“ Max Reger is content to sit in the centre of his own web, spinning for ever the same music out of the depths of his Teutonic consciousness. In opera, in the song, in the symphony, in program music, in chamber music, Germany is apparently doing little more at present than mark time. Nevertheless there are undoubtedly germinating forces which will come to fruition before long. Perhaps the men now creating will be the instruments of the new voice, perhaps their pupils. One or two of the younger generation, at any rate, have done things that may justly claim our attention. ”

“ But their meaning for those men who are producing vital things in Italy to-day is undeniable. Sgambati not only gave the world his compositions; he saw to it that for the first time the symphonic works of the great German masters were produced in his country. And he was among the earliest of the Italians to champion the music of Richard Wagner. Such a man, a musician with the breadth to appreciate Wagner in the days when Wagner was hissed and ridiculed, must in truth have possessed the soul of an artist. ”

“ The music is by no means 'radical,' but it shows immense talent in expressive melody, colorful harmony, in precise expression of mood, in the suggestion of pictures, and in a certain elaborate and free polyphony which is one of Stravinsky's chief glories. It is a work irresistible alike to the casual listener and to the technical musician. The next ballet was 'Petrouchka,' produced in 1911. This is a fanciful tale of Petrouchka, the Russian Pierrot, and his unhappy love for another doll. ”

“ Schillings is one of the ramparts of the progressive musical citadel of Munich, the centre from which the Reger, Pfitzner and Thuille strands radiate. If aristocracy and nobility are the outstanding characteristics of his highly individual muse, a corresponding exclusiveness, coldness and artificiality accompany them. His perfection is that of the marble, finely chiselled, hard and polished. His music is a personal expression, but his personality is one that never experienced the depths of human suffering. ”

“ Not only does the composer incorporate folk-tunes bodily when it suits his purpose, as in the case of the polka and furiant already mentioned, but the melodies he invents himself are often equally simple, even naïve, and harmonized with a similar artlessness. The haunting refrain of the love duet might be sung by village serenaders. Yet this simplicity is the simplicity of distinction, not that of commonplaceness. There is a purity, a chivalric tenderness about it that can never be counterfeited by mediocrity, and that is in many of Smetana's tunes, as it is in Schubert's and in Mozart's. ”

“ Puccini bids fair to become another Meyerbeer when fifty years shall have rolled away. He has enjoyed the same shouts of approval from a public no more discerning than was that of Paris of the early nineteenth century; he has been called the most popular operatic composer of his day. Meyerbeer was, too. Yet to-day we can only find him tiresome and boring; we can but wonder how any public listened to his banalities, his deadly fustian, his woeful lack of inspiration, and express approval. Already the music of the future is dawning on our horizon. ”

“ Italy is rapidly making felt her individuality in the contemporary musical world by the strides in original composition which she is taking. To those two pioneers, Giovanni Sgambati and Giuseppe Martucci, must go the credit for having pointed the way to absolute music by Italians, for having toiled so that the men who came after them might take what they had done and build on it individual structures. And also that their followers might have a public that would listen to them.
Nowhere in the world to-day is there more activity in musical composition than among the young Italians. ”

“ After the composer had met bitter opposition where he had expected enthusiastic appreciation he wrote to Balakireff: 'I do not consider music an abstract element of our æsthetic emotions, but a living art, which, going hand in hand with poetry and drama, shall express the very soul of human life and feeling. The academic composers and the people who have grown to love the musical classics take my works for eccentric and amateurish. ”

“ He had mastered the classics and made their technique his own; his contemporaries he approached in a critical spirit, appropriating what was good and rejecting what he considered wrong. His watchword was individual liberty. 'I believe in the subjective, not in the objective power of music,' he said to his pupils. 'Objective music may strike us with its brilliancy, but its achievement remains the handiwork of a mediocre talent. Mediocre or merely talented musicians are eager to produce effects, but the ideal of a genius is to reproduce his very self, in unison with the object of his art. ”

“ His mastery over orchestral polyphony is supreme. There is always movement in his music, a rising and falling of all the parts, a complicated interweaving, never with the loss of sonority and richness. He is a great harmonist as well and an irresistible melodist. His rhythms are full of life, whether they are march, waltz or barbarous wild dances. The movement in five-four time in the Sixth Symphony is in itself a masterpiece and has stimulated countless efforts in the directions to which it pointed. ”

“ Like Whitman, Moussorgsky broke loose from the conventional rhythm and verse. Most of his compositions are set to his own words and librettos, in a kind of poetic prose. He said plainly that he never cared for verse for his compositions, but merely for a dramatic story to carry a certain thought. 'Thoughts and words fascinate me more than rhythm and poetic technique,' he used to say. Every piece of his work bears the stamp of his individuality; every chord of his music breathes power and inspiration. ”

“ It must fail as one of those wayward retrogressions which all arts have experienced at some time in their history. From Marinetti we need fear nothing. He will be forgotten long before the next decade rolls round, when his aggressive experiment in what he calls music will have been heartily exploded as the attempt on the part of an iconoclast to fuse a passing madness with a lofty art. ”

“ His mind was always an arena in which dim, vast dreams of music of his own struggled with impressions from other men's music that incessantly thronged his brain as they must that of every busy conductor, and with more or less vague, poetic, philosophical and humanitarian visions. He never quite succeeded in making for himself an idiom unmistakably and exclusively his own; all sorts of composers, from Beethoven and Bruckner to Johann Strauss, seem to nod to each other across his pages. ”

“ Side by side with the neo-classical school, but always steadily encroaching upon it, is the 'poetic' school that derives from Liszt and Wagner. It is a truism of criticism that in musical history the big men end periods rather than begin them. The composer who inaugurates a movement appears to posterity as a fumbler rather than a master, and even in his own day his methods and his ideals fail to command general respect, so wide a gulf is there in them between intention and achievement. ”

“ As a whole, Charpentier, the poet of 'Impressions of Italy,' the crude but forceful dramatist of the 'Poet's Life,' the mature artist of 'Louise,' has accomplished certain unique aspects of realism with a symbolic or sociological undercurrent. Limited as he is to 'the quarter,' he has been also universal, and his sincere and picturesque vision has something of permanence. As a pupil of Massenet he does not belong to the vanguard, but his plausible synthesis of seemingly contradictory elements has left a permanent impress in the annals of modern French music. ”

“ Doubtless ninety-nine out of every hundred musicians and music-lovers still believe that Italy has no art-song, that her composers are still devoting their energies to turning out those delectable morceaux in ballad-style which Italian opera singers have sung in the past, and still do, to an extent, when they are called upon to take part in a concert. ”

“ Italy's right to a place among musical nations of the day cannot be denied. Not only in the producing of worthy music-dramas, of orchestral works, of chamber music, but also in the noble art-song is she active. A change has come over her. Perhaps her musicians are being better trained. Yet the St. Cecilia Academy in Rome, the conservatories in Milan, Naples, Genoa, and Bologna have always equipped their students well. It may not be this so much as it is the imbuing of those who choose lives in art with the responsibility of their calling. ”