Part 3

Moussorgsky

The music of Moussorgsky comes up out of a dense and livid ground. It comes up out of a ground that lies thickly packed beneath our feet, and that is wider than the widest waste, and deeper than the bottomless abysses of the sea. It comes up from a soil that descends downward through all times and ages, through all the days of humankind, down to the very foundations of the globe itself. For it grows from the flesh of the nameless, unnumbered multitudes of men condemned by life throughout its course to misery. It has its roots where death and defeat have been. It has its roots in all bruised and maimed and frustrated flesh, in all flesh that might have borne a god and perished barren. It has its root in every being who has been without sun, in every being who has suffered cold and hunger and disease, and pierces down and touches every voiceless woe, every defeat that man has ever known. And out of that sea of mutilated flesh it rises like low, trembling speech, halting and inarticulate and broken. It has no high, compelling accent, no eloquence. And yet, it has but to lift its poor and quavering tones, and the splendor of the world is blotted out, and the great, glowing firmament is made a sorrowful gray, and, in a single instant, we have knowledge of the stern and holy truth, know the terrible floor upon which we tread, know what man has ever suffered, and what our own existences can only prove to be.

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

"Through me, voices long dumb, many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion"--

It is as though he had surrendered himself quite to them, had relinquished to them his giant Russian strength, his zest of life, his joy, had given them his proud flesh that their cry and confession might reach the ears of the living.

Sometimes, Moussorgsky is whole civilizations discarded by life. Sometimes, he is whole cultures from under which the earth has rolled, whole groups of human beings who stood silently and despairingly for an instant in a world that carelessly flung them aside, and then turned and went away. Sometimes he is the brutal, ignorant, helpless throng that kneels in the falling snow while the conquerors, the great ones of this world, false and true alike, pass by in the torchlight amid fanfares and hymns and acclamations and speak the fair, high words and make the kingly gestures that fortune has assigned to them. Sometimes he is even life before man. He is the dumb beast devoured by another, larger; the plants that are crowded from the sunlight. He knows the ache and pain of inanimate things. And then, at other moments, he is a certain forgotten individual, some obscure, nameless being, some creature, some sentient world like the monk Pimen or the Innocent in "Boris Godounow," and out of the dust of ages an halting, inarticulate voice calls to us. He is the poor, the aging, the half-witted; the drunken sot mumbling in his stupor; the captives of life to whom death sings his insistent, luring songs; the half-idiotic peasant boy who tries to stammer out his declaration of love to the superb village belle; the wretched fool who weeps in the falling snowy night. He is those who have never before spoken in musical art, and now arise, and are about us and make us one with them.

But it is not only as content that they are in this music. This music is they, in its curves and angles, in its melody and rhythms, in its style and shape. There are times when it stands in relation to other music as some being half giant, half day-laborer, might stand in the company of scholars and poets and other highly educated and civilized men. The unlettered, the uncouth, the humble, the men unacquainted with eloquence are in this music in very body. It pierces directly from their throats. No film, no refinement on their speech, no art of music removes them from us. As Moussorgsky originally wrote these scores, their forms are visible on page after page. When his music laughs it laughs like barbarians holding their sides. When it weeps, it weeps like some little old peasant woman crouching and rocking in her grief. It has all the boisterousness and hoarseness of voices that sound out of peasant-cabins and are lodged in men who wear birch-bark shoes and eat coarse food and suffer cold and hunger. Within its idiom there are the croonings and wailings of thousands of illiterate mothers, of people for whom expression is like a tearing of entrails, like a terrible birth-giving. It has in it the voices of folk singing in fairs, of folk sitting in inns; exalted and fanatical and mystical voices; voices of children and serving-maids and soldiers; a thousand sorts of uncouth, grim, sharp speakers. The plaint of Xenia in "Boris Godounow" is scarcely more than the underlining of the words, the accentuation of the voice of some simple girl uttering her grief for some one recently and cruelly dead. There are moments when the whole of "Boris Godounow," machinery of opera and all, seems no more elegant, more artful and refined than one of the simpler tunes cherished by common folk through centuries, passed from generation to generation and assumed by each because in moments of grief and joy and longing and ease it brought comfort and solace and relief. This music is common Russia singing. It is Russia speaking without the use of words. For like the folk-song, it has within it the genius and values of the popular tongue. Moussorgsky's style is blood-brother to the spoken language, is indeed as much the Russian language as music can be. In the phrase of Jacques Riviere, "it speaks in words ending in ia and schka, in humble phrases, in swift, poor, suppliant terms." Indeed, so unconventional, so crude, shaggy, utterly inelegant, are Moussorgsky's scores, that they offend in polite musical circles even to-day. It is only in the modified, "corrected" and indubitably castrated versions of Rimsky-Korsakoff that "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina" maintain themselves upon the stage. This iron, this granite and adamantine music, this grim, poignant, emphatic expression will not fit into the old conceptions. The old ones speak vaguely of "musical realism," "naturalism," seeking to find a pigeon-hole for this great quivering mass of life.

