing in a
pretty boudoir. He is always out under the sky. It
is only that he is not always free and resourceful and
deeply self -critical. Even through the bold and rugged
and splendid Violin Concerto there flit at moments
the shadows of Beethoven and Wagner and Tchaikow-
sky. The first theme of the quartet " Voces intimae "
resembles not a little a certain theme in '^ Boris." The
close of " Nightride and Sunrise " is watered Brahms
and watered Strauss. And there are phrases in his
tone-poem that commence with all his proper rhythmic
ardor and then suddenly degenerate. There are mo-
ments when his harmonic sense, generally keen and
true, abandons him completely. And even works like
the " Finlandia " and " Karelia '^ overtures, for all
their generosity of intention, for all their suggestion of
peasant voices lifted in song, disappoint because of the
substitution of a popular lyricism, a certain easy
sweetness, for the high poetry one might have
anticipated.

252* Sibelius

And yet, one has but to turn to the symphonies of
Sibelius to encounter music of another intensity, and
gauge the richness of response that, at times, it is
given him to make. It is as if the very dignity and
grandeur of the medium itself sets him free. Just
as the form of the concerto seems to have given his
sense of the violin a play apparently denied it by the
smaller mediums, so these larger orchestral forms seem
to have liberated his imagination, his orchestral genius,
and made him poet of his folk indeed. His personal
quality, spread more thinly in his songs and tone-
poems, is essentialized and developed in these other
works. The symphonies themselves are in a sense the
stages of the essentialization. In the first of them his
language emerges, to an extent imparting its unmis-
takable coloration to a matter perhaps not entirely
distinguished. There is a looseness and lushness, a
romanticism and balladry, in the work, that is not
quite characteristic. Still, the honesty, the grimness
and savagery and lack of sensuality, are Sibelius's
own. The adagio is steeped in his proper pathos, the
pathos of brief, bland summers, of light that falls for
a moment, gentle and mellow, and then dies away.
Something like a memory of a girl sitting amid the
simple flowers in the white northern sunshine haunts
the last few measures. The crying, bold finale is full
of the tragedy of northern nature. And in the Second
Symphony the independence is complete. The orches-

Sibelius '2 153

tra is handled individually, sparingly, and with perfect
point. Often the instruments sound singly, or by twos
and threes. What had been but 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 his work of all superfluity and indecision.
And, curiously, through speaking his own language in
all its homeliness and peasant flavor, he seems to have
moved more closely to his land. The work, his '' pas-
toral " symphony, for all its absolute and formal char-
acter, reflects a landscape. It is full of home sounds,
of cattle and '' saeters," of timbered houses and sparse
nature. And through it there glances a pale evanes-
cent sunlight, and through it there sounds the burden
of a lowly tragedy.

But it is only with his Fourth Symphony, dubbed
" futuristic " because of the unusual boldness and pith-
iness of its style, the absence of a general tonality, the
independence of the orchestral voices, that Sibelius's
gift attains absolute expression. There are certain
works that are touchstones, and make apparent what
is original and virtuous in all the rest of the labors
of their creator, and give his personality a unique and
irrefragable position. The Fourth Symphony of Sibe-
lius is such a composition. It is a very synthesis of
all his work, the reduction to its simplest and most
positive terms of a thing that has been in him since
first he began to write, and that received heretofore

254 Sibelius

only fragmentary and indecisive expression. In its
very form it is essence. The structure is all bone.
The style is sharpened to a biting terseness. The color-
ing is the refinement of all his color; the rhythms have
a freedom toward which Sibelius 's rhythms have al-
ways aspired; the mournful melody of the adagio is
well-nigh archetypical. All his life Sibelius has been
searching for the tone of this music, desiring to speak
with its authority, and concentrate the soul and tragedy
of a people into a single and eternal moment. All his
life he had been seeking the prophetic gestures of which
this work is full. For the symphony is like a sum-
mary and a conclusion. It carries us into some high
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 unlimited
loneliness, beneath a somber sky. There is movement,
a climax, a single cry of passion and despair, and then,
only the soughing of wind through hoary branches.
The scherzo is the flickering of mad watery lights, a
fantastic whipping dance, a sudden sinister conclusion.
In the adagio, a bleak lament struggles upwards, seems
to push through some vast inert mass, to pierce to a
momentary height and largeness, and then sinks,
broken. And through the finale there quivers an il-
lusory light. The movement is the march, the on-
coming rush, of vast formless hordes, the passage of

Sibelius 2CC

unnamed millions that surge for an instant with their
cries and banners, and vanish into nothingness. It is
possible that Sibelius will create another work similarly
naked and intense. More definitive, it cannot be.

Loeffler

Legend records of Inez de Castro, Queen of Castile,
that she was dethroned and driven into exile by a
rival, and that before her husband and her partisans
could restore her to kingdom, she had died. But her
husband caused her body to be embalmed and borne
with him wherever he went. And when finally he had
vanquished the pretender, he had the corpse decked
in all the regal insignia, had it set upon the throne
in the great hall of the palace of the kings of Castile,
and vassals and Hegemen summoned to do the homage
that had been denied the unhappy queen in her life-
time.

The music of Charles Martin Loeffler is like
the dead Inez de Castro on her throne. It, too, is
swathed in diapered cloths and hung with gold and
precious stones. It, too, is set above and apart from
men in a sort of royal state, and surrounded by all the
emblems of kingdom. And beneath its stiff and in-
crusted sheath there lies, as once there lay beneath
the jeweled robes and diadem of the kings of Castile,
not a living being, but a corse.

For Loeffler is one of those exquisites whose refine-
ment is unfortunately accompanied by sterility, per-
haps even results from it. But for his essential un-

257

2^8 Loeffler

creativeness, he might well have become the composer
uniquely representative of the artistic movement in
which the late nineteenth-century refinement and ex-
quisiteness manifested itself. No musician, not De-
bussy even, was better prepared for bringing the sym-
bolist movement into music. Loeffler is affiliated in
temper, if not exactly in achievement, with the bril-
liant band of belated romanticists who adopted as their
device the sonnet of Verlaine's beginning.

" Je suis Pempire a la fin de la decadence."

One finds in him almost t3^ically the sensibility to
the essences and colors rather more than to the spec-
tacle, the movement, the adventure of things. The
nervous delicacy, the widowhood of the spirit, the
horror of the times, the mystic paganism, the home-
sickness for a tranquil and sequestered and soft-col-
ored land ^' where shepherds still pipe to their flocks,
and nun-like processions of clouds float over bluish
hills and fathomless age-old lakes " are eminently pres-
ent in him. He is in almost heroic degree the spirit
forever searching blindly through the loud and garish
city, the hideous present, for some vestige, some mes-
sage from its homeland; finding, some sundown, in the
ineffable glamour of rose and mauve and blue through
granite piles, " le souvenir avec le crepuscule." He,
too, one would guess, has dreamt of selling his soul to
the devil, and called upon him, ah, how many terrible

Loeffler 259

nights, to appear; and has sought a refuge from the
world in Catholic mysticism and ecstasy. Had it been
given him to realize himself in music, we should un-
doubtedly have had a body of work that would have
been the veritable milestones of the route traversed
by the entire movement. Would not the " Pagan
Poem " have been the musical equivalent of the mystic
and sorrowful sensuality of Verlaine? Would not the
two rhapsodies '' L'Etang " and " La Cornemuse "
have transmuted to music the macabre and sinister note
of so much symbolist poetry? Would we not have had
in "La Villanelle du Diable " an equivalent for the
black mass and "La-bas"; in " Hora mystica " an
equivalent for "En route"; in "Music for Four
Stringed Instruments " a musical " Sagesse '7 Does
not Charles Martin Loeffler, who, after writing " A
Pagan Poem," makes a retreat in a Benedictine mon-
astery, and who, at home in Medford, Massachusetts,
teaches the choristers to sing Gregorian chants, re-
call Joris K^rl Huysmans, the " oblat " of La
Trappe?

To a limited extent, of course, he has succeeded in
fixing the color of the symbolist movement in music.
Some of his richer, dreamier songs, some of his finer
bits of polishing, his rarer drops of essence, are indeed
the musical counterpart of the goldsmith's work, the
preciosity, of a Gustave Kahn or a Stuart Merrill.
But a musical Huysmans, for instance, it was never

26o Loeffler

in his power to become. For he has never possessed
the creative heat, the fluency, the vein, the felicity,
the power necessary to the task of upbuilding out of
the tones of instruments anything as flamboyant and
magnificent as the novelist's black and red edifices.
He has never been vivid and ingenuous and spontane-
ous enough a musician even to develop a personal
idiom. He has always been hampered and bound. His
earlier compositions, the quintet, the orchestral "Les
Vieillees de I'Ukraine " and '' La bonne chanson," for
instance, are distinctly derivative and uncharacter-
istic in style. The idiom is derived in part from Faure,
in part from Wagner and other of the romanticists.
The string quintet has even been dubbed " A Musi-
cal ^ Trip Around the World in Eighty Days.' " Nor
is the idiom of his later and more representative
period primarily and originally any more characteris-
tic. It never seems to surge quite wholly and cleanly
and fairly. The chasing to which it has evidently been
subjected cannot quite conceal its descent. The set-
ting of " La Cloche felee " of Baudelaire, for instance,
is curiously Germanic and heavy, for all the subtlety
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 to represent the sublunary
aspect of Virgil's genius. And " Hora mystica " and
" Music for Four Stringed Instruments," which have a
certain stylistic unity, nevertheless reveal the composer

Loeffler 261!

hampered by the Gregorian and scholastic idiom which
he has sought to assimilate.

