Strawinsky

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

"Tu vas mourir tantot, sous le poids de tes heures:

Les hommes, delies, glisseront par les portes,

Les ongles de la nuit t'arracheront la chair.

Qu'importe!

Tu es mienne avant que tu sois morte;

Les corps qui sont ici, la ville peut les prendre;

Ils garderont au front comme une croix de cendre

Le vestige du dieu que tu es maintenant!"

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

It is indeed likely that to-morrow the world will find in his piano-works its new Chopin, that Scriabine will shortly be given the place once occupied by the other. For not only is he in many ways the artistic superior of the man who once was his master. He is,as well, one of the beings in which the age that is slowly expiring about us became conscious and articulate. Russia bore him, it is true, elemented him, gave him her childlike tenderness and barbaric richness and mystic light. But in developing out of the Russian "universal" school into perfect liberty and individuality, he became indeed a universal expression, the first really produced by the group. He became, like the intensely "national" Strawinsky, one of those men into whom an age enters. He is symbolic of his time. He seems to have felt his age's life in its intensest form. The hour that created him was an hour in which the power of feeling had waxed inordinately, almost to the point of hampering action, when an Asiatic delicacy had begun to be manifest in Western character, when the fusion of Europe and Asia was commencing to make itself felt. And in Scriabine, that new intensity of sensation attained something near to heroic supernatural stature. What was beautiful and sick in his age entered into his art. Through it, we learn, not a little, how we feel.

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

The new steel organs of man have begotten their music in "Le Sacre du printemps." For with Strawinsky, the rhythms of machinery enter musical art. With this his magistral work a new chapter of music commences, the spiritualization of the new body of man is manifest. Through Debussy, music had liquified, become opalescent and impalpable and fluent. It had become, because of his sense, his generation's sense, of the infirmity of things, a sort of symbol of the eternal flux, the eternal momentariness. It had come to body forth all that merges and changes and disappears, to mirror the incessant departures and evanescences of life, to shape itself upon the infinitely subtle play of light, the restless, heaving, foaming surface of the sea, the impalpable racks of perfume, upon gusts of wind and fading sounds, upon all the ephemeral wonder of the world. But through Strawinsky, there has come to be a music stylistically well-nigh the reverse of that of the impressionists. Through him, music has become again cubical, lapidary, massive, mechanistic. Scintillation is gone out of it. The delicate, sinuous melodic line, the glamorous sheeny harmonies, are gone out of it. The elegance of Debussy, the golden sensuality, the quiet, classic touch,are flown. Instead, there are come to be great, weighty, metallic masses, molten piles and sheets of steel and iron, shining adamantine bulks. Contours are become grim, severe, angular. Melodies are sharp, rigid, asymmetrical. Chords are uncouth, square clusters of notes, stout and solid as the pillars that support roofs, heavy as the thuds of triphammers. Above all, there is rhythm, rhythm rectangular and sheer and emphatic, rhythm that lunges and beats and reiterates and dances with all the steely perfect tirelessness of the machine, shoots out and draws back, shoots upward and shoots down, with the inhuman motion of titanic arms of steel. Indeed, the change is as radical, as complete, as though in the midst of moonlit noble gardens a giant machine had arisen swiftly from the ground and inundated the night with electrical glare and set its metal thews and organs and joints relentlessly whirring, relentlessly functioning.