No doubt the music of Moussorgsky is not entirely iron-gray. Just as, in the midst of "Boris," there occurs the gentle scene between the Czar and his children, so scattered through this stern body of music there are light and gay colors, brilliant and joyous compositions. Homely and popular and naive his melodies and rhythms always are, little peasant-girls with dangling braids, peasant lads in gala garb, colored balls that are thrown about, singing games that are played to the regular accompaniment of clapping palms, songs about ducks and parrakeets, dances full of shuffling and leaping. Even the movements of the sumptuous "Persian Dances" in "Khovanchtchina" are singularly naive and simple and unpretentious. Sometimes, however, the full gorgeousness of Byzantine art shines through this music, and the gold-dusty modes, the metallic flatness of the pentatonic scale, the mystic twilit chants and brazen trumpet-calls make us see the mosaics of Ravenna, the black and gold ikons of Russian churches, the aureoled saints upon bricked walls, the minarets of the Kremlin. There is scarcely an operatic scene more magnificent than the scene of the coronation of Tsar Boris, with its massive splendors of pealing bells and clarion blares and the caroling of the kneeling crowds. Then, like Boris himself, Moussorgsky sweeps through in stiff, blazoned robes, crowned with the domed, flashing Slavic tiara. And yet through all these bright colors, as through the darker, sadder tones of the greater part of his work, there comes to us that one anguished, overwhelming sense of life, that single great consciousness. The gay rich spots are but part of it, intensify the great somber mass. Their simplicity, their childlikeness, their innocence, are qualities that are perceived only after suffering. The sunlight in them is the gracious, sweet, kindly sunlight that falls only between nights of pain. The bright and chivalric passages of "Boris," the music called forth by the memories of feudal Russia, and the glory of the Czars, give a deeper, stranger, even more wistful tone to the great gray pile of which they are a part. "Khovanchtchina" is never so much the tragedy, the monument to beings and cultures superseded and cast aside in the relentless march of life, as in the scene when Prince Ivan Khovansky meets his death. For at the moment that the old boyar, and with him the old order of Russia, goes to his doom, there is intoned by his followers the sweetest melody that Moussorgsky wrote or could write. And out of that hymn to the glory of the perishing house there seems to come to us all the pathos of eternally passing things, all the wistfulness of the last sunset, all the last greeting of a vanished happiness. More sheerly than any other moment, more even than the infinitely stern and simple prelude that ushers in the last scene of "Boris" and seems to come out of a great distance and sum up all the sadness and darkness and pitifulness of human existence, that scene brings into view the great bleak monolith that the work of Moussorgsky really is, the great consciousness it rears silently, accusingly against the sky. As collieries rear themselves, grim and sinister, above mining towns, so this music rears itself in its Russian snows, and stands, awful and beautiful.

And, of late, the single shaft has out-topped the glamorous Wagnerian halls. The operas of Moussorgsky have begun to achieve the eminence that Wagner's once possessed. To a large degree, it is the change of times that has advanced and appreciated the art of Moussorgsky. Although "Boris" saw the light at the same time as "Die Goetterdaemmerung," and although Moussorgsky lies chronologically very near the former age, he is far closer to us in feeling than is Wagner. The other generation, with its pride of material power, its sense of well-being, its surge toward mastery of the terrestrial forces, its need of luxury, was unable to comprehend one who felt life a grim, sorrowful thing, who felt himself a child, a crone, a pauper, helpless in the terrible cold. For that was required a less naive and confident generation, a day more sophisticated and disabused and chastened. And so Moussorgsky's music, with its poor and uncouth and humble tone, its revulsion from pride and material grandeur and lordliness, its iron and cruelty and bleakness, lay unknown and neglected in its snows. Indeed, it had to await the coming of "Pelleas et Melisande" in order to take its rightful place. For while Moussorgsky may have influenced Debussy artistically, it was Debussy's work that made for the recognition and popularization of Moussorgsky's. For the music of Debussy is the delicate and classical and voluptuous and aristocratic expression of the same consciousness of which Moussorgsky's is the severe, stark, barbaric; the caress as opposed to the pinch. Consequently, Debussy's art was the more readily comprehensible of the two. But, once "Pelleas" produced, the assumption of "Boris" was inevitable. Moussorgsky's generation had arrived. The men who felt as he, who recognized the truth of his spare, metallic style, his sober edifices, had attained majority. A world was able to perceive in the music of the dead man its symbol.