Nor has he ever had the power to express and ob-
jectify himself completely, and achieve vital form.
In performance, most of his works shrink and dwindle.
The central and sustaining structure, the cathedral
which is behind every living composition and manifests
itself through it, is in these pieces so vague and atten-
uated that it fades into the background of the concert-
hall, is like gray upon gray. The gems and gold
thread and filigree with which this work is sewn tar-
nish in the gloom. Something is there, we perceive,
something that moves and sways and rises and ebbs
fitfully in the dim light. But it is a wraithlike thing,
and undulates and falls before our eyes like flames that
have neither redness nor heat. Even the terrible bag-
pipe of the second rhapsody for oboe; even the caldron
of the " Pagan Poem,'' that transcription of the most
sensual and impassioned of Virgil's eclogues, with its
mystic, dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of
" La Villanelle du Diable," and the sundown fires that
beat through the close of " Hora mystica " are curi-
ously 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 second movement of the " Music
for Four Stringed Instruments"; certain songs like
^' Le Son du cor," that have atmosphere and a delicate

262 Loeffier

poetry, are distinctly exceptional in this body of work.
What chiefly lives in it are certain poignant phrases,
certain eloquent bars, a glowing, winey bit of color
here, a velvety phrase for the oboe or the clarinet, a
sharp, brassy, pricking horn-call, a dreamy, wan-
dering melody for the voice 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 dis-
tinction, even, of Loeffler's work, there can be no ques-
tion. He is not one of the music-making herd. The
subtlety and originality of intention which his com-
positions almost uniformly display, the unflagging ef-
fort to inclose within each of his forms a matter rare
and novel and rich, set him forever apart, even in his
essential weakness, from the academic and conform-
ing crew. The man who has composed these scores
makes at least the gesture of the artist, and comes to
music to express a temper original and delicate and
aristocratic, disdainful of the facile and the common-
place, a sensibility often troubled and shadowy and
fantastic. He is eminently not one of the pathetic,
half-educated musicians so common in America. He
knows something of musical science; knows how a
tonal edifice should be unified; has a sense of the
chemistry of the orchestra. He appears familiar with
the plainsong, and has based a symphony and por-

Loeffler 263

tions of a quartet on Gregorian modes. Even at a
period when the sophisticated and cultivated composer
is becoming somewhat less a rarity, his culture is re-
markable, his knowledge of literature eclectfc. 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 number of more gifted musicians do not
belong, who are ever respectful of their medium, 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 force to be expressive,
to remedy his cardinal defect, to eschew whatever is
trite and outworn in the line of the melody, the
sequence of the harmonies, to rid himself of whatever
is derivative and impersonal and undistinguished 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 his energy, one senses, has gone into
the cutting and polishing and shining up and setting
of little brightly colored bits of music, little sharp, in-
tense moments. One feels that they have been caressed
and stroked and smoothed and regarded a thousand
times; that Loeffler has dwelt upon them and touched
them with a sort of narcissistic love. Indeed, it must
have been a great labor that was expended on the dark-
ening and spicing and sharpening of the style in cer-

264 Loeffler

tain of his orchestral poems; the effort to create a new
idiom based on the Gregorian modes, to which '^ Hora
mystica " and the recent work for string quartet bear
witness, must in itself have been large. But though in
result of all the chasing and hammering on gold, the
filing and polishing, the vessel of his art has perhaps
become richer and finer, it has not become any fuller.
His second period differs from his first only in the
fact that in it he has gone from one form of uncreativ-
ity to another somewhat more dignified and unusual.
The compositions of both periods have, after all, the
selfsame lack. His destiny seems to have been in-
evitable.

And so, in its confused argentry and ghostliness, its
crystallization and diaphinity, his music resembles at
times nothing so much as the precious remains and
specimens of an extinct planet; things transfixed in
cold eternal night, icy and phosphorescent of hue. No
atmosphere bathes them. Sap does not mount in them.
Should we touch them, they would crumble. This,
might have been a flower. But now it glistens with
crystals of mica and quartz. These, are jewels. But
their fires are quenched. These candied petals are
the passage from " Music for Four Stringed In-
struments " glossed in the score '' un jardin plein des
fieurs nai'ves," while this vial of gemmy green liquid
is that entitled " une pre toute emeraude." The petri-
fied saurian there, whose bones have suffered

Loeffler 265

" a sea-change
Into something rich and strange "

is the Spanish rhapsody for ^cello; the string of steely-
beads, the setting of the " To Helen " of Poe. And
the objects that float preserved in those little flasks
are some of the popular ditties with which Loeffler
is so fond of incrusting his work. Once they were
" a La Villette," and the Malagueila, and the eight-
eenth-century marching song of the Lorraine soldiery,
and flourished under the windy heaven. But when
Loeffler transplanted them respectively into " La Villa-
nelle du Diable," into the 'cello rhapsody and into
" Music for Four Stringed Instruments," they under-
went the fate that befalls everything subjected to his
exquisite and sterilizing touch.

One comes to the conclusion that perhaps the most
significant and symbolic thing in the career of Charles
Martin Loeffler is his place of residence. For this
Alsatian, French in culture, temperamentally related
to the decadents, writing music at first resembling that
of Faure and the Wagnerizing Frenchmen, later that
of Dukas, and last that of d'Indy and Magnard, has
lived the greater portion of his life in no other city
than Boston. Coming originally to America for the
purpose of playing first violin in the Boston Symphony
Orchestra, he has found the atmosphere of the New
England capital so pleasant that he has remained there
practically ever since. He whom one might suppose

266 Loeffler

almost native to the Paris of Debussy and Magnard
and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave Kahn and Huys-
mans, has found comfortable an environment essen-
tially tight and illiberal, a society that masks philistin-
ism with toryism, and manages to drive its radical
and vital and artistic youth, in increasing numbers
every year, to other places in search of air. And his
own career, on the spiritual plane, seems just such an
exchange, the preference of a shadowy and frigid place
to a blazing and quivering one, the exchange of the
eternal Paris for the eternal Boston. His music seems
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 Chadwicks and
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 first of his real compositions are
like fragments of some cosmopolis of caves and towers
of steel, of furious motion and shafts of nitrogen glare
become music. They are like sensitive surfaces that
have been laid in the midst of the New Yorks; and
record not only the clangors, but all the violent forms
of the city, the beat of the frenetic activity, the inter-
secting planes of light, the masses of the masonry
with the tiny, dwarf-like creatures running in and
out, the electric signs staining the inky nightclouds.
They give again the alarum of dawn breaking upon
the crowded, 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. They
picture the very Niebelheim, the hordes of slaves
herded by giants of their own creation, the commands
and cries of power in the bells, whistles, signals. The
grinding and shrieking of loaded trains in the tubes,
cranes laboring in the port, rotary engines drilling, tur-
bines churning 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

267

268 Ornstein

of tenement windows giving on bare walls. And human
souls and songs that are gray and black like them bloom
in the blind air, open their velvet petals, their lus-
trous, soft corollas, from crannies and windows into
this metal, this dun, this unceasing roar.

For Ornstein is youth. He is the one striving
to adjust himself to all this thunder and welter and
glare. He is the spring as it comes up through the
pavements, the aching green sap. In part, no doubt,
he is the resurrection of the most entombed of spirits,
that of the outlaw European Jew. He is the break-
ing down of the walls with which the Jew had blotted
out the hateful world. He is Lazarus emerging in
his grave clothes into the new world; the Jewish spirit
come up into the day from out the basement and cellar
rooms of the synagogue where it had been seated for
a thousand years drugging itself with rabbinical lore,
refining almost maniacally upon the intention of some
obscure phrase or parable, negating the lure of the
world and of experience with a mass of rites and ob-
servances and ceremonials, losing itself in the gray
desert stretches of theory, or wasting itself in the im-
possible dream of Zion restored in modern Palestine
and Solomon's temple rebuilt in a provincial capital
of the Turkish Empire. And Ornstein's music is the
music of a birth that is the tearing away of grave
clothes grown to the body, the clawing away, stone
by stone, of the wall erected against the call of ex-

Ornstein 269

perience which was sure to be death-dealing. The old
prohibitions are still active in it in the terror with
which life is viewed, in the menace and cruelty of
things, the sharpness of edges encountered, the weight
of the masses that threaten to fall and overwhelm, the
fury and blackness and horror of nature once again
regarded. Again and again there passes through it the
haggard, shrouded figure of the Russian Jew. The
" Poems of 191 7 " are full of the wailings and rock-
ings of little old Ghetto mothers. Again and again
Ornstein speaks in accents that resemble nothing quite
so much as the savage and woeful language of the Old
Testament.

But the music of Ornstein is much besides. It is
a thing germane to all beings born into the age of
steel. It is the expression of all the men who have
tried to embrace and love the towering piles, the
strange, black, desolate pathways that are the world
to-day. The figure that one discerns in the compo-
sitions beginning with the "Dwarf Suite," Opus 16,
is one that we all have known intimately a space.
These pieces are not youth seen through the golden
haze of retrospection. They are the expression of
groping, fumbling youth as it feels and as it feels
itself to be. They are music young in all its excess,
its violence, its sharp griefs and sharper joys, its
unreflecting, trembling strength. The spring comes
up hot and cruel in them. There is all the loneliness

270 Ornstein

of youth in this music, all the mysterious dreams of a
world scarce understood, all the hesitancies and blind
gropings of powers untried. Always, one senses the
pavements stretching between steel buildings, the
black, hurrying tides of human beings; and through
them all, the oppressed figure of one searching out
the meaning of all this convulsive activity into which
he has been born. It is such solitude that speaks in
the first ^' Impression of Notre-Dame " with its gray
mounting masses, its cloisteral reverberation of bells,
its savage calls of the city to one standing alone with
the monument of a dead age. Violent, uncontrolled
passions cry out in the '' Three Moods," with their
youthful surrender to the moment. The energy of
adolescence, unleashed, rejoicing in pure muscular ac-
tivity, disports itself in the ^' Shadow Dances," and in
the " Wild Man's Dance," with its sheer, naked, beat-
ing rhythm. The bitterness of adolescence mocks in
the '^ Three Burlesques," in the " Dance of the
Gnomes," with its parodying of clumsy movements.
What revolt in the first " Piano Sonata "! And other
emotions, timid and uncertain of themselves, uneasy
with the swelling sap of springtide, speak their poetry
and their pain, tell their tales and are silent, make
us remember what once we felt.

