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 difficult 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 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 "something 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 unhealthiness of the atmosphere 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 1860'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 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 barren hills of Syria, by the constraint of its religion and folkways, by its titanic and terrible struggle for survival against the fierce peoples of Asia, by the marvelous vitality and self-consciousness and exclusiveness 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 inordinately difficult to register. For Austrian society put a great price on his suppression of them. It permitted him to participate in its activities only on the condition that he did not remind it continually of his 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 character 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, made 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 consequently most sensitive to the ill-will that barred them from power and success, there should be aroused, despite all conscious efforts neither to surrender nor to shrink, an unconscious desire to escape the consequences of the thing that stamped them in the eyes of the general as individuals of an inferior sort; to inhibit 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 gestures. There was in him the frenetic unconscious desire 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, perhaps, 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 unrealized, of large powers misapplied, of great and respectable creative efforts that did not succeed in bringing into being anything really new, really whole. Of 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 expression 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, reveal 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 something which childhood seems to possess and maturity to be without; to dream himself into childlike, paradisaic 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 Dionysiac might of sun and winds and teeming clay; wished to be able to say of his symphonies, "Hier roerht 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 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 symphony. He conceived the form anew. "Mir heiszt Symphonic," he is reported to have said, "mit allen mitteln der vorhaendenen Technik mir eine Welt aufbauen." He conceived the form particularly with reference 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 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 Wunderhorn," and concluded the work with a choral setting of one ode of Klopstock's. In the Third Symphony, 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 Brentano. 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 nevertheless 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 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 employed an instrumental palette distinctly his own. He utilized instead of the violin the trumpet as premier instrument of the band; achieved all manner of brilliant effects with it. He increased the variety and usefulness 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, triangle and cymbals in the supplementary. In the Eighth Symphony, the instruments of percussion form a little band by themselves. And he utilized the common instruments in original fashion, made the harps 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 symphonies, 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 lamentably weak, often arid and banal. There is surely not another case in musical history in which indubitable 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 Kapellmeistermusik, 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 cruelest 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 Michelangelo by sheer bulk. And the first four of his symphonies, 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 employed 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 vergaengliche Ist 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.

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, particularly 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 effectiveness. Bruckner, Mahler's teacher, is also incessantly reflected by these works, by the choral themes which Mahler is so fond of embodying in his compositions, 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 deformation 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 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 symphony that Beethoven died before composing. He was continually attempting to approximate the other's grand, pathetic tone, his broad and self-righteous manner. His music is full of but slightly disguised quotations. 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 Walkuere," a theme almost directly lifted out of Beethoven's violin concerto is announced on the 'cellos and horns. And the andante of the same symphony 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 Bruder," oh, how often and at what length through 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 worship 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 composers, 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 solution of his conflict in this particular piece of self-identification.

And had Mahler been able really to be himself 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 vigorously with the gigantic programs he set for himself. At moments, no doubt, as in the C-minor Symphony and so many of his piano-sonatas, one is repelled 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 composition, the First and Sixth Symphonies with their immortal youth and freshness, their hearty strength and simplicity, the deeply beautiful passages and movements 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 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 ultimate effect is exactly the reverse of what Mahler planned. The very size of the apparatus throws into crudest 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 brilliant. 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 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 homesickness, 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 untrue 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 instead of a nondescript and mongrel thing that he composed. All that he really attained by hampering himself was sterility.

And, in the end, we are forced to conclude that it was not solely the environment, however much that favored it, that condemned Mahler to sterility. Did we have no example of a Jewish musician attaining creativity through the frank expression of his Semitic characteristics, 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 composer the courage to speak out, and to attain salvation. 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 Beethoven'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 inseparable. 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 masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He, the troubled, nervous, modern man, wrote with fluency fugues and double fugues, chaconnes and passacaglie, concerti grossi and variations. He seemed to have mastered the secrets of the old composers, to be continuing 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 "Contributions to the Theory of Harmony," proposed one 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 conservatives and traditionalists rallied to him. He was acclaimed 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 "Parsifal," 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 ramifications. 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 symbolized the great things they thought the man achieving, 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-audiences had become bored to the point of exasperation with his classicizing compositions. To most folk, it appeared as though the man saw no other end in composition 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, romantic 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," "Boecklin" 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 attempt to interest the public in his work, made during the succeeding season, brought but few people to repent of their former indifference. A revival of interest is scarcely to be expected.

