Paul Leopold Rosenfeld

“ A psychic maturity, freshness of spirit, living culture, and technical control have opened into the realm of music in America. The music to The Black Maskers is no happy hit such as many slight talents make once in their lives; accidents liable as not never to repeat themselves again. ”

“ News is never that a dog goes mad and bites a man, but only that a man goes mad and bites a dog; and three hundred odd singers and players wading under the direction of Mr Bodanzky through a lengthy work devoid of all value, and the Philadelphia Orchestra muffling a Beethoven symphony under the baton of Mr Stokowsky, are events quite as banal as spasms of canine frenzy. ”

“ A living flow informs the structure. The clangorous and ironic passages subside naturally into the weeping, dolorous, soft ones. Nor has the music form in the American manner: at the expense of robustness and vibrancy. There is great strength in the movements; powerfully pulsing rhythms; long melodic lines that flow and continue and extend in beauty ”

“ His workmanship declares him marvellously in control of his resources, capable of producing hard form which reveals itself the larger the more it is heard. Broken as it sounds, elusive and mysterious as it is in outline, full of abrupt brutal resolutions and strange new sounds and sudden suspensions and blinding blurs, his work has a fine clarity and solidity of form. ”

“ A true romanticist would not to-day be found attempting to write "romantic" music. There is not a fresh and expressive note in the long work. Throats, instruments, sound unending emptiness. First you wonder what is suddenly the matter with yourself. ”

“ Men full of something to sing have not to play upon their audiences' sympathies through extra-musical means. But this manoeuvre seems habitual with Pfitzner. Some years since, when Busoni wrote Towards a New Aesthetic of Music, and demonstrated the logic of not twenty-four, but of one hundred and three gamuts, Pfitzner sought to discredit the theory, not by refuting Busoni on musical ground, but with talk of "We Germans do not need new scales" ”

“ They, too, fall into the pattern of the music-people. Hence, any one who so wishes can insult the public with empty music and empty playing. For someone in the press is sure next morning to pat him on the back as though he had done a worthy deed. ”

“ We have proof that, at length, for the first time since the colonization of the Atlantic seaboard, an whole creative musicianship has appeared among the Americans. The audiences which assisted at the three performances of The Black Maskers in Northampton in June heard an incidental music poorly performed, muffled by the two circumstances that it was sounded from behind the stage, and by a scratch body of instrumentalists ”

“ If these concerts justify any mention whatsoever, it is merely because of certain comments passed on them in one of the morning newspapers; having set forth to draw the picture of a machine, we cannot in fairness leave off before having limned all its component parts. ”

“ It seems he is a member of that race which is falling more rapidly than leaves do in November, or Nordics in the minds of neo-Hegelians: the race of American college professors who have not yet permitted the environing elements to annihilate intellectual curiosity and courage in them. ”