The city, the birth into the new world, youth, exist
in the music of Ornstein with all the sharpness of
shock because of an imagination of a wonderful force-

Ornsfein 271

fulness. There is no indirectness in Ornstein, no
vagueness. His tension is always of the fullest, the
stiffest. What he feels, what he hears, he sets down,
irrespective of all the canons and rules and procedures.
Harmony with him is something different than it is
with any other composer. Piano colors of a violence
and garishness are hurled against each other. The
lowest and highest registers of the instrument clash
in " Improvisata." Rhythms battle, convulsively, al-
most. In portions of the " Sinfonietta," five rhythms
are to be found warring against each other. Melodic
curves, lines, sing ecstatically over turbulent, mottled
counterpoint in the piano and violin sonatas. The
violin sonata is something of an attempt to exhaust
all the possibilities of color-contrast contained in the
little brown box. In the first '' Impression de Notre-
Dame," the piano is metallic with the booming bells.
In the second, it is stony, heavy with the congested,
peering, menacing forms of gargoyles. In the accom-
paniment to the song " Waldseligkeit," it seems to give
the musical equivalent for the substance of wood. No
doubt, to one who, like Ornstein, regarded music only
as a means of communication, as speech of man to
man, and occupied himself only with the communica-
tion of his sensations and experience in briefest, di-
rectest, simplest form, there must have come moments
of the most terrible self-doubt, when all the anathemas
of the fathers of the musical church thundered loud

272 Ornstein

in his ears, and other men's forms and proportions
seemed to make his shrivel. It was doubtless thank-
fulness to William Blake, that other " mad " inventor
of wild images and designs, that other " rager in the
wilds," for fortification and sustenance, that made him
preface his violin sonata with the Argument of '' The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and defend himseif
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 Leo Ornstein are not so raging and lion-in-
fested. For while one speculates whether these pieces
are music or not, one discovers that one has entered
through them into the life of another being, and
through him into the lives of a whole upgrowing gen-
eration.

Ornstein 273

At present, however, some of those qualities that
were so clearly visible in Leo Ornstein during the first
years in which he disclosed himself are somewhat ob-
scured. Something not entirely reassuring has hap-
pened to the man. A great deal of the music that
he has been composing of late wants the bite his
earlier work had. The colors are not so piping hot.
The outlines are less bold and jagged and clear-cut.
Some of the convulsive intensity, the fury, has passed
out of the rhythmic element. The melodies are less
acidulous, the moods less unbridled. No doubt, some-
thing happier has entered into his music, something
more voluptuous and smooth. The 'cello chants pas-'
sionately and dreamily in the two sonatas Ornstein
has written of late for it. The racial element is soft-
ened, become gentler and duskier and more romantic.
The Jew in it no longer wears his gaberdine. If he
wears a prayer-shawl at all, it is one made of silk.
The Jeremiah of the desert has given way to the
young, amorous, dream-filled poet, a poet of the sort
that arose among the Jews in Spain during the years
of the Moorish ascendency. Yet, a certain intensity,
a certain originality, a certain vein of genius, has un-
dergone eclipse in the change. Something a little bril-
liant, a little facile, a little undistinguished, has intro-
duced itself, even into the best of the newest pieces.
The texture is thinner, the tension slacker. Ornstein
does not seem to be putting himself into them with

274 Ornstein

the same directness and completeness with which he
put himself into his earlier work. Moreover, occasion-
ally there come from his pen works into which he is
not putting himself at all. A choral society 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 of Tchaikowsky's. The piano
sonatina of the Funeral March, although by no means
as insignificant, is nevertheless uncharacteristic in the
resemblances it bears the music of Ravel. One thing
the earlier compositions are not, and that is, deriva-
tive. Ornstein, they make plain, had benefited by the
achievements of Debussy and Moussorgsky and Scria-
bine. But they made plain as well that he had de-
veloped a style of his own, a style that was, for all
its crudeness and harshness, personal. In becoming
again a disciple he reverts to something that he seemed
to have left behind him when he wrote his clangorous
'' Dwarf Suite."

What this new period of Ornstein's composition
represents it is not easy to say. Probably, it is a
period of transition, a time of the marshaling of forces
to a new and fiercer onslaught. Such a time of ges-
tation might well be necessary to Ornstein's genius.
It is possible that he has had to give up something
in order to gain something else, to try for less in order
to establish himself upon a footing firmer than that
upon which he stood. His genius during his first years

Ornstein 275

of creation was lyrical purely. It was a thing that
expressed itself in picturing moods, in making brief
flights, in establishing moments musicaux. He is at
his best in his piano preludes, in his small forms.
The works composed during this period in the
larger forms, the violin sonata excepted, are
scarcely achieved. The outer movements of the
Grand Sonata for pianoforte, for instance, are far
inferior to the central ones. Whatever the merit
of some of the individual movements of " The Mas-
queraders," Opus 36, and the " Poems of 191 7,'' and
at times it is not small, the works as a whole lack
form. They have none of the unity and variety and
solidity of the " Papillons " and the " Carnaval " of
Schumann or the " Valses nobles et sentimen tales "
of Ravel, for instance, works to which they are in
certain other respects comparable. As he grew a little
older, Ornstein's nature probably began to demand
other forms beside these smaller, more episodic ones.
It probably began to strive for greater scope, dura-
tion, development, complexity. And so, in order to
gain greater intellectual control over his outflow, to
learn to build piles of a bulk that require an
entirely different workmanship and supervision
than do preludes and impressions, Ornstein doubt-
lessly has been withholding himself, diminishing
the intensity of his fire. In order to learn to
organize his material, he has doubtlessly uncon-

276 Ornstein

sciously lessened its density and vibrancy for the
time being.

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

At the same time, there is a distinct possibility that
the present period of Ornstein's composition is not a
time of preparation for a new flight. There is a dis-
tinct possibility that it represents an unwholesome
slackening. After all, may it not be that he has
flinched? Stronger men than he have succumbed to a
hostile world. And Ornstein has found the world very
hostile. He has found America absolutely unprepared
for his art, possessed with no technique to cope with
it. He has very largely been operating in a void.
It is not so much that he has been tried and found
wanting. He has not even been heard. Because the
musical world has been unable to follow him, it has
dismissed him entirely from its consciousness. Scarcely
a critic has been able to express what it is about his
music that he likes or dislikes. They have either ridi-
culed him or written cordially about him without say-
ing anything. There is nothing more demoralizing for
the artist. At present they are even classing him with

Ornstein 277

Prokofief. The virtuosi have shown a like timidity.
Scarcely a one has dared perform his music. Many
have refrained out of policy^ unwilling to forfeit any
applause. Others have no doubt quite sincerely re-
fused to perform any music that sounded cacophonous
to them. For the army of musicians is almost entirely
composed of rearguard. Not a single one of the or-
chestral conductors in New York has dared consider
performing his '' Sinfonietta/' to say nothing of the
early and comparatively accessible '' Marche funebre "
and " A la chinoise." Of the Philharmonic Society,
of course, one expects nothing. But one might
suppose that the various organizations allegedly
*^ friendly " to music, eager for the cause of the " new "
and the " modern," would see to it that the musician
whom such an authority as Ernest Bloch has declared
to be the single composer in America who displays
positive signs of genius, was given his opportunity.
The contrary has been the case. DTndy's foolish
war symphony, the works of Henry Hadley, of Rach-
maninoff, of David Stanley Smith, even of Dvorsky,
that person who exists as little in the field of compo-
sition as he does in Biarritz, have received and do
receive the attention of our powerful ones. It would
be small wonder, then, if an artist like Ornstein, who,
like every real artist, requires the contact of other
minds and cannot go on producing, hopeless of attain-
ing performance and exhibition, had finally flinched

278 Ornstein

and wearied of his efforts, and suddenly found himself
writing such music as the intelligences of his fellow-
craftsmen can reasonably be expected to comprehend.
There are other reasons that might lead one to pre-
sume that these recent works represent a slump. For
Ornstein has been devoting too much of his energy
to concertizing. He has been traveling madly over the
United States and Canada for the last few years, living
in Pullman sleepers and playing to audiences of all
sorts. During the first years that he was in America
after the outbreak of war in Europe, he at least played
the music that he loved. But no one was ready for
programs beginning with Korngold and Cyril Scott and
ending with Ravel and Scriabine and Ornstein him-
self. So little by little Ornstein began adulterat-
ing his programs, adding a popular piece here,
another there. Recently, he has been playing
music into which he cannot put his heart at all,
Liszt and Rubinstein as well as Beethoven and
Schumann. He has been performing it none too bril-
liantly. Such an existence cannot but dull the man's
edge. No one can play the Twelfth Hungarian Rhap-
sody or the transcription of the Mendelssohn Wedding
March or the Rigoletto Fantasy continually without
being punished. No one who does not love them can
play the Sonata Appassionata or the Etudes sympho-
niques or the waltzes of Chopin long without becoming
dulled and spoiled. So with composition become an

Ornstetn 279

interval between two trains, and expression an attempt
to please audiences and to establish oneself with the
public as a popular pianist, it is not the most prepos-
terous of thoughts that Leo Ornstein has lost some-
thing he once possessed in beautiful and superabundant
form.