But it is by no means alone the timeliness of Moussorgsky that has advanced him to his present position. It is the marvelous originality of his art. He is one of the most completely and nobly original among composers, one of the great inventors of form. The music of Moussorgsky is almost completely treasure-trove. It is not the development of any one thing, the continuation of a line, the logical outcome of the labors of others, as the works of so many even of the greatest musicians are. It is a thing that seems to have fallen to earth out of the arcana of forms like some meteorite. At the very moment of Wagner's triumph and of the full maturity of Liszt and Brahms, Moussorgsky composed as though he had been born into a world in which there was no musical tradition, a world where, indeed, no fine musical literature, and only a few folk-songs and orthodox liturgical chants and Greek-Catholic scales existed. Toward musical theory he seems to have been completely indifferent. Only one rule he recognized, and that was, "Art is a means of speech between man and man, and not an end." He was self-taught, and actually invented an art of music with each step of composition. And what he produced, though it was not great in bulk, was novel with a newness that is one of the miracles of music. Scarcely a phrase in his operas and songs moves in a conventional or unoriginal curve. The songs of Moussorgsky are things that can be recognized in each of their moments, so deeply and completely distinctive they are. There is not a bar of the collection called "Sans soleil" that is not richly and powerfully new. The harmonies sound new, the melodies are free and strange and expressive, the forms are solid and weighty as bronze and iron. They are like lumps dug up out of the earth. The uttermost simplicity obtains. And every stroke is decisive and meaningful. Moussorgsky seems to have crept closer to life than most artists, to have seized emotions in their nakedness and sharpness, to have felt with the innocence of a child. One of his collections is entitled "La Chambre d'Enfants." And that surprise and wonder at all the common facts of life, the sharpness with which the knowledge of death comes, characterize not alone this group, but all the songs. He is throughout them the child who sees the beetle lie dead, and who expresses his wonder and trouble directly from his heart with all the sharpness of necessary speech. So much other music seems indirect, hesitating, timorous, beside these little forms of granite.

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

These pieces are the children of an infinitely noble mind. There is something in those gorgeous melodies, those magnificent cries, those proud and solemn themes of which both "Boris" and "Khovanchtchina" are full, that makes Wagner seem plebeian and bourgeois. Peasant-like though the music is, reeking of the soil, rude and powerful, it still seems to refer to a mind of a prouder, finer sort than that of the other man. The reticence, the directness, the innocence of any theatricality, the avoidance of all that is purely effective, the dignity of expression, the salt and irony, the round, full ring of every detail are good and fortifying after the scoriac inundations of Wagner's genius. The gaunt gray piles, the metallic surfaces, the homelinesses of Moussorgsky, are more virile, stronger, more resisting than Wagner's music. Only folk aristocratically sure of themselves can be as gay and light at will. If there is anything in modern music to be compared with the sheer, blunt, powerful volumes of primitive art it is the work of Moussorgsky. And as the years pass, the man's stature and mind become more immense, more prodigious. One has but to hearken to the accent of the greater part of modern music to gauge in whose shadow we are all living, how far the impulse coming from him has carried. The whole living musical world, from Debussy to Bloch, from Strawinsky to Bartok, has been vivified by him. And, certainly, if any modern music seems to have the resisting power that beats back the centuries and the eons, it is his pieces of bronze and ironware and granite. What the world lost when Modest Moussorgsky died in his forty-second year we shall never know.

