Old Scores and New Readings: Discussions on Music & Certain Musicians

I have so often insisted on the pictorial power of Wagner's music, that, save for one quality of the pictures in the "Ring," and especially in "Siegfried," it would be unnecessa...

Mr. George Frideric Handel is by far the most superb personage one meets in the history of music. He alone of all the musicians lived his life straight through in the grand mann...

That impression is due entirely to the music and not to the drama. Dramatic music, in the sense that Mozart's music, and Wagner's, is dramatic, it is not. There is not the sligh...

So far I have spoken of his music generally, and now I come to deal (briefly, for my space is far spent) with the orchestral, choral, and chamber music and songs; and first with...

It may well be doubted whether Vienna thought even so much of Capellmeister Mozart as Leipzig thought of Capellmeister Bach. Bach, it is true, was merely Capellmeister; he hardl...

The precise provocation of this essay was a certain performance of "Lohengrin." During the first act the drama proceeded with charming, almost Mozartean, smoothness; and I was s...

And even as Seidl interpreted it, the supreme beauty of the music, the sweetness of it as well as its strength, were manifest as they have never been manifest before. "Lohengrin...

As for the representation of "Parsifal," I should not trouble to discuss it had not Mr. Chamberlain's book on Wagner lately come my way. It shows me that the old game is being p...

The learned branch of the English school reached its climax. Meantime another branch, not unlearned, but caring less for scholastic perfection than for perfect expression of poe...

Many years ago, in the essay which is set second in this collection, I wrote (speaking of the early English composers) that "at length the first great wave of music culminated i...

Whether the public is right or wrong, and whether we all are or are not just a little inclined to-day to exaggerate Tschaikowsky's gifts and the value of his music, there can be...

After hearing the whole opera twice, with all the supposed advantages of the stage, the main thing borne in upon me is that the stage and actors and accessories, far from increa...

"Aïda" is a different matter, though not so very different a matter. Here we have the young Verdi--Verdi in his early prime, for he was only fifty-eight; here also we have a sto...

Nevertheless, out of this wretched book Handel made a masterpiece. The tale of Susanna is not one in which a man of his character might be expected to take a profound interest;...

When I wrote the preceding paragraphs on Lamoureux, some of my colleagues were good enough to neglect their own proper business while they put me right about orchestral playing...