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 essentially 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 expression. 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, painfully 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 moments are outbalanced by the mass of his living, fragrant, robust song! With what rareness the pedant in Brahms emerges! Behind this music there is almost always visible the great, grave, passionate, resigned 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 without 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 Cyclops, 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 they would be humorous, their lack of passion where they would be profound, their sardonic and monotonous bourdon, one is perforce reminded of the photograph 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 poverty of invention and organizing power that conceals itself under an elaborate and complex and erudite surface. 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 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 compositions seem written out of no inner necessity, bring no liberation in their train. They are like mathematical problems and solutions, sheer brain-spun and unlyrical 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 intellectually only. He felt himself called upon to continue the work of the three great "B's," and yet never understood 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 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 writing 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 blueht" is decked with contrapuntal felicities. He copies the mannerisms of the composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contorts his compositions with all manner of outmoded turns. He appears to have come to his worktable inevitably with his mind full of the compositions he had been studying. His impulse seems always a reflected 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, variations under that of Mozart, sonatas under that of Brahms. In vain one searches for a perfectly individual style throughout his works. 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 adagios, even in some of his sardonic and turbulent scherzi (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 cannot be written to-day, that modern music and the antique 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 compositions of Strawinsky and Ornstein, too, have no tonality, lack every vestige of a pure chord, and exhibit unanalyzable harmonies, and rhythms of a violent 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 indubitably 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 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 pallor 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 uncompromisingness, 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 abstract 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, indeed, 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 temperament 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 mutual 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. 1, through the "Kammersymphonie," Op. 9, are full of a fervent lyricism, a romantic effusiveness. "Gurrelieder," indeed, opens wide the floodgates of romanticism. But these compositions are somewhat uncharacteristic and derivative. The early songs, for instance, 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 degenerates 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 instance, is lineally descended from the "Walter von 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 Tchaikowsky 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 romantic school. The person who declared ecstatically that assisting at a performance of the string sextet, "Verklaerte Nacht," resembled "hearing a new 'Tristan,'" exhibited, after all, unconscious critical acumen. The great cantata, "Gurrelieder," the symphonic setting of Jens Peter Jacobsen's romance in lyrics, might even stand as the grand finale of the whole post-Wagnerian, ultra-romantic period, and represent the moment at which the whole style and atmosphere did its last heroic service. And even the "Kammersymphonie," 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 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 compositions. 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 hurtling, 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 "durchfuehrung" which, introduced between 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 utilized with great deftness. Exclusive of the theme of the scherzo, which recalls a little overmuch the Teutonic 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 richness, a chiaroscuro that at moments recalls Brahms, though Schoenberg has a sensuous melancholy, a delicacy 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 interspersed with unmusical ones. It is not only that the work does not quite "conceal art," that it smells overmuch of the laboratory. It is that portions of it are scarcely "felt" at all, are only too obviously carpentered. 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 countermarching of instruments, an obsession with certain rhythms that becomes purely mechanical, an intensification of the contrapuntal pickings and peckings that annoy so often in the compositions of Brahms. It is Schoenberg the intellectualist, Schoenberg 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 Quartet. 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 scholasticism 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, daring 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 tonality 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 to incorporate his theories in tone. One finds the experimental 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 manoevers. 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. "Herzgewaechse," the setting of the poem of Maeterlinck 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 accompaniment 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 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 Doctor 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 artistic 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, throughout 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, a composition not without its incisiveness, as well as several of the tiny "Six Piano Pieces," Op. 19, recall 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 creativity just as once indubitably by the aid of experiments 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 impulse so long incarcerated. But, for the present, Schoenberg, the composer, is almost completely obscured by Schoenberg, the experimenter. For the present, he is the great 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 adversaries, the other and less radical professors. He, too, has invented a system and a method; his "Harmonielehre," 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 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 considered as simply a part of his unique course of instruction.



Sibelius

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 inclosure, 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 certain 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 proceeds 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 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 massive chords of the piano, say, lie the silence of rocks and clouds, precisely what manner of resistance between 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 instrumentation 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 glittering of harps. The musical ideas of those of the compositions that are finely realized recall the ruggedness 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 nickering sunlight. Music has forever been a movement "up to nature," and Schoenberg's motto is but the precision of a motive that has governed 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, preserving 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 primeval 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, 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 circumstance 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. Contact with Finnish earth gives him back into his own hands. It is the North, the wind and the moorland and the sea, that gathers 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 it. Youth had overtaken it once more, and filled it with the desire of independence. Chained to the Russian 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. Inarticulate thousands, unaware though they were of his existence, awaited his work, wanted the sustenance it could give. And, certainly, the sense of the needfulness 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 supplied him with a powerful incentive and made enormously 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 comrades straining toward a single lofty goal, felt himself 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, must have felt incarnate within himself, however incompletely, that mysterious image, and so proceeded with his work everlastingly assured that all he actually 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 foreign to each other. The creative power itself is extraordinarily fitful in him. It is as if, for all his physical robustness, he has not quite the spiritual indefatigability of the major artist. He has not that inventive heat that permits the composer of indisputably the first rank to realize himself unflaggingly in all his independence and intensity. Too often Sibelius'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 personalities, 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 the North are never entirely absent from his work. His songs invariably recapture, sometimes almost miraculously, the dark and mourning accents of the Scandinavian 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 Tchaikowsky. 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 moments 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.

