the orchestra as for the
piano.

It is indeed likely that to-morrow the world will find in his
piano-works its new Chopin, that Scriabine will shortly be given the
place once occupied by the other. For not only is he in many ways the
artistic superior of the man who once was his master. He is, as well,
one of the beings in which the age that is slowly expiring about us
became conscious and articulate. Russia bore him, it is true, elemented
him, gave him her childlike tenderness and barbaric richness and mystic
light. But in developing out of the Russian "universal" school into
perfect liberty and individuality, he became indeed a universal
expression, the first really produced by the group. He became, like the
intensely "national" Strawinsky, one of those men into whom an age
enters. He is symbolic of his time. He seems to have felt his age's life
in its intensest form. The hour that created him was an hour in which
the power of feeling had waxed inordinately, almost to the point of
hampering action, when an Asiatic delicacy had begun to be manifest in
Western character, when the fusion of Europe and Asia was commencing to
make itself felt. And in Scriabine, that new intensity of sensation
attained something near to heroic supernatural stature. What was
beautiful and sick in his age entered into his art. Through it, we
learn, not a little, how we feel.

His music was a thing created in the flesh of a man, out of his agony.
"Eine Entwicklung ist ein Schicksal," Thomas Mann once wrote. For
Scriabine, the awakening of that aerial palpitant sensibility was such.
It devoured him like a fire. One shudders as well as marvels at the
destiny of one who came to feel life as it is felt in those last
quivering poems--"Guirlandes," "Flammes sombres," he entitles them,--or
in the mysterious Tenth Sonata, that glows with the feverish light of
the dream, or in those last haunted preludes. Existence for the man who
could write such music, in which unearthly rapture contrasts with
unearthly suffering, must have been a sort of exquisite martyrdom. The
man must have been indeed a nerve exposed. And, like a fragile thing
suddenly ignited, he flared up, fiercely, magnificently, and went out.

Strawinsky

The new steel organs of man have begotten their music in "Le Sacre du
printemps." For with Strawinsky, the rhythms of machinery enter musical
art. With this his magistral work a new chapter of music commences, the
spiritualizati