Still, it is fairly incredible. It is impossible that
great and permanent harm should have been done
him already. He was too vital and sane a being to
be so easily corrupted. For those who knew him in
the first years of his return from Paris, he was noth-
ing if not the genius. If he was less accomplished,
less resourceful and magistral an artist than Stra-
winsky, for instance, whom he resembles in a certain
general way, he was at least a more human, a
more passionate being. It is this great vitality, this
rich temperament, that makes one sure that we are
not going to have in Leo Ornstein another Richard
Strauss, another Strauss who has never had the many
fertile years vouchsafed the other. It makes us sure
that he will finally come to terms with his managers
and audiences, and that the harm already done him
by his way of life will grow no greater. It convinces
us that his present mood is but the result of a neces-
sary process of transition from one basis to another;
that the man is really summoning himself for the works
that will express him in his manhood. And we are
positive that there will shortly come from him weighty

280 Ornstein

musical forms with colors as burning and deep as those
of his first pieces, and of like intensity and boldness;
and that Leo Ornstein is sure of reaching the high
heaven of art for which he seemed and still seems
bound.

Bloch

Once before, East and West have met and merged.
On the plains where the soldiers of Darius and Alex-
ander slaughtered one another, and where the Mace-
donian phalanxes recoiled before the castellated
elephants of Porus, a marriage was consummated.
Hovering over the heads of the opposing armies, the
angel of Europe and the angel of Asia embraced, and
sent their lifebloods coursing through each other.
Passage was made to India. The two continents slowly
faced about. Two reservoirs that had been accumu-
lating for eons the precious distillations of two great
centers of the human race began mingling their es-
sences. In whatever the East did, there was evident
the hand of the West. In whatever the West thought
there was visible the prismatic intelligence of the East.
The gods of Greece showed their smooth foreheads on
the banks of the Ganges. Oriental systems refracted
the blonde Mediterranean light into an hundred
subtle tints. But the empire of Alexander crumbled.
Parthians annihilated the legions of Crassus. Persians
and Seljuks and Ottomans barred Europe from the
East. Steady communication ceased. Asia withdrew
under her cloudy mysterious curtains. Legendary
fumes, Cathay, Zipango, the Indias of the Great

281

282 Block

Ocean, arose. Once again, the two basins were cut
off. Once again, each began secreting a substance
radically different from the other's, a substance grow-
ing more individual with each elapsing century. For
almost two thousand years. East and West developed
away one from the other.

And now, a second time, in our own hour, the two
have drawn close and confronted each other. Once
again, a fusion has taken place. We are to-day in the
midst of a movement likely to surpass the period of
Hellenization in duration and extent. This time, per-
haps, no dramatic march of Macedonians to the banks
of the Indus has served to make the connection.
Nevertheless, in the image of Amy Lowell, guns have
again shown themselves keys. For a couple of cen-
turies, great gates have been swinging throughout the
East at the behest of frigates and armed merchantmen.
And slowly, once again, Asia has been seeping into
Europe. Warm spicy gusts have been drifting over
the West, steadily permeating the air. At first, there
appeared to be nothing serious in the infiltration. The
eighteenth century was apparently coquetting only
with Eastern motifs. If Chinese palaces put in their
appearance at Drottningholm and Pillnitz, in all por-
tions of the continent; if Chippendale began giving
curious delicate twists to his furniture, it seemed noth-
ing more than a matter of caprice. The zest for Per-
sian letters. Oriental nouvelles, Turkish marches,

Block 283

arose apparently only from the desire for masquerade.
Gretry, Mozart, Wieland, scarcely took their seraglios,
pashas, bulbuls earnestly. But, gradually, with the
arrival of the nineteenth century, what had hitherto
seemed play only, began to assume a different shape.
The East was indeed dawning upon the West again.
The mists were being burned away. Through Sir
WilKam Jones and Friedrich Schlegel, the wisdom of
the dangerous slippery Indies was opened to Europe.
Goethe, as ever the outrider, revealed the new orienta-
tion in his " West-Oestlicher Divan " and his " Chi-
nesich-Deutsche Jahres-und-Tages-Zeiten." In 1829,
Victor Hugo published " Les Orientales"; in 1859,
Fitzgerald his " Omar." If Weber little more than
toyed with Chinese and Turkish musical color in
" Turandot " and in " Oberon," Felicien David in his
songs and in his " Le Desert " attempted seriously to
infiltrate into European music the musical feeling of
the Levant. In the corner of Schopenhauer's apart-
ment there sat an effigy of the Buddha ; volumes of the
Upanishads lay on his table. In 1863 for the first
time, a Paris shop offered for sale a few Japanese
prints. Manet, Whistler, Monet, the brothers De
Goncourt came and bought. But though the craze for
painting Princesses du Pays de la Porcelaine ended
rapidly, European painting was revolutionized. Sur-
faces once more came into being. Color was born
again under the brushes of the impressionists and the

284 Block

post-impressionists. The sense of touch was freed.
In all the arts the art of Japan became powerful.
De Maupassant wrote a prose that is full of the tech-
nique of the Japanese prints; that works chiefly
through means of sharp little lines and dainty spotting.
All five senses were being born again. People listened
with new keenness to the sounds of instruments. The
Russian sons of Berlioz with their new orchestral
chemistry 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 deliberately assumed thing, this fusion of
Oriental and Occidental modes of feeling, showed that
it was a thing arising deep in the being. Something
that had long lain inert had been reborn at the contact
in Western men. A part of personality that had lain
dead had of a sudden been suffused with blood and
warmth; light played over a hemisphere of the mind
long dark. The very hand that drew, the very mouth
that matched words, the very body that beat and
curved and swayed in movement, were Western and
Eastern at the same time. It was no longer the Greek
conception of form that prevailed on the banks of the
Seine, or wherever art was produced. Art was become
again, what the Orientals had always known it to be,
significant form. It was as though Persia had been
born again in Henri Matisse, for instance. A sense of

Block 285

design and color the like of which had hitherto been
manifest only in the vases and bloomy carpets of
Teheran dictated his exquisite patterns. Hokusai and
Outamaro got in Vincent Van Gogh a brother. The
sultry atmosphere and animal richness of Hindoo art
reappeared in Gauguin's wood-cuts. One has but to go
to any really modern art, whether produced in Paris
or in Munich or in New York, to see again the subtle
browns and silvers and vermilions, the delicate sen-
suous touch, the infinitely various patterns, the
forms that carry with them the earth from Arabia to
Japan.

As in the plastic arts, so in poetry. The imagists,
Ezra Pound in particular, were Chinese long before
they discovered Cathay in the works of Ernest Fen-
nellosa. And in music, certainly, the East is on us;
has been on us since the Russian five began their
careers and expressed their own half-European, half-
Mongol, natures. The stream has commenced setting
since the Arabian Nights, the Persian odalisques, the
Tartar tribesmen became music. And the Chinese
sensibility of Scriabine, the Oriental chromatics of
the later Rimsky-Korsakoff, the sinuous scales and
voluptuous colors and silken textures of Debussy, the
shrill fantastic Japanese idiom of Strawinsky, have
shown us the fusion was near.

But in the music of no composer is it as plainly
evident as it is in that of Ernest Bloch. In a work

286 Block

like this composer's suite for viola and piano, one has
a sense of a completeness of fusion such as no other
gives. Here, the West has advanced furthest east, the
East furthest west. Two things are balanced in the
work, two things developed through a score of cen-
turies by two uncommunicating regions. The organiz-
ing power of Europe is married to the sensuousness of
Asia. The virile formative power of the heirs of Each
is here. An extended form is solid as mountains, pro-
jects volumes through time. One four-square move-
ment is set atop another. There is no weakening, no
slackening, no drop. One can put one's hand around
these brown-gold blocks. And at the same time, this
organizing power makes to live a dusky sensuality, a
velvety richness of texture, a sultriness and wetness
that sets us amid the bronzed glowing wood-carvings
of Africans, the dark sunsets of Ceylon, the pagodas
in which the Chinaman sits and sings of his felicity,
his family, his garden. The lyric blue of Chinese art,
the tropical forests with their horrid heat and dense
growths and cruel animal life, the Polynesian seas of
azure tulle, the spice-laden breezes, chant here. The
monotony, the melancholy, the bitterness of the East,
things that had hitherto sounded only from the darkly
shining zither of the Arabs, or from the deathly gongs
and tam-tams of the Mongolians, speak through West-
ern instruments. It is as though something had been
brought out from a steaming Burmese swamp and

Block 287

exposed to the terrible beat of a New York thorough-
fare, and that out of that transplantation a matter
utterly new and sad and strange, favoring both father
and mother, and yet of a character distinctly individ-
ual, had been created.

For no composer was better fitted by nature to re-
ceive the stimulus of the onrushing East. As a
Jew, Bloch carried within himself a fragment of the
Orient; was in himself an outpost of the mother of
continents. And he is one of the few Jewish com-
posers really, fundamentally self-expressive. He is
one of the few that have fully accepted themselves,
fully accepted the fate that made them Jewish and
stigmatized them. After all, it was not the fact that
they were '^ homeless '^ as Wagner pretended, that pre-
vented the company of Meyerbeers and Mendelssohns
from creating. It was rather more the fact that, in-
wardly, they refused to accept themselves for what
they were. The weakness of their art is to be under-
stood only as the result of the spiritual warfare 'that
threatens to divide every Jew against himself. There
was operative in them, whether they were aware of it
or no, a secret desire to escape their stigmata. They
were deliberately deaf to the promptings of the beings
that were so firmly planted in the racial soil. They
were fugitive from the national consciousness. The
bourn of impulse was half stopped. It was not that
they did not write " Jewish " music, utilize solely

288 Block

racial scales and melodies. The artist of Jewish ex-
traction need not do so to be saved. The whole world
is open before him. He can express his day as he
will. One thing, however, is necessary. He must not
seek to inhibit any portion of his impulse. He must
not attempt to deny his modes of apprehension and
realization because they are racially colored. He must
possess spiritual harmony. The whole man must go
into his expression. And it was just the " whole man '*
who did not go into the work of the composers who
have hitherto represented '' Judaism in Music." An
inhibited, harried impulse is manifest in their art.

