tely set himself to make abnormal music. I don't know how true
this may be; the same sort of thing was said of Mallarme and Paul
Cezanne and Richard Strauss, and was absolutely without foundation.

Schoenberg is an autodidact, the lessons in composition from Alexander
von Zemlinsky not affecting his future path-breaking propensities. His
mission is to free harmony from all rules. A man doesn't hit on such
combinations, especially in his acrid instrumentation, without heroic
labour. His knowledge must be enormous, for his scores are as logical
as a highly wrought mosaic; that is, logical, if you grant him his
premises. He is perverse and he wills his music, but he is a master in
delineating certain moods, though the means he employs revolt our
ears. To call him "crazy," is merely amusing. No man is less crazy,
few men are so conscious of what they are doing, and few modern
composers boast such a faculty of attention. Concentration is the
key-note of his work; concentration--or condensation formal,
concentration of thematic material--to the vanishing-point; and
conciseness in treatment, although every license is allowed in
modulation.

Every composer has his aura; the aura of Arnold Schoenberg is, for me,
the aura of subtle ugliness, of hatred and contempt, of cruelty, and
of the mystic grandiose. He is never petty. He sins in the grand
manner of Nietzsche's Superman, and he has the courage of his
chromatics. If such music-making is ever to become accepted, then I
long for Death the Releaser. More shocking still would be the
suspicion that in time I might be persuaded to like this music, to
embrace, after abhorring it.

As for Schoenberg, the painter--he paints, too!--I won't take even the
guarded praise of such an accomplished artist as Kandinsky as
sufficient evidence. I've not seen any of the composer's "purple
cows," and hope I never shall see them. His black-and-white
reproductions look pretty bad, and not nearly as original as his
music. The portrait of a lady (who seems to be listening to
Schoenbergian harmonies) hasn't much colour, a critic tells us, only a
sickly rose in her dress. He also paints grey-green landscapes and
visions, the latter dug up from the abysmal depths of his
subconsciousness. Schoenberg is, at least, the object of considerable
curiosity. What he will do next no man may say; but at least it won't
be like the work of any one else. The only distinct reminiscence of an
older composer that I c