And yet, the two styles, Debussy's and Strawinsky's, are related. Indeed, they are complementary. They are the reactions to the same stimulus of two fundamentally different types of mind. No doubt, between the two men there exist differences besides those of their general fashions of thinking. The temper of Debussy was profoundly sensuous and aristocratic and contained. That of Strawinsky is nervous and ironic and violent. The one man issued from an unbroken tradition, was produced by generations and generationsof gentlemen. The other is one of those beings who seem to have been called into existence solely by the modern way of life, by express trains and ocean greyhounds, by the shrinkage of continents and the vibration of the twentieth-century world. But the chief difference, the difference that made "Le Sacre du printemps" almost antithetical to "Pelléas et Mélisande," is essentially the divergence between two cardinal manners of apprehending life. Debussy, on the one hand, seems to be of the sort of men in whom the center of conscience is, figuratively, sunken; one of those who have within themselves some immobility that makes the people and the things about them appear fleeting and unreal. For such, the world is a far distant thing, lying out on the rims of consciousness, delicate and impermanent as sunset hues or the lights and gestures of the dream. The music of Debussy is the magistral and classic picture of this distant and glamorous procession, this illusory and fantastical and transparent show, this thing that changes from moment to moment and is never twice the same, and flows away from us so quickly. But Strawinsky, on the other hand, is in the very midst of the thing so distant from the other man. For him, the material world is very real, sharp, immediate. He loves it, enjoys it, is excited by its many forms. He is vividly responsive to its traffic. Things make an immediate and biting impression on him, stimulate in him pleasure and pain. He feels their edge and knows it hard, feels their weight and knows it heavy, feels their motion in all its violence. There is in Strawinsky an almost frenetic delight in the processes that go on about him. He goes through the crowded thoroughfares, through cluttered places, through factories, hotels, wharves, sits in railway trains, and the glare and tumult and pulsation, the engines and locomotives and cranes, the whole mad phantasmagoria of the modern city, evoke images in him, inflame him to reproduce them in all their weight and gianthood and mass, their blackness and luridness and power. The most vulgar things and events excite him. The traffic, the restlessness of crowds, the noise of vehicles, of the clatter of horses on the asphalt, of human cries and calls sounding above the street-bass, a couple of organ grinders trying to outplay each other, a brass band coming down the avenue, the thunder of a railway train hurling itself over leagues of steel, the sirens of steamboats and locomotives, the overtones of factory whistles, the roar of cities and harbors, become music to him. In one of his early orchestral sketches, he imitates the buzzing of a hive of bees. One of his miniatures for string-quartet bangs with the beat of the wooden shoes of peasants dancing to the snarling tones of a bagpipe. Another reproduces the droning of the priest in a little chapel, recreates the scene almost cruelly. And the score of "Petruchka" is alivemarvelously with the rank, garish life of a cheap fair. Its bubbling flutes, seething instrumental caldron, concertina-rhythms and bright, gaudy colors conjure up the movement of the crowds that surge about the amusement booths, paint to the life the little flying flags, the gestures of the showmen, the bright balloons, the shooting-galleries, the gipsy tents, the crudely stained canvas walls, the groups of coachmen and servant girls and children in their holiday finery. At moments one can even smell the sausages frying.

For Strawinsky is one of those composers, found scattered all along the pathway of his art, who augment the expressiveness of music through direct imitation of nature. His imagination seems to be free, bound in nowise by what other men have adjudged music to be, and by what their practice has made it seem. He comes to his art without prejudice or preconception of any kind, it appears. He plays with its elements as capriciously as the child plays with paper and crayons. He amuses himself with each instrument of the band careless of its customary uses. There are times when Strawinsky comes into the solemn conclave of musicians like a gamin with trumpet and drum. He disports himself with the infinitely dignified string-quartet, makes it do light and acrobatic things. There is one interlude of "Petruchka" that is written for snare-drums alone. His work is incrusted with cheap waltzes and barrel-organ tunes. It is gamy and racyin style; full of musical slang. He makes the orchestra imitate the quavering of an old hurdy-gurdy. Of late he has written a ballet for eight clowns. And he is reported to have said, "I should like to bring it about that music be performed in street-cars, while people get out and get in." For he finds his greatest enemy in the concert-room, that rut that limits the play of the imagination of audiences, that fortress in which all of the intentions of the men of the past have established themselves, and from which they dominate the musical present. The concert-room has succeeded in making music a drug, a sedative, has created a "musical attitude" in folk that is false, and robbed musical art of its power. For Strawinsky music is either an infection, the communication of a lyrical impulse, or nothing at all. And so he would have it performed in ordinary places of congregation, at fairs, in taverns, music-halls, street-cars, if you will, in order to enable it to function freely once again. His art is pointed to quicken, to infect, to begin an action that the listener must complete within himself. It is a sort of musical shorthand. On paper, it has a fragmentary look. It is as though Strawinsky had sought to reduce the elements of music to their sharpest and simplest terms, had hoped that the "development" would be made by the audience. He seems to feel that if he cannot achieve his end, the communication of his lyrical impulse, with a single strongmotif, a single strong movement of tones, a single rhythmic start, he cannot achieve it at all. So we find him writing songs, the three Japanese lyrics, for instance, that are epigrammatic in their brevity; a piece for string-quartet that is played in fifty seconds; a three-act opera that can be performed in thirty minutes.

