Ravel is by no means as perfect an artist. He has not the clear self-consciousness, the perfect recognition of limits. His music has not the absolute completeness 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; aspires to plenitude of utterance, to sheerness and rigidity 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 dionysiac, between the smooth, level, contained, perfect, and the darker, more turbulent, passionate, and instinctive. For Ravel has been vouchsafed a high grace. He has been permitted to remain, in all his manhood, the child that once we all were. In him the powerful and spontaneous flow of emotion from out the depths of being has never been dammed. He can still speak from the fullness of his heart, cry his sorrows piercingly, produce 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 primitive, and reflects the childlike singleness and intensity of the animating spirit. The man who shaped not only the deliberately infantine "Ma Mere l'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, inventiveness perhaps. But Ravel is full of a lyricism, a piercingness, a passionateness, that much of the music of Debussy successive to "Pelleas" wants. We understand Ravel's music, in the famous phrase of Beethoven, 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. 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, dripping with stars. The music of "Daphnis," from the very moment of the introduction with its softly unfolding 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 transmuted the witchery of the German forest into tone, is more romantic. Over it might be set the invocation of Heine:

"Steiget auf, ihr alten Traueme! 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 past most strongly in him. Debussy, with his thoroughly 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 clavecinist become contemporary of Scriabine and Strawinsky, 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 instance 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 instance, however, not in that of Lully nor in that of Franck, has the transfusion of blood been so successful. Ravel is in no wise treacherous to himself. There must be something in the character of the French nation 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 MacDowellesque preludes, or in the composition of such ghosts 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 musical evolution. If there is a single modern composition 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 compared 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 mechanism 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 solid 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 Strawinskys and the Schoenbergs and the Ornsteins and all 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 l'absence de sensibilite fait encore une personalite," as one of the quirites termed him, never existed save in the minds of those unable to comprehend his reticence and delicacy and essentiality. Nevertheless, besides his lyrical, dreamy, romantic temper, he has a very unsentimental 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 "Histoires 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 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 Tombeau 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 villages, 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 eastward, 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 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, advancing slowly, patiently, steadily into power and manhood, until it had come into possession of the wildest and fairest 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 lumbering rhythms, through the cymbal-crashing Mongol marches and warm, uncouth peasant chants that are his music, there surges that vision, that sense of immanent 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 joyous and inspiriting wind blows from these pages. The music of "Prince Igor," with its epical movement and counter-movement, its shouting, wandering, savage 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 assemblies and jousts and feasting of the boyartry 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 monuments, 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 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 sensibility, 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 established in Europe by the practice of generations of composers, was a convention; the Russian music, particularly 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 Petrograd 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 vestige of the past, every vestige of the fatherland that Peter the Great and Catherine had sought to reform, and that persists in every Russian underneath the coating of convention. Together with the others, Borodin steeped himself in the lore 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 instincts 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 invented 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, centuries before the music of "Scheherazade" and "Le Coq d'or" was conceived. So, too, the temperaments and sensibilities of the others. They had but to touch these emblems and reliques and rhythms to become self-conscious.