For, like Meyerbeer, convinced of the worthlessness
of their feelings, they manufactured spectacles for the
operatic stage, and pandered to a taste which they
least of all respected. Or, like Mendelssohn, they tried
to adapt themselves to the alien atmosphere of Teu-
tonic romance, and produced a musical jargon that
resembles nothing in the world so much as Yiddish.
Or, with Rubinstein, they gloved themselves in a
pretty salon style in order to conceal all vestiges of
the flesh, or tried, with Gustav Mahler, to intone " Ave
Maria." Some, no doubt, would have preferred to
have been true to themselves. Goldmark (the uncle)
is an example. But his desire remained intention,
largely. For his method was a trifle childish. He
conceived it as a lying on couches amid cushions,
sniffing Orient perfumes in scent-bottles. He did not

Block 289

realize that the couch was the comfortable German
canape, the cushions the romantic style of Weber
and the early Wagner, and that through the

" Sabsean 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, an authentic expression of what is racial
in the Jew. There is music of his that is authentic by
virtue of qualities more fundamentally racial than the
synagogical modes on which it bases itself, the Semitic
pomp and color that inform it. There are moments
when one hears in this music the harsh and haughty
accents of the Hebrew tongue, sees the abrupt gestures
of the Hebrew soul, feels the titanic burst of energy
that created the race and carried it intact across lands
and times, out of the eternal Eg5^t, through the eter-
nal Red Sea. There are moments when this music
makes one feel as though an element that had re-
mained unchanged throughout three thousand years,
an element that is in every Jew and by which every
Jew must know himself and his descent, were caught
up in it and fixed there. Bloch has composed settings
for the Psalms that are the very impulse of the Davidic
hymns incarnate in another medium; make it seem as
though the genius that had once flowered at the court

290 Block

of the king had attained miraculous second blooming.
The setting of the 114th Psalm is the very voice of
the rejoicing over the passage of the Red Sea, the
very lusty blowing on ox horns, the very hieratic dance.
The voice of Jehovah, has it spoken to those who
throughout the ages have called for it much differently
than it speaks at the close of Bloch's 22nd Psalm?

And it is something like the voice of Job that speaks
in the desolation of the third of the " Poemes juives."
Once again, the Ecclesiast utters his disillusion, his
cruel disappointment, his sense of the utter vanity of
existence in the soliloquy of the 'cello in the rhapsody
" Schelomo." Once again, the tent of the tabernacle
that Jehovah ordered Moses to erect in the wilder-
ness, and hang with curtains and with veils, lifts it-
self in the introduction to the symphony " Israel."
The great kingly limbs and beard and bosom of Abra-
ham are, once again, in the first movement of the
work; the dark, grave, soft-eyed women of the Old
Testament, Rebecca, Rachel, Ruth, re-appear in the
second, with its flowing voices.

Racial traits abound in this body of work. These
ponderous forms, these sudden movements, these im-
perious, barbaric, ritual trumpet blasts, bring to mind
all one knows of Semitic art, recall the crowned winged
bulls of the Assyrians as well as Flaubert's Carthage,
with its pyramided temples and cisterns and neighing
horses in the acropolis. Bloch's themes oftentimes

Block 291

have the subtle, far-flung, monotonous line of the syna-
gogic chants. Many of his melodic bits, although pure
inventions, are indubitably hereditary. The mode of
a race is, after all, but the intensified inflection of its
speech. And Bloch's melodic line, with its strange
intervals, its occasional quarter notes, approximates
curiously to the inflections of the Hebrew tongue.
Like so much of the Gregorian chant, which it often-
times recalls, one can conceive this music as part of
the Temple service in Jerusalem. And like the melodic
line, so, too, the phrases assigned to the trumpets in
the setting of the three Psalms and in the symphony
" Israel.'^ They, also, might once have resounded
through the courts of Herod's temple. The unusual
accents, the unusual intervals, give the instruments a
timbre at once imperious, barbaric, ritual. And how
different from the theatric Orientalism of so many of
the Russians are the crude dissonances of Bloch, the
terrible consecutive fourths and fifths, the impetuous
rhythms, savage and frenetic in their emphasis. This
music is shrill and tawny and bitter with the desert.
Its flavor is indeed new to European music. Cer-
tainly, in the province of the string quartet, nothing
quite like 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 Bloch spoke his proper language. The
works that precede the " Trois Poemes juives," the

292 Block

first of his compositions in which the racial gesture is
consciously made, do not really represent the man as
he is. No doubt, the brilliant and ironic scherzo of
the C-sharp minor Symphony, whose verve and passion
and vigor make the composer of " L'Apprenti sorcier "
seem apprentice indeed, is already characteristic of the
composer of the string quartet and the suite for viola
and piano. But much of the symphony is derivative.
One glimpses the influence of Liszt and Tchaikowsky
and Strauss in it. So too with the opera " Macbeth,"
written a few years after the composition of the sym-
phony, when the composer was twenty-four. Despite
the effectiveness of the setting it gives the melodrama
cleverly abstracted from Shakespeare's tragedy by
Edmond Flegg, the score bears a still undecided sig-
nature. One feels that the composer has recently
encountered the personalities of Moussorgsky and
Debussy. No doubt, one begins to sense the proper
personality of Bloch in 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 Poemes juives," the original Bloch
is at hand. These compositions were conceived at first
as studies for " Jezabel," the opera Bloch intended
composing directly after he had completed the scoring

Block 293

of "Macbeth" in 1904. To-day, " Jezabel " still
exists only in the libretto of Flegg and in the series
of sketches deposited in the composer's portfolio. The
moment in which Bloch is to find it possible for him
to realize the work has not yet arrived. Planned at
first to follow directly upon '' Macbeth," " Jezabel "
promises fairly to become the goal of his first great
creative period. But out of the conception of the
opera itself, out of the desire of creating a work around
this Old Testamentary figure, out of the train of emo-
tion excited by the project, there have already flowed
results of a first magnitude for Bloch and for modern
music. For in the process of searching out a style
befitting this biblical drama, and in the effort to master
the idiom necessary to it, Bloch executed the com-
positions that have placed him so eminently in the
company of the few modern masters. The three
Psalms, " Schelomo," " Israel," portions of the quar-
tet, have but trodden further in the direction marked
out by the " Trois Poemes juives." " Jezabel " has
turned out to be one of those dreams that lead men
on to the knowledge of themselves.

And yet, the " Jewish composer " that the man is
so often said to be, he most surely is not. He is too
much the man of his time, too much the universal
genius, to be thus placed in a single category. His art
succeeds to that of Moussorgsky and Debussy quite as
much as does that of Strawinsky and Ravel; he rests

294 Block

quite as heavily on the great European traditions of
music as he does on his own hereditary strain. In-
deed, he is of the modern masters one of those the most
conscious of the tradition of his art. He falls heir to
Bach and to Haydn and to Beethoven quite as much
as any living musician. Quite as much as that of any
other his music is an image of the time. In the quar-
tet, his magistral work, the Hebraic element is only
one of several. The trio of the scherzo is like a
section of some Polynesian forest, with its tropic
warmth, its monstrous growths, its swampy earth, its
chattering monkeys and birds of paradise. There is
the beat of the age of steel in the finale. And the
delicate Pastorale is redolent of the gentle fields of
Europe, smells of the hay, gives again the nun-like
close of day in temperate skies. It is only that as a
Jew it was necessary for Ernest Bloch to say yea to
his own heredity before his genius could appear. And
to what a degree it has appeared, one can gauge from
the intensity with which his age mirrors itself in the
music he has already composed. His music is the
modern man in his lately gotten sense of the tininess
of the human elements in the race, the enormity of
the animal past. For Ernest Bloch, the primeval
forest with its thick spawning life, its ferocious beasts,
its brutish phallic-worshiping humanity, is still here.
Before him there still lie the hundreds and hundreds of
thousands of years of development necessary to make

Block 295

a sapient creature of man. And he writes like one
who has been plunged into a darkness and sadness
and bitterness all the greater for the vision of the
rainbow that has been given him, for the glimpse he
has had of the " pays du soleil," the land of man lift-
ing himself at last from the brute and becoming
human. For he knows too well that only aeons after
he is dead will the night finally pass.

And he is the modern insomuch as the fusion of
East and West is illuminated by what he does. The
coloration of his orchestra, the cries of 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 all the world. In his art, we feel the
earth itself turning toward the light of the East.

APPENDIX

WAGNER

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

The dates of the composition and first performances of his
operas are: " Rienzi," 1838-40; premiere in Dresden, 1842.
" Tannhauser," 1843-45 (Paris version, i860) ; Dresden, 1845.
"Lohengrin," 1845-48; Weimar, 1850. "Das Rheingold," 1848-
53 ; Munich, 1869. " Die Walkiire," 1848-56 ; Munich, 1870.
"Tristan und Isolde," 1857-59; Munich, 1865. "Siegfried,"
1857-69 ; Bayreuth, 1876. " Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg,"
1861-67; Munich, 1868. "Die Gotterdammerung," 1870-74;
Bayreuth, 1876. "Parsifal," 1876-82; Bayreuth, 1882.