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

And so, free of preconceptions, Strawinsky was able to let nature move him to imitation. Just as Picasso brings twentieth-century nature into his still lives, so the young composer brings it into his music. It is the rhythm of machinery that has set Strawinsky the artist free. All his life he has been conscious of these steel men. Mechanical things have influenced his art from the beginning. It is as though machinery had revealed him to himself, as though sight of the functioning of these metal organisms, themselves but the extension of human bones and muscles and organs, had awakened into play the engine that is his proper body. For, as James Oppenheim has put it in the introduction to "The Book of Self," "Man's body is just as large as his tools, for a tool is merely an extension of muscle and bone; a wheel is a swifter foot, aderrick a greater hand. Consequently, in the early part of the century, the race found itself with a new gigantic body." It is as though the infection of the dancing, lunging, pumping piston-rods, walking beams, drills, has awakened out of Strawinsky a response and given him his power to beat out rhythm. The machine has always fascinated him. One of his first original compositions, written while he was yet a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakoff's, imitates fireworks, distinguishes what is human in their activity, in the popping, hissing, exploding, in the hysterical weeping of the fiery fountains, the proud exhibitions and sudden collapses of the pin-wheels. It is the machine, enemy of man, that is pictured by "The Nightingale," that curious work of which one act dates from 1909, and two from 1914. Strawinsky had the libretto formed on the tale of Hans Christian Andersen which recounts the adventures of the little brown bird that sings so beautifully that the Emperor of China bids it to his court. Strawinsky's nightingale, too, comes to the palace and sings, and all the ladies of the entourage fill their mouths with water in the hopes of better imitating the warbling of the songster. But then there enter envoys bearing the gift of the Emperor of Japan, a mechanical nightingale that amuses the court with its clockwork antics. Once more the emperor commands the woodland bird to sing. But it is flown. In his rage the emperor banishes it from his realm. ThenDeath comes and sits at the emperor's bedside, and steals from him crown and scepter, till, of a sudden, the Nightingale returns, and sings, and makes Death relinquish his spoils. And the courtiers who come into the imperial bedchamber expecting to find the monarch dead, find him well and glad in the morning sunshine.