It must have been in particular the old warrior, the chivalric, perhaps even the Tartar imprint in the emblems 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 Mongolian mustache in all their flat 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 descent, 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 Tartar 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, 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 contrary of that of the neurotic, sallow Tchaikowsky 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 character Borodin's great contribution to his age's life? For has not the most recent time of all beheld a resurgence 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 Tolstoy learn more than from that conserver of the pristine and dominating Russian traits, the moujik? And so men like Borodin who sought out the racial character 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 satisfactorily conjoined numbers, a golden mosaic from which whole groups of enameled bits are missing. Indeed, Borodin had not even notated the overture when 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 introduce a pretty cavatina; "Prince Igor's" magnificent scene, so original and contained and vigorous, is followed 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 original 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 entirely to composition; that he could come to his writing 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 Slavonic and Oriental legends and fairy tales are illustrated astonishingly, with a certain humor in the matter-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 incrusted with large and impossible stones. Framing the illustrations are border-fancies of sunflowers and golden cocks and wondrous springtime birds, fashioned 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 content to have his music picturesque and colorful. The childish, absurd Tsar in "Le Coq d'or," who desires only to lie abed all day, eat delicate food, and listen to the fairy tales of his nurse, is, after all, something 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 decorativeness. 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 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 musical 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 variations have been exhausted. There is no actual development in the sense of volumnear increase. In "Scheherazade," for instance, the climaxes are purely voluntary, are nothing other than the arbitrary thickening 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 piquancy 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—admittedly 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 history and folklore, and he continually attempted to find a musical idiom with the accent of the old Slavonic chronicles and fairy tales. Certain of his works, particularly "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 instance, 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 of the orchestra, wrote treatises on the science of instrumentation and on the science of harmony, and developed into something of a doctor of music. Indeed, when finally there devolved upon him, as general legatee 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 before 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 Borodin'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 nationalist 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 produces innumerable artists like him, who are fundamentally incapable of becoming the instrument every creative 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 unshakable a confidence in all purely conscious processes 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 composed 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 foreigner 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 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 birdcalls 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, listening 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 intelligence 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 his limitations as well. They bring into sharpest relief the difference between poetic and superficial expressiveness. 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 brilliance and vivacity and madness that makes Rimsky's scenes from popular life, his utilizations of vulgar tunes and dances scarcely comparable to it. Nowhere in any of Rimsky'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 particularly 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 remarkable 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 tricks and mannerisms that pall. One hears the whistling parabolas of the flutes and clarinets of "Scheherazade" 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 famous "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 significance in M. Rachmaninoff's use of it. For he employed 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 professionally 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 suggestive 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 successful, whether the implications of the phrase do quite manage to manoeuver his work into genuine importance. No doubt, music does not invariably reform itself 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 initiating a new one. Nevertheless, M. Rachmaninoff cannot 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 establishment 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 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 superficially 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 important individuality. In all the elaborate score of "The Island of the Dead," in the very one of M. Rachmaninoff's works that is generally deemed his best, there are few accents that are either very large or very poignant or very noble. The music lacks distinction, lacks vitality. The style is strangely soft and unrefreshing. Emotion is communicated, no doubt. But it is emotion 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 without the hysteria, perhaps, but also without the energy. In all the music of M. Rachmaninoff there is something strangely twice-told. From it there flows the sadness distilled by all things that are a little useless.

There are to be found in every picture gallery canvases 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 handiwork of artists who appeared independent enough to their patrons and to themselves. Their names and their persons were familiar to those who ordered pictures 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 himself, 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 musician 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 throwback to the salon school, the school of velocity, of effect, of whatever Rubinstein and Liszt could desire? 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 instrument. We no longer require so insensitive a display. 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 pianoforte. And he writes concerti of the old type. He writes pieces full of the old astounding musical dislocation. Phrases of an apparent intensity and lyricism 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. Rachmaninoff comes amongst us like a very charming and amiable ghost.

For that, however, let us not fail to be duly grateful. 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 enchantment 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 musicians to which he belongs. It has evaluated the pretensions 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 Tchaikowsky and Arensky, is usually dubbed "universal" 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 abstracted from classical music. Without regard, however, 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 appeal of their compatriots. For them, as it is for every Russian musician, Russia was without their windows, appealing dumbly for expression of its wild, ungoverned energy, its misery, its rich and childish laughter, its deep, great Christianity. It wanted a music that would have the accents of its rude, large-hearted 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 symphonic poems of Scriabine. And yet, despite their effulgence, their manifold splendors, their hieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual and significant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus," they each reveal to some degree the influence of Wagner. The "Idyl" of the Second Symphony, for instance, is dangerously close to the "Waldweben" in "Siegfried," although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest is rather more the perfumed and rose-lit woodland, Wagner's the fresh primeval wilderness. The "Poeme de l'extase," with its oceanic tides of voluptuously entangled bodies, is a sort of Tannhaeuser "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 disquieting temper, and definitely recorded himself.

There have been few composers more finely conscious 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 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 classicists. 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 wakened 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 instrument, 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, especially in that of his last period, when his own individuality broke so marvelously into flower. He wrote for it as one of two persons who had shared life together 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 almost 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 discipleship undeniable. The influence of Chopin is ubiquitous. Scriabine writes mazurkas, preludes, etudes, nocturnes and waltzes in his master's cool, polite, 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 11, for instance, are full of Chopinesque turns, of Chopinesque 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 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 attractive 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 moments, 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 Russian 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 abandoned the major-minor system to which he had hitherto adhered, and substituted for it the other that permitted 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 makes his craft comparable to Bach's in its mastery of a medium, and enables one to mention the "Chromatic 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 considerably on the wane, is still evident. The "Poeme satanique" 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 something 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 entirely 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 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, intolerant, 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, almost 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 himself 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 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 Scriabine. 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 communication 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 something clarified and universal. It is as though performer and auditor have themselves been transformed into more sensitive instruments, and prepared to participate more graciously in the common experience. It is as though in each one the ability 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 wonderful 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 whispers of one sinking from the world in mortal illness, Debussy, even, seems cool, silvered by the fine temperance 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 intensely 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 suffering, 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 religion 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 ephemeridae that wheel and skim delightfully through the limpid 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 marshaling 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, 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 outspreading his mighty pinions to greet some tremendous spirit sunrise. And in those last, bleeding, agonizing preludes, 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 hovering of the spirit that has quit its earthly habitation 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 philosophy, 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:

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

In "Prometheus" he introduces a clavier 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 "Mysteria" in which the music was to be conjoined not only with light, but with dance and perfume as well. It is a pity it was not granted him to achieve this work. The theosophic programs of his orchestral works are, after all, innocuous. Much of the half-mystical, half-sensual coloration of his orchestra is due them. And had the score of the "Mysteria" been as much an improvement over that of "Prometheus" as "Prometheus" is over the other symphonic works, Scriabine might 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, as well, one of the beings in which the age that is slowly expiring about us became conscious and articulate. Russia bore him, it is true, elemented him, gave him her childlike tenderness and barbaric richness 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 intensest 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 Schicksal," 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—"Guirlandes," "Flammes sombres," he entitles them,—or in the mysterious Tenth Sonata, that glows with the feverish light of the dream, or in those last haunted preludes. Existence for the man who could write such music, in which unearthly rapture contrasts with unearthly 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 Strawinsky, 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 liquified, 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 evanescences of life, to shape itself upon the infinitely subtle play of light, the restless, heaving, foaming surface of the sea, the impalpable racks of perfume, upon gusts of wind and fading sounds, upon all the ephemeral wonder of the world. But through Strawinsky, 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, massive, mechanistic. Scintillation is gone out of it. The delicate, sinuous melodic line, the glamorous sheeny harmonies, are gone out of it. The elegance of Debussy, the golden sensuality, the quiet, classic touch, 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 inundated the night with electrical glare and set its metal thews and organs and joints relentlessly whirring, relentlessly functioning.

And yet, the two styles, Debussy's and Strawinsky's, are related. Indeed, they are complementary. They are the reactions to the same stimulus of two fundamentally different types of mind. No doubt, between the two men there exist differences besides those of their general fashions of thinking. The temper of Debussy 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 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 greyhounds, by the shrinkage of continents and the vibration of the twentieth-century world. But the chief difference, the difference that made "Le Sacre du printemps" almost antithetical to "Pelleas et Melisande," is essentially the divergence between two cardinal 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 appear 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 moment 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 pleasure 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 thoroughfares, 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 reproduce 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 railway train hurling itself over leagues of steel, the sirens of steamboats and locomotives, the overtones of factory 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 almost cruelly. And the score of "Petruchka" is alive marvelously with the rank, garish life of a cheap fair. Its bubbling flutes, seething instrumental caldron, concertina-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 augment the expressiveness of music through direct imitation 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 preconception 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 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 established themselves, and from which they dominate the musical present. The concert-room has succeeded in making music a drug, a sedative, has created a "musical 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 elements 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 impulse, with a single strong motif, a single strong movement 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 epigrammatic 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 vernal, 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 innocence instead of in the wisdom of the fathers of the musical church, had dared obey the promptings of his own blood and set down chords, melodies, rhythms, just as they sang in his skull, though all the world 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 expression 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 functioning 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 introduction to "The Book of Self," "Man's body is just as large as his tools, for a tool is merely an extension of muscle and bone; a wheel is a swifter foot, a 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 Rimsky-Korsakoff's, imitates fireworks, distinguishes what is human in their activity, in the popping, hissing, exploding, in the hysterical weeping of the fiery fountains, 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 1914. Strawinsky had the libretto formed on the tale of Hans Christian Andersen which recounts the adventures of the little brown bird that sings so beautifully 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 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 monarch 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 machine 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 unsympathetically, 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 sawdust, 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 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 clockwork 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 pathetic finery of the crowds, the dancing of the human ephemeridae 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 genius. For the elements that make for the originality of style of "Petruchka" and the other of Strawinsky's representative compositions, in this work attain a signal largeness and powerfulness. The rhythmic element, already fresh and free in the scherzo of "L'Oiseau de feu" and throughout "Petruchka," attains virile and magistral might in it, surges and thunders with giant vigor. The instrumentation, magical with all the magic of the Russian masters in the earlier ballets, here is informed by the sharpness, hardness, nakedness which is originally Strawinsky's. Besides, 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. Everything 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 prolong and repeat. A dozen mills pulsate at once. Steam escapes; exhausts breathe heavily. The weird orchestral introduction to the second scene has all the oppressive silence of machines immobile at night. And in the hurtling finale the music and the dancers create 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 1913, the year Strawinsky 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 1915 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 Strawinsky's work, the music-hall ballet for eight clowns, and the work for the orchestra, ballet and chorus entitled "Les Noces villageoises," are by no means as bold in style as "Le Sacre," and resemble "Petruchka" more than the later ballet. But, whatever Strawinsky's 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 composer 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.