I sought as I passed youth and its dangerous
critical heats to analyze just why I preferred one man's music to
another's. Why was I attracted to Brahms whilst Wagner left me cold? Why
did Schumann not appeal to me as much as Mendelssohn? Why Mozart more
than Beethoven? At last, one day, and not many years ago, I cried aloud,
"Bach, it is Bach who does it, Bach who animates the wooden, lifeless
limbs of these classicists, these modern men. Bach--once, last, and all
the time."

And so it came about that with my prying nose I dipped into all
composers, and found that the houses they erected were stable in the
exact proportion that Bach was used in the foundations. If much Bach,
then granted talent, the man reared a solid structure. If no Bach, then
no matter how brilliant, how meteoric, how sensational the talents,
smash came tumbling down the musical mansion, smash went the fellow's
hastily erected palace. Whether it is Perosi--who swears by Bach and
doesn't understand or study him--or Mascagni or Massenet, or any of the
new school, the result is the same. Bach is the touchstone. Look at
Verdi, the Verdi of _Don Carlo_ and the Verdi who planned and built
_Falstaff_. Mind you, it is not that big fugued finale--surely one of
the most astounding operatic codas in existence--that carries me away.
It is the general texture of the work, its many voices, like the sweet
mingled roar of Buttermilk Falls, that draws me to _Falstaff_. It is
because of Bach that I have forsworn my dislike of the later Wagner, and
unlearned my disgust at his overpowering sensuousness. The web he spins
is too glaring for my taste, but its pattern is so lovely, so admirable,
that I have grown very fond of _The Mastersingers_.

Bach is in all great, all good compositions, and especially is he a test
for modern piano music. The monophonic has been done to the death by a
whole tribe of shallow charlatans, who, under the pretence that they
wrote in a true piano style, literally debauched several generations of
students. Shall I mention names? Better disturb neither the dead nor the
quick. In the matter of writing for more voices than one we have
retrograded considerably since the days of Bach. We have, to be sure,
built up a more complex harmonic system, beautiful chords have been
invented, or rather re-discovered--for in Bach all were latent--but,
confound it, children! these chords are too slow, too ponderous in gait
for me. Music is, first of all, motio