STRAUSS

Richard Strauss was born in Munich June nth, 1864. His
father, Franz Strauss, was first horn-player in the Munich
Court Orchestra. His mother was the daughter of the beer
brewer, Georg Pschorr. He began composing at the tender age
of six. From 1870 to 1874 he attended the elementary school
at Munich. In 1874 he matriculated at the Gymnasium, and re-
mained there until 1882. During the next year he attended lec-
tures at the University of Munich. From 1875 to 1880 he studied
harmony, counterpoint and instrumentation with Hofkapell-
meister F. W. Meyer. His compositions were performed pub-
licly from 1880 on. In 1885 he made the acquaintance of Alex-
ander Ritter, who, together with Hans von Biilow, is supposed
to have converted young Strauss, until then a good Brahmsian,
to Wagnerism and modernism. In 1885 at Billow's invitation,
Strauss conducted a concert of the Meiningen Orchestra. In
November of that year he succeeded Biilow as conductor of the
organization. In 1886 he become third Kapellmeister at the
Munich Opera; in 1889, director at Weimar. 1892-3 was spent
in Egypt and Sicily after an attack of inflammation of the lungs.

299

300 Appendix

In 1894 he became chief Kapellmeister at Munich. In 1895 his
European concert-tours commenced. He conducted in Budapest,
Brussels, Moscow, Amsterdam, London, Barcelona, Paris, Ziirich
and Madrid. In 1898 he became conductor of the Berlin Royal
Opera. In 1904 he came to America to conduct at four festival
concerts given in his honor in New York. In one month he
gave twenty-one concerts in different cities with nearly as many
orchestras. The tour ended with the hubbub over the fact that
Strauss had conducted a concert in John Wanamaker's. Since
1898 Strauss has resided chiefly in Charlottenburg and, in the
summer, at Marquardstein near Garmisch.
The dates of the composition of his principal works are:
" Serenade for Wind Instruments," Opus 7, 1882-83 ; " Eight
Songs," Opus 10, 1882-83; "Aus Itahen," Opus 16, 1886; "Don
Juan," Opus 20, 1888; "Tod und Verklarung," 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; "Don Quixote,"
Opus 35, 1897 ; " Ein Heldenleben," Opus 40, 1898 ; " Feuersnot,"
Opus 50, 1900-01 ; " Taillefer," Opus 52, 1903 ; " Sinfonia Domes-
tica," Opus 53, 1903 ; " Salome," Opus 54, 1904-05 ; " Elektra,"
Opus 58, 1906-08; "Der Rosenkavalier," Opus 59, 1909-10;
"Ariadne auf Naxos," Opus 60, 191 1-12; "Josef's Legende,"
1913; "Fine Alpensymphonie," 1914-15; "Die Frau ohne
Schatten," 1915-17.

MOUSSORGSKY

Modest Petrovitch Moussorgsky was born March i6th, 1839,
in the village of Karevo in the government of Pskow, Russia.
His parents were members of the lesser nobility. His mother
gave him his first piano lessons. At the age of ten he was sent
to the School of St. Peter and St. Paul in Petrograd. His piano-
studies were continued with a certain Professor Herke. At the
age of twelve he played in public a Rondo de concert by Herz.
In 1852 he matriculated at the school for ensigns, and the same
year had his first composition, a polka, published. In 1856, while
serving as an officer in the Preobrajensky Guards, he made the
acquaintance of Borodin. Soon after, he met Dargomyjski. It

Appendix 301

was with him that, in his own words, " he for the first time
lived the musical life." Later, he became acquainted also with
Cui, Balakirew and Rimsky-Korsakoflf. He took lessons in com-
position of Balakirew, and finally realized what his direction
really was. A nervous malady prevented him from working in
1859. But directly after his convalescence, he resigned from the
guards, and set to work in earnest. In order to support him-
self, he accepted a position in the government service. He lived
in Petrogard with five friends. In 1865 he was once more
attacked by his malady, and had to retire to the country for
three years. In 1869 he returned to Petrograd, living with his
friends the Opotchinines. His moment of success came in 1874,
with the performance of " Boris." Directly after, his health
commenced to fail. In 1879 he resigned his office, and sought
to support hi^nself by playing accompaniments. 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; "The Defeat 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,
181 1. He died in Bayreuth, July 31st, 1886. He played in public
for the first time at the age of nine, in Odenburg. In 1829 he
came to Vienna, remaining there eighteen months studying
piano under Czerny, and composition with Salieri. He then was
taken to Paris, where he studied under Reicha till 1825. In
1831 he heard Paganini play. It is supposed that he was so
impressed that he decided to become the Paganini of the piano.
He was very much in demand in Paris as an artist. In 1835
he carried the Comtesse d'Agoult off from a ball, and went
with her to Geneva. He remained in Geneva until 1839, when

302 Appendix

his triumphal progresses through Europe commenced. In 1848
he became Kapellmeister in Weimar. Here, he caused " Lohen-
grin '* to be produced, and had " Der Fliegende Hollander " and
" Tannhauser," as well as operas of Berlioz and Schumann,
revived. It was while he was in Weimar that he formed a rela-
tionship with the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein. In 1859 he went
to Rome, where he remained till 1870. In 1866 Pius IX made
him an Abbe. 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 Preludes," "Or-
pheus," " Mazeppa," " Hungaria," " Hunnenschlacht," " Die
Ideale," " Two Episodes from Lenau's Faust," etc.

His principal orchestral works are " Die Legende von der
Heiligen Elisabeth " and " Christus."

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

BERLIOZ

Louis Hector Berlioz was born at La Cote Saint-Andre near
Grenoble on December nth, 1803. His father was a physician,
and wished his son to follow his profession. So Hector was sent
to Paris to study. Instead of studying medicine he commenced
to compose. A mass of his was performed at Saint-Roch in
1824. In 1826 he sought to enter the Conservatoire, but failed
in the preliminary examination. In 1827, 1828 and 1829, he com-
peted for the Prix de Rome, and failed. In 1830 he finally se-
cured it. While in Rome in 1831, he composed the " Symphonic
Fantastique " and " Lelio." 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, "Romeo" in 1839. In 1840 Berlioz made his first journey
to Brussels ; in 1842-43 he toured Germany. The " Carnaval
Romain" was performed in 1844, In 1845-46 Berlioz gave nu-
merous concerts in France, and toured Austria and Hungary. In

Appendix 303

December of the latter year " La Damnation de Faust " failed at
the Opera Comique. In 1847 Berlioz went to Russia and to Eng-
land for the first time. In 1849 he began work on his " Te
Deum " ; in 1850 on " L'Enfance du Christ." The next years
were spent in conducting. In 1854, on the death of his wife,
he married Mile. Recio. In 1856 we find Berlioz in North Ger-
many, Brussels and London. He began the composition of " Les
Troyens " the same year. At its performance in 1863, the work
failed. His last years were darkened by the death of his wife
and son. He died March 8th, 1869, in Paris.

FRANCK

Cesar-Auguste Franck was born at Liege, Belgium, December
loth, 1822. His father hoped to make a piano-virtuoso of him,
and supervised his musical education. At the age of eleven the
young Franck was touring Belgium as a pianist. In 183S the
family emigrated to Paris, and two years later Cesar was ad-
mitted to the Conservatoire. He studied composition with
Leborne and the piano with Zimmermann. He took the first
prize for fugue in 1840. In 1842 his father compelled him to
leave the Conservatory and return to Belgium, but two years
later he was once more in Paris, seeking to gain his living by
teaching and playing. " Ruth " was performed in 1846. He was
married in 1848. In 1851 he was appointed organist at the church
of Saint-Jean-Saint-Frangois, later of the church of Sainte-
Clotilde, which post he occupied during the remainder of his
years. In 1872 he was appointed professor of organ-playing at
the Conservatoire. " Redemption " was performed in 1873.
" Les Beatitudes " was performed for the first time in 1880.
Shortly after, the professorship of composition at the Conserva-
tory was refused him, and five years later he was decorated with
the ribbon of the Legion of Honor as " professor of organ-
playing." In 1887 a " Festival Franck " was given under the direc-
tion of Pasdeloup at the Cirque d'hiver. His symphony was per-
formed for the first time in 1889. He died November 8th, 1890.

The dates of the composition of his principal works are as fol-
lows:

304 Appendix

"Ruth," 1843-46; "Six pieces pour grand orgue," 1860-62;
"Trois offertoires," 1871 ; "Redemption," 1871-72 (first version),
1874 (second version); "Prelude, fugue et variation," 1873;
" Trois pieces pour grand orgue," 1878 ; " String-quintet," 1878-
79; "Les Beatitudes," 1869-79; " Le Chasseur maudit," 1882;
"Les Djinns," 1884; "Prelude, choral et fugue," 1884; " Hulda,"
1882-85; "Variations symphoniques," 1885; " Sonate," 1886;
"Prelude, aria et finale," 1886-87; "Psyche," 1887-88; " Sym-
phonie," 1886-88; "Quatuor," 1889; "Trois chorales," 1890.

