Modern Musical Drift

It was the night before Christmas. The city of Gotham was surfeited with the vast spectacle of wealth in its annual orgy of expenditure. Women had careered madly through the sav...

To reach the state of mind in which that end is the chief object, one must rid himself of all desire and yearn to arrive at a complete negation of the will to live. Recall "Tris...

With every year the festival of the four dramas is celebrated in the metropolis of the New World. Parsifalian orgies are new, and the wine of the holy cup offers a novel intoxic...

But Fricka is right, after all. If Wotan had listened to her advice, he would have come out of all his difficulties much better. The fount of misfortune, as far as Fricka is con...

Little is left to be said, or much, for "Götterdämmerung" must be treated as a separate drama or dismissed shortly in the light of what has already been written. In this drama w...

For some seasons the orchestral compositions of Richard Strauss have been the exciting features of the leading orchestral concerts. They have fairly set the musical _cognoscenti...

Of the ideas which lie behind the music of Strauss less can be said in opposition now than could be said five years ago. Then we knew Strauss as the writer of "Don Juan," an att...

In his "Heldenleben" he has written more clearly than in some of his earlier works, but when all is said, his chief concern seems to be the dissection of souls for the purpose o...

How often shall we who are treading the downward slopes of life croon that old couplet and yearn for the cradle songs of Schubert and Beethoven? How often, too, we wonder, will...

The other works for the most part seem to wander along in endless stretches of melodious phrases, which have no closely organized relation to each other. They sound well, for th...

It is not a question to be answered lightly, for in these days the number of the lovers of "Lucia" is not to be estimated by the size of the audiences in the great opera-houses....

"It is a pleasure to open a new book and discover on its first page that the clearness and simple beauty of its typography has a harmony in the clearness, directness, and restfu...