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 unmistakable 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 orchestra 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 "pastoral" symphony, for all its absolute and formal character, 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 evanescent 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 pithiness 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 Sibelius 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 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 coloring is the refinement of all his color; the rhythms have a freedom toward which Sibelius's rhythms have always 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 summary 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 illusory light. The movement is the march, the oncoming rush, of vast formless hordes, the passage of 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 liegemen summoned to do the homage that had been denied the unhappy queen in her lifetime.

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 incrusted sheath there lies, as once there lay beneath the jeweled robes and diadem of the kings of Castile, not a living being, but a corpse.

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

"Je suis l'empire a la fin de la decadence."

One finds in him almost typically the sensibility to the essences and colors rather more than to the spectacle, the movement, the adventure of things. The nervous delicacy, the widowhood of the spirit, the horror of the times, the mystic paganism, the homesickness for a tranquil and sequestered and soft-colored 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 present 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 message 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 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 undoubtedly 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"? Does not Charles Martin Loeffler, who, after writing "A Pagan Poem," makes a retreat in a Benedictine monastery, and who, at home in Medford, Massachusetts, teaches the choristers to sing Gregorian chants, recall Joris Karl Huysmans, the "oblat" of La Trappe?

To a limited extent, of course, he has succeeded in fixing the color 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 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 spontaneous 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 l'Ukraine" and "La bonne chanson," for instance, are distinctly derivative and uncharacteristic 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 Musical 'Trip Around the World in Eighty Days.'" Nor is the idiom of his later and more representative period primarily and originally any more characteristic. 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 setting 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 hampered by the Gregorian and scholastic idiom which he has sought to assimilate.

Nor has he ever had the power to express and objectify 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 attenuated 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 tarnish 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 bagpipe 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 curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial. Pages of sustained music occur rarely enough in his music. The lofty, almost metaphysical, first few periods, the severe and pathetic second movement of the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments"; certain songs like "Le Son du cor," that have atmosphere and a delicate 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, wandering 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 distinction, even, of Loeffler's work, there can be no question. He is not one of the music-making herd. The subtlety and originality of intention which his compositions almost uniformly display, the unflagging effort 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 conforming 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 commonplace, 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 portions 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 remarkable, his knowledge of literature eclectic. 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, intense 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 darkening and spicing and sharpening of the style in certain 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 uncreativity to another somewhat more dignified and unusual. The compositions of both periods have, after all, the selfsame lack. His destiny seems to have been inevitable.

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 Instruments" glossed in the score "un jardin plein des fleurs naives," while this vial of gemmy green liquid is that entitled "une pre toute emeraude." The petrified saurian there, whose bones have suffered

"a sea-change Into something rich and strange"

is the Spanish rhapsody for 'cello; the string of steely beads, 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 Malaguena, and the eighteenth-century marching song of the Lorraine soldiery, and flourished under the windy heaven. But when Loeffler transplanted them respectively into "La Villanelle du Diable," into the 'cello rhapsody and into "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," they underwent 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 almost native to the Paris of Debussy and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave Kahn and Huysmans, has found comfortable an environment essentially tight and illiberal, a society that masks philistinism 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 intersecting 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, turbines 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 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 lustrous, 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 breaking 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 observances and ceremonials, losing itself in the gray desert stretches of theory, or wasting itself in the impossible 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 experience 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 1917" are full of the wailings and rockings 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 compositions 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 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 activity, disports itself in the "Shadow Dances," and in the "Wild Man's Dance," with its sheer, naked, beating 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 forcefulness. 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, almost. 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 accompaniment 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 communication of his sensations and experience in briefest, directest, 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 in his ears, and other men's forms and proportions seemed to make his shrivel. It was doubtless thankfulness 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 himself with the verses:

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

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

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

And certainly, for us, whatever the pundits claim, the wilds of Leo Ornstein are not so raging and lion-infested. 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 generation.

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 obscured. Something not entirely reassuring has happened 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, something happier has entered into his music, something more voluptuous and smooth. The 'cello chants passionately and dreamily in the two sonatas Ornstein has written of late for it. The racial element is softened, 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 undergone eclipse in the change. Something a little brilliant, a little facile, a little undistinguished, has introduced 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 the same directness and completeness with which he put himself into his earlier work. Moreover, occasionally 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, derivative. Ornstein, they make plain, had benefited by the achievements of Debussy and Moussorgsky and Scriabine. But they made plain as well that he had developed 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 gestation 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 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 Masqueraders," Opus 36, and the "Poems of 1917," 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 sentimentales" 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, duration, 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 doubtlessly has been withholding himself, diminishing the intensity of his fire. In order to learn to organize his material, he has doubtlessly unconsciously 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 distinct 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 ridiculed him or written cordially about him without saying anything. There is nothing more demoralizing for the artist. At present they are even classing him with 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 refused 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 orchestral 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. D'Indy's foolish war symphony, the works of Henry Hadley, of Rachmaninoff, of David Stanley Smith, even of Dvorsky, that person who exists as little in the field of composition 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 attaining performance and exhibition, had finally flinched 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.