By W. J. Henderson Author of "The Story of Music," "Preludes and Studies," etc., etc. Longmans, Green, and Co. 91 and 93 Fifth Avenue, New York London and Bombay 1904 Copyright, 1904 , By Longmans, Green, and Co. All rights reserved THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. TO MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE, JAMES HUNEKER. Dear James : W. J. H. August, 1904. Modern Musical Drift...

The Holy Grail!—I trust We are green in heaven's eyes. Tennyson , The Holy Grail . 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 savings of a twelvemonth; and desperate husbands, driven almost to the abyss of insanity, had plunged blindly into the vortex of buying, and mortgaged the labor of the next half-year. It was the merry Yule-tide, when every self-respecting New

The cut nails of machine divinity may be driven in, but they won't clinch. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table , Ch. IV. There was no question that Gotham—wicked, wayward Gotham—was much stirred up by this production. It was generally accepted as a kind of religious ceremony, as to which no right-minded gentleman should deliver himself of critical comment. Yet there were some picturesque exceptions to the general state. A few ministers of the Gospel sprang to the pulpit o

I shall lay down a type of theological orthodoxy to which all the divine legends in our city must conform. Plato , Republic ( Grote's abstract ) "Parsifal" is the supreme test of the outcome of Wagner's theory that the modern theatre ought to bear the same relation to the life of the people as the theatre of the Greeks did. All students of the master's writings know that he preached this especially in those years when his system had attained definite and detailed form in his mind. In the Greek t

The will And high permission of all-ruling Heaven Left him at large to his own dark designs. Milton , Paradise Lost , Bk. I. 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 intoxication to restless spirits ever seeking fresh excitements. But your good, honest, old Wagnerite goes yearly to gape in awestruck silence at the majesty of the "wildered" Wotan, and to bask in the sun

I will put enmity between thee and the serpent. Genesis iii. 15 Wagner's gallery of portraits of women has been much praised. Senta, mooning by her idle spinning-wheel and waiting the time when she might cast her pure spirit on the stained bosom of the ocean rover and so save him another seven years' damnation; Elsa, wavering between faith and doubt and finally rushing to destruction out of sheer curiosity; the holy Elizabeth, praying for the life of him who had committed against her the deadlie

And those same torches, flaring by her bed, Lighted her downward path among the dead. Meleager. ( Translated by Jane Minot Sedgwick.) The drama of "Siegfried" opens with a reintroduction of one of Wagner's most subtle studies. Mime in "Rheingold" plays almost no part at all. There the local interest of Niebelheim is centred in that peevish parody of Napoleonic ambition, Alberich, whose curse is launched upon the entire succeeding series of incidents. In "Siegfried" Alberich is shown to us a help

The daughter of debate, That discord aye doth sowe. Verses by Queen Elizabeth in Percy's Reliques . It is an inquiring age. We investigate the domestic habits of the poet or the sandpiper with equal zest. We analyze dress and intellectual states with the keenest delight. Upon all things we speculate, ponder, ring the changes of scrutinizing comment. Thus it chanced upon a day that certain learned Thebans, sitting in the solemn conclave of educational chop-houses, fell upon disputatious views of

Theorbos, violins, French horns, guitars, Leave in my wounded ears inflicted scars. Charles Lamb to Clara N. 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 by the ears. The strenuous German artist is yet a young man, and what he may achieve in an uncertain future is a fruitful subject for critical speculation. What he has already done is to stir up the musical world a

Denique sit quidvis, simplex duntaxat et unum. Horace , Ars Poetica . Mr. Strauss has been acclaimed as an explorer, a pathfinder in the wilderness of new art. But after all he is simply a product, or perhaps it would be more exact to say a result; for the trend of musical art in the past century was toward representation. But the attempts of the early composers were in the line of descriptive music, which is a species of mimetics. The transfer of peculiar sounds and characteristic sound-motions

We transfretate the Sequane at the dilucul and crepuscul; we deambulate by the compites and quadrives of the urb; we despumate the Latin verbocination; and like verysimilary amorabons, we captat the benevolence of the omnijugal, omniform and omnigenal feminine sex. Rabelais , Pantagruel , bk. ii. ch. vi. It matters little from what point we view the tendency of musical art as it is disclosed to our vision through its most potent manifestations. We are driven inward upon the central and all-impor

He hath songs, for man or woman, of all sizes. A Winter's Tale , Act IV. Sc. 3. In the domain of the song new developments have come forward with startling rapidity in recent years. Every student of musical history is familiar with the growth of what is called the art song. The folk song was a simple form, in which a good, round tune, once made, served for every stanza. The early composers of songs were content to adhere to this form, which had its musical claim for supremacy, just as the Italia

What do ye singing? What is this ye sing? Swinburne , Atalanta in Calydon . Several factors have united in causing a new interest in the opera of Italy. In so far as New York is concerned the singing together of two such admirable exponents of the art of bel canto as Mme. Marcella Sembrich and Enrico Caruso has restored to life some of the older works, while a recent visit of Mascagni and the frequent performances of Puccini's "La Bohème" and "Tosca" have directed serious attention to the tenden

But how may he find Arcady Who hath nor youth nor melody? H. C. Bunner , The Way to Arcady . In these tumultuous times of Strauss and Wagner, with the furies of intellectual realism pursuing us and the sirens of seductive emotionalism panting before us, the persistence with which Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" clings to the lyric stage impels us toward the complacent conclusion that this work is become the classic of the musically unprogressive. This seems a hazardous statement, yet it may be

The chapters of this volume, except three, appeared originally as articles in the New York Sun in the course of the two years during which I have had the honor to serve that paper. The first half of the chapter on "Strauss and the Song Writers" and the chapter entitled "The Classic of the Unprogressive" were first printed in the New York Times , of which it was my privilege to be musical editor for some years. The first of the four articles on Richard Strauss was previously published in the Atla