DEBUSSY

Claude-Achille Debussy was born August 22nd, 1862, at Saint-
Germain-en-Laye. He died at Paris March 22nd, 1918. He
entered the Conservatoire at the age of twelve, studying harmony
with Lavignac and piano with Marmontel. At the age of
eighteen, he paid a brief visit to Russia. But it was not until
several years later that he became acquainted with the score of
" Boris Godounow," which was destined to have so great an
influence on his life, and precipitate his revolt from Wagnerism.
In 1884 he gained the Prix de Rome with his cantata " L'Enfant
prodigue." During his three-year stay at the Villa Medici he
composed " Printemps " and " La Damoiselle elue." " Ariettes
oubliees " were published in 1888, followed, in 1890, by " Cinq
poemes de Baudelaire"; in 1893 by the string-quartet and the
" Prelude a ' I'Apres-midi d'un faune ' " ; in 1894 by " Proses
lyriques"; and in 1898 by "Les Chansons de Bihtis." The
" Nocturnes " were performed for the first time in 1899. " Pel-
leas," upon which Debussy had been working for ten years, was
produced at the Opera Comique in 1902. In 1903, "Estampes"
were published. "Masques," " L'Isle joyeuse," " Danses pour
harp chromatique " and " Trois chansons de France " were pub-
lished in 1904. The following year saw the disclosure of the first
book of " Images " for piano and of " La Mer." The second
book of "Images" appeared in 1906; "Iberia" in 1907; "Trois
chansons de Charles d'Orleans " and the " Children's Corner "
in 1908. " Rondes de Printemps " was performed for the first
time in 1909. In 1910 there appeared " Trois ballades de
Frangois Villon " and the first book of " Preludes for piano." It

Appendix 305

was in the incidental music to d'Annunzio's Le Martyre de
Saint-Sehastien, performed in 191 1, that Debussy's genius showed
itself for the last time in any fullness. In 1912 " Gigues " were
performed; in 1913 there appeared the second book of Preludes
for piano. The works produced subsequently are of much
smaller importance.

RAVEL

Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrenees, March
7th, 1875. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Paris.
Henri Ghis was his first piano-teacher, Charles-Rene his first
teacher of composition. He took piano-lessons of Ricardo
Viries, and in 1891 was awarded a "premiere medaille " in
piano-playing at the Conservatoire. In 1897 Ravel entered the
class of Faure. In 1898, his " Sites auriculaires " were publicly
performed. In 1901 he failed for the first time to gain the
Prix de Rome. His quartet was performed in 1904. In 1905
he failed for the fourth time to gain the Prix de Rome. " His-
toires naturelles " were performed in 1907, the " Rapsodie
espagnole " in 1908. " L'Heure espagnole " was given at the
Opera Comique in 191 1, " Daphnis et Chloe " was performed by
the Russian Ballet in 1912. During the war Ravel served as
ambulance driver. He was wounded while serving before
Verdun, and dismissed from service. 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; "Valses nobles et sentimentales," 191 1; "Ma Mere
rOye," 1908; " Histoires naturelles," 1906; "Cinq Melodies popu-
laires grecques," 1907 ; " Trois Poemes de Mallarme," 1913 ;
" Quatuor a cordes," 1902-03 ; " Introduction et Allegro pour
harpe," 1906; "Rapsodie espagnole," 1907; " Daphnis et Chloe,"
1906-11; L'Heure espagnole," 1907; " Le Tombeau de Couperin,"
1914-17.

BORODIN

Alexander Porfirievitch Borodin was born In Petrograd No-
vember I2th, 1834, and died there February 27th, 1887.

3o6 Appendix

RIMSKY-KORSAKOFF

Nikolai Andreyevitch Rimsky-Korsakoff was born March 6th,
1844, at Tikhvin, in the government of Novgorod, Russia. His
father was a civil governor and landed proprietor. He began
to study the pianoforte at the age of six. He was destined for
a career in the navy, and, in 1856, he was sent to study at the
Petrograd Naval College. In 1861 he made the acquaintance of
Balakirew and of the group about him. After a two-year cruise
in the navy, Rimsky returned to Petrograd in 1865. In 1866
he was installed in furnished rooms, having decided upon becom-
ing 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 the Petrograd Conservatory.
In 1872 his opera " The Maid of Pskof " was produced. Rimsky
married, on June 30th of that year, Nadejeda Pourgold. Mous-
sorgsky was best man at the ceremony. In 1873 he became In-
spector of Naval Bands. In 1874 he toured the Crimea. In
1883 he was called upon to reorganize the Imperial chapel. In
1889 he conducted two Russian concerts at the Paris Exposition.
In the following year he conducted two Russian concerts in
Brussels. He resigned his position as conductor of the Russian
Symphony concerts and the inspectorship of the Imperial chapel
in 1894. In 1900 he was in Brussels again. In 1904, due to his
political views, he was called upon to vacate his post of Director
of the Conservatory. He attended the Russian festival in Paris
in the spring of 1907. The French Society of Composers, how-
ever, refused to admit him to membership. He died in April,
1908, at his property at Lioubensk.

The titles of his operas are : " The Maid of Pskof," 1872 ; " A
Night in May/' 1880; " Sniegouroschka," 1882; " Mlada," 1892;
"Christmas Eve Revels," 1895; *' Sadko," 1897; "Mozart and
Salieri," 1898; " Boyarina Vera Sheloga," 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 dor," 1907.

Among his orchestral compositions are: Symphony No. i,
"Serbian Fantasy," Opus 6; "Symphonic Suite Antar," Opus 9;
Symphony, Opus 32. "Spanish Caprice," Opus 34; "Schehera-
zade," Opus 35 ; " Easter Overture," Opus z^^.

Appendix 307

RACHMANINOFF

Sergei Vassilievitch Rachmaninoff was born March 29th, 1873,
at Onega in the government of Novgorod, Russia. He entered
the Petrograd Conservatory in 1882, studying piano in the class
of Demyaresky, theory in that of Professor L. A. Sacchetti. In
1885 he entered the Moscow Conservatory, studying under
Zviereiff, Taneyef and Arensky. His first public appearance
as a pianist took place in 1892. He has been composing steadily
since 1894. His first symphony was produced by Glazounof in
1895. His European tours commenced in 1899. In 1903 he
taught in the Moscow Maryinsky Institute. From 1904 to 1906
he conducted at the Imperial Opera in Moscow. His own operas,
" The Miser Knight " and " Francesca da Rimini," were per-
formed at that time. After 1907 he lived in Dresden. His first
American tour took place in 1909. His second began in 1918.

Among Rachmaninoff's works are three operas, " Aleko,"
" The Miser Knight," " Francesca da Rimini " ; two symphonies,
Opus 13 and Opus 27; three concertos for pianoforte, Opus i,
18 and 30; a symphonic poem "Die Toteninsel," Opus 29; a
work for chorus and orchestra, " The Bells " ; two 'cello sonatas,
Opus 19 and Opus 28; a pianoforte trio, Opus 9; piano pieces,
Opera 3, 5, 10, 16, 22, 32; and numerous songs.

SCRIABINE

Alexander Nicolas Scriabine was born in Moscow in 1871,
of aristocratic parents. In his tenth year he was placed in the
2nd Moscow Army Cadet Corps. His first piano lessons were
taken from G. A. Conus. Musical theory he studied with Pro-
fessor S. I. Taneieff. While still continuing the Cadet courses,
he was enrolled as a student at the Moscow Conservatory of
Music. He studied the pianoforte with Vassily Safonoft", coun-
terpoint first with Taneieff and later with Arensky. His studies
both in the Conservatory and in the corps were completed by
1891. In 1892 he toured Europe for the first time as pianist,
playing in Amsterdam, Brussels, The Hague, Paris, Berlin,
Moscow and Petrograd. The next five years Scriabine devoted

3o8 Appendix

to both concert-tours and composition. In 1897 he became Pro-
fessor of Pianoforte, playing at the Moscow conservatory, re-
maining such for six years. He resigned from his post in 1903
in order to devote himself entirely to composition and con-
certizing, living principally in Beattenberg, Switzerland, and in
Paris. It is during that time that he seems to have been con-
verted to Theosophy. He spent 1905-06 in Genoa and in Geneva.
In February, 1906, Scriabine embarked on a tour of the United
States. He played in New York City, Chicago, Washington,
Cincinnati and other cities. The next years were spent in Beat-
tenberg, Lausanne and Biarritz. From 1908 to 1910, Scriabine
lived in Brussels. Then he returned to Moscow, touring Russia
in 1910, 191 1 and 1912. In 1914 he visited England for the first
time. Returning to Russia just before the outbreak of the war,
he set about on a work involving the unification of all the arts
entitled " Mysterium." On April 7th, 191 5, he was taken ill with
blood-poisoning. On April 14th he was dead.

His principal orchestral works are: " Le Poeme divine,"
Opus 43; " Le Poeme de I'Extase," Opus 54; and "Prometheus,"
Opus 60. It is not easy to say which of his many compositions
for the pianoforte are the most important. 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, June 5th, 1882. His father was a bass singer attached
to the court. Igor was destined for a legal career. But in 1902
he met Rimsky-Korsakoff in Heidelberg, and abandoned all idea
of studying the law. He studied with Rimsky till 1906. His
" Scherzo fantastique," inspired by Maeterlinck's Life of the
Bee, which was produced in 1908, attracted the attention of
Sergei Diaghilew to the young composer, and secured him a com-
mission to write a ballet for Diaghilew's organization. The im-
mediate result was " L'Oiseau de feu," which was composed
and produced in 1910. "Petruschka" was written in 191 1, the
composer residing in Rome at the time. " Le Sacre du prin-
temps " was written in Clarens, where Strawinsky generally lives.

Appendix 309

It was produced in Paris in 1913. The opera " Le Rossignol,"
of which one act was completed in 1909, and two in 1914, was
produced in Paris and in London just before the war. A new
ballet " Les Noces villageoises " has not as yet been produced.

Other of Strawinsky's compositions are :

Opus I, " Symphony in E-flat " ; Opus 2, " Le Faune et la
Bergere," songs with orchestral accompaniment; Opus 3,
" Scherzo f antastique " ; Opus 4, " Feuerswerk " ; Opus S, " Chant
funebre " in memory of Rimsky-Korsakoff ; Opus 6, Four Studies
for the pianoforte ; Opus 7, Two songs ; " Les Rois des Etoiles,"
for chorus and orchestra; Three songs on Japanese poems with
orchestral accompaniment; Three pieces for string-quartet; An
unpublished pianoforte sonata; A ballet for clowns.

