tian savage. But I
suspect there was a profounder sincerity in the case of the Muscovite.
Little need now to sing the praises of Boris Godunoff, though not
having seen and heard Ohaliapine, New York is yet to receive the
fullest and sharpest impression of the role notwithstanding the
sympathetic reading of Arturo Toscanini. Khovanchtchina is even more
rugged, more Russian. Hearing it after Tschaikovsky's charming, but
weak, setting of Eugen Onegin, the forthright and characteristic
qualities of Moussorgsky are set in higher relief. All the old
rhetoric goes by the board, and sentiment, in our sense of the word,
is not drawn upon too heavily. Stravinsky is a new man not to be
slighted, nor are Kodaly and Bartok. I mention only the names of those
composers with whose music I am fairly familiar. Probably Stravinsky
and his musical fireworks will be called a Futurist, whatever that
portentous title may mean. However, the music of Tschaikovsky,
Rimsky-Korsakof, Rachmaninof, and the others is no longer
revolutionary, but may be considered as evolutionary. Again the theory
of transitional periods and types comes into play, but I notice this
theory has been applied only to minor masters, never to creators. We
don't call Bach or Handel or Mozart or Beethoven intermediate types.
Perhaps some day Wagner will seem as original to posterity as
Beethoven does to our generation. Wasn't it George Saintsbury who once
remarked that all discussion of contemporaries is conversation, not
criticism? If this be the case, then it is suicidal for a critic to
pass judgment upon the music-making of his day, a fact obviously at
variance with daily practice. Yet it is a dictum not to be altogether
contravened. For instance, my first impressions of Schoenberg were
neither flattering to his composition nor to my indifferent critical
acumen. If I had begun by listening to the comparatively mellifluous
D-minor string quartet, played by the Flonzaley Quartet, as did my New
York colleagues, instead of undergoing the terrifying aural tortures
of Lieder des Pierrot Lunaire, I might have been as amiable as the
critics. The string sextet has been received here with critical
cordiality. Its beauties were exposed by the Kneisel Quartet. But
circumstances were otherwise, and it was later that I heard the two
string quartets--the latter in F-sharp minor (by courtesy, this
tonality), with voices at the close--the astounding Gurrelieder and
the piano pieces. The or