Louis C. Elson, Chief Editor

“ Never did composer take himself and his mission in deeper earnest. The tenets of Christianity were hard facts to him, not subjects for elegant musical embroidery. Life was a bitter struggle against definite powers of evil, heaven a place of splendor to be attained only by ceaseless warfare. Beauty for its own sake seemed to him an unworthy object for a Christian to pursue.
Springing from this view of life, or at any rate closely allied to it, is the curiously vivid realism of Bach's music. Never has composer visualized his subject with such intensity. ”

“ Wagner's description of the Seventh symphony as an apotheosis of the dance gives the key to its meaning, but we must take the word dance in the widest signification. In the majestic introduction we seem to be ascending a mighty staircase, and when the gates of the palace are flung open the scenes that pass before our eyes seem to embrace all earth and heaven in their scope. In the first movement the rhythm of the universe is set to music, from the ordered beauty of the rolling spheres of heaven to the voices of nature and the wild music that burdens every bough. ”

“ There are certain phases of modern thought which are not represented in his music, and it is partly from their absence that his appeal to the world of to-day is less potent than formerly. He loved life and drank deep of it; he looked upon death and was not afraid. There is nothing morbid in Handel. He was as blind to the beauty of decay as was the sculptor of the Elgin marbles. His view of life was simple, but it was magnificently sane. His music has a tonic force that it is not for our good that we neglect. ”

“ In the slow movement we have its calmer and more dignified side, when hope blessed the composer with visions of peace and happiness, here set forth in the form of variations upon a noble and beautiful melody such as only he could write. Between the composition of this movement and the next came the rupture of the engagement, and the final shattering of all Beethoven's dreams. In the scherzo, that embodiment of indescribable mystery and horror, he treads the valley of the shadow of death, relieved only by the grim and cynical humor that peeps out in the trio. ”

“ Many may know him by other music, but the world at large knows him only by those inspiring melodies which enkindle all the emotions appertaining to human nature—love and hatred, joy and sorrow, hope and despair, consolation, resignation, and the like. His six hundred songs form a unique and precious bequest to music. Well has his work taken its place with the stately and strong columns on which the vast edifice of modern musical art rests—the symphonies and sonatas of Beethoven, the operas of Mozart, the oratorios of Handel, the chamber music of Haydn, and the songs of Schubert. ”

“ II Mozart is Mozart by virtue of the exquisite tenderness and charm of his nature, which breathes from every bar of his music. Never has a more delicate soul been cast upon the tender mercy of a cruel world. There is something in the childlike nature of Mozart's nature, in his beautiful sympathy not only for the nobler aspirations of humanity, but also for its weaknesses and foibles, which has a pathos that is beyond tears. ”

“ The Fourth symphony is the gayest and brightest that Beethoven ever wrote. It is pleasant to think that even that much-enduring soul had its moments of sunshine, and in such a moment was this symphony written. The slow movement is a love-song of profound and tender feeling, but the rest of the work is joyous and frolicsome, even rollicking in its humor. There is hardly a touch of the rough horse-play which characterizes the lighter movements in some of his later works, but the symphony—and particularly the finale—suggests irrepressible life and vigor, abundant health and high spirits. ”

“ It is in a sense the foundation of all his music, and in his hands it speaks with the tongues of angels. Abstract music has nothing grander and more dignified to show than some of his "mountainous fugues," as Browning calls them, and the soul of man has never been poured forth in tones of purer or more exalted rapture than in such a work, to quote but one of many, as the great Fantasia in G.
Bach spoke through music as few have spoken. It is a commonplace to say that every man lives in his work, but Bach lives in his as hardly another musician has done. ”

“ Beethoven has here painted himself and his beloved in colors that can never fade. Like the story of their love, the music whirls upon its tumultuous course, fierce and terrible, at times almost incoherent for all its strict form, rising and falling in waves of passion, yet with touches of ineffably pathetic tenderness—surely never was the tragedy of a man's love told in accents of such irresistible sincerity and force. ”

“ Nothing is more difficult than to describe music and the impressions produced by music in terms of plain prose, and the music of Palestrina in particular is of so delicate a fiber that it is almost impossible to find words in which to paint its distinctive charm. The prevailing note of it is its intense spirituality. Not a touch of earth degrades its celestial rapture. It voices the highest and purest mysticism of the Catholic faith as it never has been voiced before or since. Palestrina seems to view the mysteries of the Christian religion through a golden haze. ”