But, chiefest of all, his music has the grandeur of an essentially religious act. It is the utterance of the profoundest spiritual knowledge of a people. Moussorgsky was buoyed by the great force of the Russian charity, the Russian humility, the Russian pity. It was that great religious feeling that possessed the man who had been a foppish guardsman content to amuse ladies by strumming them snatches of "Il Trovatore" and "La Traviata" on the piano, and gave him his profound sense of reality, his knowledge of how simple and sad a thing human life is after all, and made him vibrate so exquisitely with the suffering inherent in the constitution of the world. It gave his art its color, its character, its tendency. It filled him with the unsentimental, warm, animal love that made him represent man faithfully and catch the very breath of his fellows as it left their bodies. Certainly, it was from his race's dim, powerful sense of the sacrament of pain that his music flows. He himself confessed that it was the sense of another's inarticulate anguish, sympathy with a half-idiotic peasant-boy stammering out his hopeless love, that first stirred the poet within him and led him to compose. The music of defeat, the insistent cry of the world's pain, sound out of his music because the Russian folk has always known the great mystery and reality and good of suffering, has known that only the humble, only those who have borne defeat and pain and misfortune can see the face of life, that sorrow and agony can hallow human existence, and that while in the days of his triumph and well-being man is a cruel and evil being, adversity often makes to appear in him divine and lovely traits. Dostoievsky was never more the Russian prophet than when he wrote "The Idiot," and uttered in it his humble thanksgiving that through the curse of nature, through the utter uselessness of his physical machine, through sickness and foolishness and poverty, he had been saved from doing the world's evil and adding to its death. And Moussorgsky is the counterpart of the great romancer. Like the other, he comes in priestly and ablutionary office. Like the other, he expresses the moving, lowly god, the god of the low, broad forehead and peasant garb, that his people bears within it. Both prose and music are manifestations of the Russian Christ. To Europe in its late hour he came as emissary of the one religious modern folk, and called on men to recognize the truth and reform their lives in accordance with it. He came to wrest man from the slavery of the new gigantic body he had begotten, to wean him from lust of power, to pacify and humble him. Once more he came to fulfil the Old Testamentary prophets. The evangel of Tolstoy, the novels of Dostoievsky, the music of Moussorgsky are the new gospels. In Moussorgsky, music has given the new world its priest.

Liszt

Oh, magnificent and miserable Abbe Liszt! Strange and unnatural fusion of traits the most noble and the most mean! One can scarcely say which was the stronger in you, the grand seigneur or the base comedian. For in your work they are equally, inextricably commingled. In your art it is the actor who thrones it in the palace hall, the great lord of music who struts and capers on the boards of the itinerant theater. Nowhere, in all music, is grandeur nigher to the dust, and nowhere does the dust reveal more grandiose traits. Your compositions are the most brilliant of bastards, the most lamentable of legitimate things. They smite us with both admiration and aversion, affect us as though the scarlet satin robes of a patrician of Venice were to betray the presence beneath them of foul, unsightly rags. They remind us of the facades of the palaces of Vicenza, which, designed by the pompous and classicizing Palladio, are executed in stucco and other cheap materials.

And yet, the many works in which you do not show yourself the artist reveal the plenitude of your powers almost as much as the few in which you do. The most empty of your many ostentatious orchestral soliloquies, the most feeble of your many piano-pyrotechnics, the iciest of your bouquets of icy, exploding stars, the brassiest of your blatant perorations, the very falsest of your innumerable paste jewels, declare that you were born to sit among the great ones of your craft. For they reveal you the indubitable virtuosic genius. The very cleverness of the imitation of the precious stone betrays how deep a sense of the beauty of the real gem you had, how expert you were in the trade of diamond cutter. Into the shaping of your bad works of art there went a temperament, a playfulness, a fecundity, a capriciousness, a genius that many better artists have not possessed.

You were indeed profusely endowed, showered with musical gifts as some cradled prince might be showered with presents and honors. Everything in your personality was grand, seigneurial, immense in scale. You were born musical King of Cyprus and Jerusalem and Armenia, titular sovereign of vast, unclaimed realms. Few composers have been more inventive. No composer has ever scattered abroad ideas with more liberal hand. Compositions like the B-minor piano-sonata, the tone-poem "Mazeppa," the "Dante" symphony, whatever their artistic value, fairly teem with original themes of a high order, are like treasure houses in which gold ornaments lie negligently strewn in piles. Indeed, your inventive power supplied not only your own compositions with material, but those of your son-in-law, Richard Wagner, as well. As James Huneker once so brightly put it, "Wagner was indebted to you for much besides money, sympathy, and a wife." For Siegmund and Sieglinde existed a long while in your "Dante" symphony before Wagner transferred them to "Die Walkuere"; Parsifal and Kundry a long while in your piano-sonata before he introduced them into his "Buehnenweihfestspiel."

