Musical Portraits : Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers

_Some of the material of this book was originally printed in the form of articles in "The Dial," "The New Republic," and "The Seven Arts." Thanks are due the editors of these pe...

For we accepted him with the world of our minority. For each individual there is a period, varying largely in extent, during which his existence is chiefly a process of imitatio...

And even though Strauss himself could scarcely be mistaken for the god, nevertheless he made Nietzsche's dream appear realizable. He permitted one for an instant to perceive a m...

And always the excuses: "Earning money for the support of wife and child is not shameful," "I am going to accumulate a large enough fortune so that I can give up conducting enti...

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...

For we exist to-day in a time of barbarian inroads. We are beholding the old European continent of music swarmed over by Asiatic hordes, Scyths and Mongols and Medes and Persian...

What the cause of this diffidence is, what sort of rigidity it betokens, one can only guess. But of its presence there can be no doubt. Were there nothing else to demonstrate it...

He has permeated music completely with his impressionistic sensibility. His style is an image of this our pointillistically feeling era. With him impressionism achieves a perfec...

The intelligence that fashioned the music of Debussy was one completely aware, conscious of itself, flooded with light in its most secret places, set four-square in the whirling...

His work is not large in bulk. In a comparatively long life, long at least by the side of that of a Mozart or a Moussorgsky, he succeeded in producing only a single opera, "Prin...

For that, however, let us not fail to be duly grateful. Let us not fail to give thanks for the fact that setting forever is the conception of music as an after-dinner cordial, a...

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 type...

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...

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...

Air blows through the music of Sibelius, quickens even the slightest of his compositions. There are certain of his songs, certain of his orchestral sketches, that would be virtu...

It is only that, in seeking to compensate himself for his infecundity, he has fallen into the deep sea of preciosity. In seeking by main force to be expressive, to remedy his ca...

Once before, East and West have met and merged. On the plains where the soldiers of Darius and Alexander slaughtered one another, and where the Macedonian phalanxes recoiled bef...

Modest Petrovitch Moussorgsky was born March 16th, 1839, in the village of Karevo in the government of Pskow, Russia. His parents were members of the lesser nobility. His mother...

"En Saga," Opus 9; "Karelia Overture," Opus 10; "Der Schwan von Tuonela" and "Lemmenkainen zieht heimwarts," Opus 22; "Finlandia," Opus 26; "Suite King Christiern II," Opus 27;...