MAHLER

Gustav Mahler was born In Kalischt, Bohemia, July 7th, i860.
He died in Vienna May i8th, 191 1. He studied the pianoforte
with Epstein, composition and counterpoint with Bruckner. In
1883 he was appointed Kapellmeister in Kassel; in 1885 he was
called to Prague ; in 1886 he was made conductor of the Leipzig
opera. In 1891 he went to Hamburg to conduct the opera, and
in 1897 he was made director of the Vienna Court Opera. In
1908 he came to New York to conduct the operas of Wagner,
Mozart and Beethoven at the Metropolitan. In 1909 he became
conductor of the New York Philharmonic Society. His health
broke in 191 1, and he returned to Vienna.

Mahler wrote nine symphonies. The first dates from 1891, the
second from 1895, the third from 1896, the fourth from 1901,
the fifth from 1904, the sixth from 1906, the seventh from 1908,
the eighth from 1910, and the ninth from 191 1.

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 einer fahrenden Gesellen," with orchestral accompani-
ment ; " Des Knaben Wunderhorn," twelve songs.

310 Appendix

REGER

Max Reger was born in Brand, Bavaria, March 19th, 1873. His
father was school-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 to perfect himself as a
pianist. Later, composition and organ-playing absorbed him.
He was made professor of counterpoint in the Royal Academy
in Munich in 1905. In 1907 he was made musical director of the
University of Leipzig and professor of composition at the
Leipzig Conservatory. From 191 1 until his death he was Hof-
kepellmeister at Meiningen. He died in Jena, May nth, 1916.

His works for orchestra include: " Sinfonietta," Opus 90;
" Serenade," Opus 95 ; " Hiller-Variations," Opus 100 ; " Sym-
phonic Prologue," Opus 120; " Lustspielouvertiire," Opus 123;
" Konzert in Alten Stiel," Opus 125 ; '' Romantische Suite,"
Opus 128; "Vier Tondichtungen nach Bocklin," Opus 130;
"Ballet-Suite," Opus 132; " Mozart- Variations," Opus 140;
"Violin-concerto," Opus loi ; "Piano-concerto," Opus 114.

His works for chorus include : " Gesang der Verklarten," Opus
71; "Psalm 100," Opus 106; "Die Nonnen," Opus 112.

His chamber-works include: String-sextet, Opus 118; Piano-
forte-quintet, Opus 64; Pianoforte-quartet, Opus 113; Five string-
quartets, Opera 54, 74, 109, 121 ; Serenade for flute, violin and
viola. Opus 77a; Trio for flute, violin and viola. Opus 76b;
Nine violin sonatas. Opera i, 3, 41, y2, 84, 103b, 122, 139; Four
'cello sonatas, Opera 5, 28, 71, 116; Three clarinet 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 ZZ', Two fantasies, Opus 40; Fantasy and fugue,
Opus 46; The fantasies. Opus 52; Symphonic fantasy and
fugue, Opus 57; Sonata, Opus 60; Fifty-two preludes, Opus 67;
Variations and fugue, Opus 72,; Suite, Opus 92; Intermezzo,
passacaglia and fugue, Opus 127.

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

He wrote over three hundred songs.

Appendix 311

SCHOENBERG

Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna September 13th, 1874.
He was self-taught until his 20th year. His first instruction was
received from his brother-in-law, Alexander von Zemlinsky. In
1901 he went to Berlin, and became the Kapellmeister of the
" Uberbrettl," the cabaret managed by Birnbaum, Wedekind and
von Wolzogen. Due to the influence of Richard Strauss, he
secured a position as instructor in Stern's Conservatory. In
1903 he returned to Vienna. He aroused the interest of Gustav
Mahler, who secured performances for several of his works.
The Rose Quartet performed the sextet " Verklarte Nacht " and
the Quartet, Opus 7. The " Kammersymphonie " and the choral
work " Gurrelieder " were also played. In 1910 Schoenberg was
appointed teacher of composition in the Imperial Academy. In
191 1 he returned to Berlin, remaining there till 1916 (?). He
is said at present to be in Vienna.

Among his compositions are :

Opera i, 2 and 3, Songs — " Gurrelieder " ; Opus 4, sextet
"Verklarte Nacht"; Opus 5, " Pelleas und Melisanda"; Opus 7,
1st String-quartet; Opus 8, Songs with orchestral accompani-
ment; Opus 9, "Kammersymphonie"; Opus 10, 2nd String-
quartet, with setting of " Entriickung," by Stefan George; Opus
II, three pieces for Piano; Opus 13, a capclla 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 Sth,
1865. He matriculated at the University of Helsingfors in 188I5,
but shortly after gave up all idea of studying law, and entered
the Conservatory in 1886. Here he remained three years, study-
ing composition with Wegelius. In 1889-90 he studied with
Becken in Berlin. In 1891 he went to Vienna to study instru-
mentation with Karl Goldmark. From 1893-97 he taught com-
position at the Helsingfors Conservatory. In 1897 the Finnish

312 Appendix

Senate allotted him the sum of $600 yearly for a period of ten
years, in order to permit him leisure for composition. In 1900
he toured Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium and France as con-
ductor of the Helsingfors Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1901
he was invited to conduct his own compositions at the festival
of the Deutscher Tonkiinstlerverein in Heidelberg. In 1914,
while in America, Yale University conferred upon him the
degree of Doctor of Music. At present he is living in Jarsengraa,
Finland.

Among Sibelius's compositions are:

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

String-quartet " Voces intimae," 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; " Nachtlicher Ritt
und Sonnenaufgang," Opus 55; "Scenes historiques," Opus 66;
"Die Okeaniden," Opus 72. Some fifty songs, etc., etc.

LOEFFLER

Charles Martin Loeffler was born in Miilhausen, Alsace, Janu-
ary 30, 1861. He studied the violin under Massart and Leonard
in Paris, and under Joachim in Berlin. He studied composition
with Guirand in Paris. Played violin in Pasdeloup's orchestra,
then in the orchestras at Nice and Lugano. From 1883 till 1903
he was second leader in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Since
1903 he has been devoting himself completely to composition.
He is living at present in Medford, Massachusetts.

His compositions include : Suite for violin and orchestra, " Les
Viellees de TUkraine," 1891 ; Concerto for 'cello, 1894; Divertis-
sement for orchestra, 1895; "La Mort de Tintagiles," 1897;
" Divertissement espagnol " for orchestra and saxaphone ; " La
Villanelle du Diable"; "A Pagan 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 by
Baudelaire, Verlaine, Yeats, Rossetti, Lodge, Kahn, etc.

Appendix 313

ORNSTEIN

Leo Ornstein was born in Krementchug, Russia, December
nth, 1895. His father was cantor in the synagogue. Until 1906
Ornstein was a pupil in the Petrograd Conservatory. Because
of the pogroms, his family emigrated to New York. There he
attended the Friends' School and studied music in the Institute
of Musical Art. Later, he studied with Bertha Fiering Tapper.
He made his debut as pianist in January, 191 1. In 1913-14 he
lived in Europe, in Paris chiefly. He was introduced to the
French public by Calvocoressi at a concert in the Sorbonne. In
the summer he toured Norway. He returned to America in
the autumn, and early next year gave a series of recitals of
ultra-modern music at the Fifty-seventh Street Theatre. Next
year he continued the series at four semi-private recitals at the
home of Mrs. Arthur M. Reis. He has been giving concerts
all over the United States and Canada since. He is living at
present in Jackson, N. H.

Among Ornstein's compositions there are:

Two symphonic poems, "The Fog" and "The Life of Man"
(after Andrev) ; a Piano-concerto, Opus 44; a setting of the
30th Psalm for chorus ; a Quartet for strings, Opus 2^ ; a Minia-
ture String-quartet; a Piano-quintet, Opus 49; two Sonatas for
Violin and Piano, Opera 26 and 31 ; two Sonatas for Cello and
Piano, Opera 45 and 78; Three Lieder, Opus 2>2>\ Four settings
of Blake, Opus 18. — For piano solo: Sonata, Opus 35; Dwarf
Suite, Opus 11; Impressions of the Thames, Opus 13; Two
Impressions of Notre-Dame, Opus 16; Two Shadow Pieces,
Opus 17; Six Short Pieces, Opus 19; Three Preludes, Opus 20;
Three Moods, Opus 22; Eleven Short Pieces, Opus 29; Bur-
lesques, Opus 30; Eighteen Preludes— a la Chinoise, Opus 39;
Arabesques, Opus 48; Poems of 1917, Opus 68.

BLOCK

Ernest Bloch was born in Geneva, Switzerland, July 24th,
1880. He studied in Geneva with Jaques Dalcroze; in Brussels
with Ysaye; at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfort with

314 Appendix

I. Knorr ; and with Thuille in Munich. His opera " Macbeth "
was produced at the Opera Comique in Paris in 1910. In 1915
he was appointed professor of composition in the conservatory
in Geneva. In 1916 he came to America as conductor of the
Maud Allan Symphony Orchestra. His quartet was performed
by the Flonzaleys that season, and in May, 1917, the Society
of the Friends of Music devoted a concert entirely to his works.
Returning to Switzerland in the summer he once more voyaged
to America, this time with the intention of settling here. He
taught composition at the David Mannes School from 1917 to
1919. In September, 1919, he won the Coolidge Prize with his
Suite for viola. He lives in New York.

Besides " Macbeth," the list of his compositions includes a
Symphony in C-sharp minor ; " Vivre-Aimer " ; " Hiver-Prin-
temps"; "Trois Poemes juives," " Trois Psaumes " (22nd for
baritone, 14th and 137th for soprano); ''Poemes d'Automne "
for mezzo-soprano ; " Schelemo," rhapsody for 'cello and or-
chestra; "Israel" (symphony — two movements); String-quartet;
and Suite for viola and piano or viola and orchestra. A sonata
for violin and piano is in process of preparation.

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