You were equipped for piano-composition as was no other of your time. For you the instrument was a newer, stranger, more virgin thing than it was for either Schumann or Chopin. You knew even better than they how to listen for its proper voice. You were more deeply aware than they of its proper color and quality. You seem to have come to it absolutely without preconceived ideas. Your B-minor sonata, however unsatisfactory its actual quality, remains one of the magistral works of the sort. For few works better exhibit the various ranges of the instrument, better contrast different volumes of piano-sound. The sonata actually lies on different planes, proceeds from various directions, delimits a solid form, makes even Beethoven's seem flat and two-dimensional by contrast. Here, almost for the first time, is a sonata that is distinctly music of the pianoforte. And the modern achievements in pianoforte composition do not by any means lessen the wonder of your comprehension of the instrument's dynamics. The new men, Scriabine and the composers of the modern French school, may have penetrated more deeply than it was in your power to do, may have achieved where you failed. Nevertheless, they could not have progressed had it not been for your way-finding. They are immeasurably indebted to you.

Not even Wagner had an influence on the new age greater than yours, more largely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the good friend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntax and balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vague regions, the terra incognita of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its general, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to the romantic period, your conviction that the content conditions the form of every piece makes you the link between classic and modern musical art. The symphonic poem, whether or not it originates in the overtures of Beethoven, is mainly your handiwork, since although you yourself were not sufficiently free of the classic formulas to create a symphonic form entirely programmatic, as Strauss has subsequently done, you nevertheless gave him the hint whereby he has profited most. The impressionists, too, seem to stem from you. The little piece called "Les jeux d'eau de La Villa d'Este" seems not a little to anticipate their style. And although you were not responsible for the music of the nationalistic Russian school, the robust, colorful barbarian in you nevertheless made you welcome and encourage their work. It made you write to Borodin and Moussorgsky those cordial letters which pleased them so much. For at that time they were but obscure workmen, while you were the very prince of musicians.

Indeed, nothing is more princely, nothing better reveals the amplitude, the generosity of your spirit, than your relations with your fellow craftsmen. Artists are oftentimes so petty in their conduct toward each other that it is indeed refreshing to read with what infallible kindness you treated so many composers less fortunately situated than yourself. And not only Wagner and Cesar Franck benefited by your good deeds. Many obscurer and younger men, poor Edward MacDowell, for instance, knew what it was to receive cordial and commendatory letters from you, to be assisted by you in their careers, to have their compositions brought to performance by the best German orchestras through your aid. And you had no conceit in you, smilingly referred to your symphonic poems as "Gartenmusik," and replied to Wagner, when he informed you that he had stolen such and such a theme from you, "Thank goodness, now it will at least be heard!" Had you, O Liszt, expressed the nobility of your nature as purely in your composition as you expressed it in your social relations, we could have complained of no mountainous rubble, no squalor marring the perfect splendor of your figure.

But, unhappily, the veritable grandeur of your endowment never begot itself a body of work really symbolic of itself. For if your music, as a whole, has any grandeur, it is the hollow grandeur of inflation, of ostentation, of externality. Your music is almost entirely a monstrous decor de theatre. It is forever seeking to establish tragical and satanic and passional atmospheres, to suggest immense and regal and terrific things, to gain tremendous effects. It is full of loud, grandiloquent pronouncements, of whirlwinds, thunderstorms, coronations on the Capitoline, ideals, lamentations, cavalcades across half of Asia, draperies, massacres, frescoes, facades, magnificats, lurid sunsets, scimitars, miracles, triumphs of the cross, retreats from the world. It is full of all the romantic properties. Like vast pieces of stage scenery the various passages and movements are towed before our eyes, and we are bidden to feast our eyes on representations of titanic rocks and lowering skies and holy hermits' dwellings that remind us dangerously of the wonders displayed in the peepshows at gingerbread fairs. The atmosphere of the compositions is so invariably sensational, the gesture so calculated, so theatrical, that much of the truly impressive material, the quantities of original ideas, lose all substantiality, and become indistinct components of these vast mountains of ennui, these wastes of rhetorical and bombastic instruments, these loud and prancing concertos of circus-music. There is something almost insulting to the intelligence in these over-emphasized works, these pretentious facades, these vast, pompous frescoes by Kaulbach, these Byronic instrumental soliloquies, these hollow, empty flourishes of the brass, these foolishly satanic chromatics, these inevitable triumphs of the cross and the Gregorian modes.

