THIRD EDITION
THIRD EDITION
Printed byBallantyne, Hanson & Co.at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
The greater part of the following matter has already appeared in various periodicals—theFortnightly Review, theContemporary Review, theSpeaker, theChord, the New YorkMusical Courier, theAtlantic Monthly, theWeekly Critical Review, theMonthly Musical Record, and theDaily Mail. All have been greatly altered, however—some practically rewritten. The larger articles—those on Programme Music, Strauss, and Berlioz—have been made up from sundry articles that appeared at different times and in different journals; any one who has tried to weld heterogeneous material of this kind into one mass will appreciate the difficulty of the work, and will, I trust, make allowances for whatever awkwardness of form the essays may show here and there.
I must apologise for the fact that occasionally one essay touches slightly upon ground that has already been more fully treated in another. It sometimes happens that two quite different linesof thought, starting from widely separated points, will converge and meet; or, on the other hand, that the one æsthetic principle will prove applicable to different phenomena. I am conscious of this occasional overlapping in the essays, but there seemed no way of avoiding it; if an argument was to have its proper force it had to be given in full, even if for a page or so it duplicated what had already been said elsewhere.
My thanks are due to the Editors of the journals I have named for their permission to reprint.
E. N.
As this Second Edition is printed from moulds, no alteration of or addition to the text of the First Edition has been possible. I should have liked to expand one or two of the essays at various points and to revise them at others. There is always something new to be said, for example, about programme music, while any article on a living subject, such as that on Strauss, is bound to contain many things that are not so apposite now as when they were first written. But even these may have a value as pictures of a bygone state of things; and in this way such matter as that relating to the earlier attitude of the critics and the public towards Strauss may be of some historical interest. The Strauss article obviously needs bringing up to date. But even if that were done, the new article would in turn be behind the times in another year or two; while the reader will find a further discussion of Strauss, and a consideration of the trend of hisart since theSymphonia Domestica, in my little book on him in the series of "Living Masters of Music." The Appendix to the present volume is wholly new.
E. N.
A preface to the third edition can in the nature of things be little more than a repetition of that to the second. While in one way it is regrettable that the article on Strauss does not carry us further than theSymphonia Domestica, that work, after all, is the most convenient and the most logical closing point for a study of him in all but his very latest activities. It is about seven years now since he launched out upon a new sea withSalome. With that and the operas that followed it he has made a new "period" in his artistic history. The best time, however, for critically appraising what he has done in the theatre will be when he comes out of it, and lets us see what influence his operatic methods and ideals have had on his musical thinking as a whole. He is said to have been engaged for some time on a "Nature" Symphony. The appearance of that or of some other purely instrumental work will give the opportunity for a rounded study ofthe later Strauss, who has made even his own earlier works seem rather far-off things.
The Appendix to the volume remains as in the second edition. No occasion has been given me to pursue the subject further.
E. N.
Oct. 1913.