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

"Le Sacre," on the other hand, is the man-machine viewed not from without, and unsympathetically, but from within. So far, it is Strawinsky's masterwork, the completest and purest expression of his genius. For the elements that make for the originality of style of "Petruchka" and the other of Strawinsky's representative compositions, in this work attain a signal largeness and powerfulness. The rhythmic element, already fresh and free in the scherzo of "L'Oiseau de feu" and throughout "Petruchka," attains virile and magistral might in it, surges and thunders with giant vigor. The instrumentation, magicalwith all the magic of the Russian masters in the earlier ballets, here is informed by the sharpness, hardness, nakedness which is originally Strawinsky's. Besides, the latter work has the thing hitherto lacking somewhat in the young man's art—grandeur and severity and ironness of language. In it he stands completely new, completely in possession of his powers. And in it the machine operates. Ostensibly, the action of the ballet is laid in prehistoric times. Ostensibly, it figures the ritual with which a tribe of stone-age Russians consecrated the spring. Something of the sort was necessary, for an actual representation of machines, a ballet of machines, would not have been as grimly significant as the angular, uncouth gestures of men, would by no means have as nakedly revealed the human engine. Here, in the choreography, every fluid, supple, curving motion is suppressed. Everything is angular, cubical, rectilinear. The music pounds with the rhythm of engines, whirls and spirals like screws and fly-wheels, grinds and shrieks like laboring metal. The orchestra is transmuted to steel. Each movement of the ballet correlates the rhythms of machinery with the human rhythms which they prolong and repeat. A dozen mills pulsate at once. Steam escapes; exhausts breathe heavily. The weird orchestral introduction to the second scene has all the oppressive silence of machines immobile at night. And in the hurtling finale the music and the dancers createfigure that is at once the piston and a sexual action. For Strawinsky has stripped away from man all that with which specialization, differentiation, have covered him, and revealed him again, in a sort of cruel white light, a few functioning organs. He has shown him a machine to which power is applied, and which labors in blind obedience precisely like the microscopic animal that eats and parturates and dies. The spring comes; and life replenishes itself; and man, like seed and germ, obeys the promptings of the blind power that created him, and accomplishes his predestined course and takes in energy and pours it out again. But, for a moment, in "Le Sacre du printemps," we feel the motor forces, watch the naked wheels and levers and arms at work, see the dynamo itself.

The ballet was completed in 1913, the year Strawinsky was thirty-one years old. It may be that the work will be succeeded by others even more original, more powerful. Or it may be that Strawinsky has already written his masterpiece. The works that he has composed during the war are not, it appears, strictly new developments. Whatever enlargement of the field of the string quartet the three little pieces which the Flonzaleys played here in 1915 created, there is no doubt that it was nothing at all to compare with the innovation in orchestral music created by the great ballet. And, according to rumor, the newest of Strawinsky's work, the music-hall ballet for eight clowns,and the work for the orchestra, ballet and chorus entitled "Les Noces villageoises," are by no means as bold in style as "Le Sacre," and resemble "Petruchka" more than the later ballet. But, whatever Strawinsky's future accomplishment, there can be no doubt that with this one work, if not also with "Petruchka," he has secured a place among the true musicians. It is doubtful whether any living composer has opened new musical land more widely than he. For he has not only minted music anew. He has reached a point ahead of us that the world would have reached without him. That alone shows him the genius. He has brought into music something for which we had long been waiting, and which we knew must one day arrive. To us, at this moment, "Le Sacre du printemps" appears one of those compositions that mark off the musical miles.

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 ofthese 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 consequenceof 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 hisalienhood, 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 inhibitany 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. Ofwhat 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 rörht 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, "Ichhab' 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 vorhändenen 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 itloses in effectiveness. So, taking hints from the Ninth of Beethoven and the "Roméo" 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 naïve 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 mustcondition 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 harpsimitate 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 vergänglicheIst nur ein Gleichnisz"

"Alles vergängliche

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 sentimentalWienerwaldBrahms, 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, wrotejust 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 Walküre," 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 throughMahler'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 himselfalone, 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. Wefeel 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 racialtraits, 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 wehave 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.

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 onehundred 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 musicalbête noire. Closer acquaintance with his art had not ingratiated him with his public. Indeed, concert-audiences had become bored to the point of exasperationwith 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," "Böcklin" 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 pedantin 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 wherethey 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 makeof 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 greatmen 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 manœuvers. 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 blüht" 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.

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 thecomposer 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 "Pelléas" is also ultra-romantic and post-Wagnerian. The trumpet theme, the "Pelléas" theme, for instance, is lineally descended from the "Walter vonStolzing" and "Parisfal" motives. The work reveals Schoenberg 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 "Pelléas et Mélisande" than it is "PelleasundMelisanda." 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, "Verklärte 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 Schoenbergfirst 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 "durchführung" 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 thatannoy 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 proceededto 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 manœvers. 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. "Herzgewächse," the setting of the poem of Maeterlinck made contemporaneously with these pieces, makes fantastic demands upon the singer, asks the voice to hold high Fpppp, 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 periodmade 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.

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