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

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

was the type of you all. You had to ward off consciousness of your own insignificance by conceiving yourselves amid stupendous surroundings, lurid natural effects, flaming prairies, pinnacles, torrents, coliseums, subterranean palaces, moonlit ruins, bandit dens, and as laboring under frightful curses, dire punishments, ancestral sins, etc., etc.

But while we find the frenetic romanticism of a Delacroix, for instance, attractive, even, because of the virtue of his painting, and forgive that of a Berlioz and a Chateaubriand because of the many beauties, the veritable grandeurs of their styles, we cannot quite learn to love yours. For in you the disease was aggravated by the presence of another powerful incentive to strut and posture and externalize and inflate your art. For you were the virtuoso. You were the man whose entire being was pointed to achieve an effect. You were the man whose life is lived on the concert-platform, whose values are those of the concert-room, who finds his highest good in the instantaneous effect achieved by his performance. From childhood you were the idolized piano-virtuoso. All your days you were smothered in the adulation showered upon you in very tangible form by the great ladies of every capital of Europe. And a virtuoso you remained all your existence. You never developed out of that early situation into something more salutary to the artist. On the contrary, you came to require the atmosphere of the performance, the exhibition, about you continually, to find the rose leaves and the clouds of perfume absolutely necessary. Most of your composition seems but the effort to perpetuate about you the admiration and the adulation, the glowing eyes and half-parted lips and heaving bosoms. Everything in your piano-music is keyed for that effect. The shameless sentimentalities, the voluptuous lingerings over sweet chords and incisive notes, the ostentatious recitatives, the moist, sensual climaxes, the titillating figuration, the over-draperies, were called into existence for the immediate, the overwhelming effect at first hearing. Everything is broadened and peppered and directed to obtaining you the Pasha-power you craved. Besides being windy and theatrical, your music is what Nietzsche so bitterly called it, "Die Schule der Gelaeufichkeit--nach Frauen."

So your vast artistic endowment lies squandered, your ideas shallowly set, your science misused. For while fate showered you magnificently with gifts, it seems to have at the same time sought to negate its liberality by fusing in your personality the base alloy, by decreeing that you should have enormous powers and yet abuse them. It prevented you from often being completely genuine, completely incandescent, completely fine. It refused you for the greater part the true adamantine hardness of the artist, the inviolability of soul, the sense of style. It made you, the prodigiously fecund inventor, the mine of thematic material, prodigal; unable to refine your ore, to chase your ideas, and give them their full value. Wagner could have said of you, had he so wished, what Haendel is reported to have said of the composer from whom he borrowed, "Of what use is such a good idea to a man like him?" One must indeed go to Wagner for the appreciation of many of the inventions, the Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Parsifal and Kundry, music, which you cast from you so carelessly. As for yourself, you are too much the "virtuosic genius"; too much, at heart, the actor. Your music is perhaps the most cunningly carpentered for effect, the most artificial known to us. You are perhaps the most brilliant artifex of music.

We always seem to see you sitting on the concert-platform before us, immersed in the expression of your passion, your disgust of passion, your renunciation of passion. But the absorption is not quite as complete as it would appear to be. During the entire performance, you have been secretly keeping one wicked little eye trained on the ladies of the audience.

Sometimes you play the religious. Perhaps there truly was in you a vein of devotion and faith. The fact that you took Holy Orders to escape marrying the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, who pursued you those many years and doubtlessly bored you with her theological writings, does not entirely disprove its existence. Indeed, your "Dante" symphony, with its Hell full of impenitent sexual offenders, its Purgatory full of those who repent them of their excesses, its Paradise represented by a hymn to the Virgin, suggests what manner of role, and how real a one, religion might have played in your luxurious existence. But, for the most part, the religiosity of your music recalls overmuch the fashionable confessor's. You bring consolation, doubtlessly. But you bring it by choice into the boudoir. You speak sadly of the cruel winds of lust. You dwell on the example of the pious St. Elizabeth of Hungary. You spread your hands over fair penitents, making a series of the most beautiful gestures. You whisper honeyed forgiveness for passional sins. You always excite tears and gratitude. But, in the end, your "Consolation" turns out only another "Liebestraum."