“ The personality of Beethoven is revealed no less clearly in his sonatas and quartets, some would say even more clearly than in his more elaborate orchestral works. In the pianoforte sonatas particularly, we seem to come almost nearer to the composer than in anything that he wrote, and there are certain movements in listening to which one can almost fancy that one is hearing with the ear of faith one of those marvelous improvisations in which the composer poured forth his soul in music, oblivious of all save the passionate emotions that burned within him. ”

“ Never was youth more richly gifted for the operatic stage than was Mario. Beauty of voice, face, and figure, with the most winning grace of Italian manner, were all his. For the stage he was born, and to the stage he remained faithful during his artistic life. To the brilliance of his success in opera he brought one great helping quality, the eye for color and all the important details of costume. ”

“ Imagination, picturesqueness, charm—these he has, but not that force, moral, emotional, and intellectual, which animates the music of his great contemporary Beethoven, and through it speaks as plainly to us as it did to our forefathers, perhaps more plainly to us than it ever did to them.
What Weber has to say he says delightfully; it is his misfortune that what he has to say is for an age but not for all time. While Beethoven writes in music the emotions that are the common lot of man, Weber represents a passing phase, an attitude of mind sincere enough in itself but of necessity evanescent. ”

“ When the curtain fell, Rossini turned toward the public, shrugged his shoulders, and clapped his hands. The audience were deeply offended by this open contempt for their opinion, but they made no reply at the time; the vengeance was reserved for the second act, of which not a note passed the orchestra. The hubbub was so great that nothing like it had ever been heard at any theater. Rossini meanwhile remained perfectly calm, and afterward went home as composed as if the work, received in so insulting a manner, had been the production of some other musician. ”

“ The excessive length of the opera on its first production (when the performance occupied more than six hours) necessitated considerable curtailments detrimental to coherence of plot. But in spite of all this, the music has a special charm, a kind of exotic fragrance of its own, which will always make it to some minds the most sympathetic of Meyerbeer's works. It is, in fact, the most purely musical of them all. None is so melodious or so pathetic, or so free from blemishes of conventionality; in none is the orchestration so tender ”

“ What that career was, and what its value has been to the world at large, may best be summed up in Gounod's eloquent words: "O Mozart, divine Mozart! How little to they know thee who do not adore thee—thee, who art eternal truth, perfect beauty, inexhaustible charm, profound yet ever limpid, all humanity with the simplicity of a child—who hast felt everything and expressed everything in a musical language that has never been and never will be surpassed!" ”

“ But Beethoven was a man of heroic mold; he was not to be crushed by sorrows that would have driven a weaker man to destruction, and after a passage of unutterable weirdness, in which the pulse of life is at its lowest, he bursts forth into a magnificent song of triumph. God is still God, and the world is fair, he seems to say. For a moment the shadows of the scherzo gather again, but his manhood triumphs once more, and the symphony ends in the radiant splendor of a glorious day. ”

“ His music was not to him an end in itself, so much as an engine for the saving of men's souls. He sings his Maker's praise, not for the joy of singing, but as an act of thankfulness due from man to God. He tells the story of the Passion not as the most tragic and moving episode in the world's history, but as the means of grace to lost sinners. ”

“ There is something almost miraculous in his setting of some of Goethe's lyrics, in the manner in which he keeps pace with the marvelous conceptions of that great poet; but his own music shows no attempt to face the baffling problems of life.
The charm of Schubert lies in his eternal youthfulness. He is the musician of springtime; the ardor of budding manhood bubbles in his strains. His greatest and most characteristic work, the symphony in C, is an Odyssey of youth. It pictures for us the feelings of a young man starting upon the pilgrimage of life. ”

“ No man's music is freer from the taint of sensuality than Beethoven's, and no work of his moves in an atmosphere of more radiant purity than the Kreutzer sonata. If we may venture to propose a reading in mere words of that incomparable masterpiece, we would term it the story of the adventures of a soul. In the first movement we seem to see the soul of man, a newly arrived guest moving about in a world not realized. ”

“ Happy Schubert to have died with his ideals unclouded by disillusion and remorse! Even when the bitterness of life and the cruelty of disappointment touch him, as in the first movement of the unfinished symphony in B minor, it is the unreasoning petulance of rebellious youth of which the music speaks, not, as in Beethoven, the grim tragedy of a man's sad war with fate. ”