e to exemplify it? Indeed, it is
only as experiments, as the incorporation in tone of an abstract and
intellectualized conception of forms, that one can at all comprehend
them. And it is only in regarding him as primarily an experimenter that
the later Schoenberg loses his incomprehensibility, and comes somewhat
nearer to us.

There is much in Schoenberg's career that makes this explanation
something more than an easy way of disposing of a troublesome problem,
makes it, indeed, eminently plausible. Schoenberg was never the most
instinctive and sensible, the least cerebral and intellectualizing of
musicians. For just as Gustav Mahler might stand as an instance of
musicianly temperament fatally outweighing musicianly intellect, so
Arnold Schoenberg might stand as an example of the equally excessive
outbalancing of sensibility by brain-stuff. The friendship of the two
men and their mutual admiration might easily be explained by the fact
that each caught sight in the other of the element he wanted most. No
doubt, the works of Schoenberg's early period, which extends from the
songs, Op. 1, through the "Kammersymphonie," Op. 9, are full of a
fervent lyricism, a romantic effusiveness. "Gurrelieder," indeed, opens
wide the floodgates of romanticism. But these compositions are somewhat
uncharacteristic and derivative. The early songs, for instance, might
have proceeded from the facile pen of Richard Strauss. They have much of
the Straussian sleepy warmth and sweet harmonic color, much of the
Straussian exuberance which at times so readily degenerates into the
windy pride of the young bourgeois deeming himself a superman. It was
only by accident that "Freihold" was not written by the Munich
tone-poet. The orchestral poem after Maeterlinck's "Pelleas" is also
ultra-romantic and post-Wagnerian. The trumpet theme, the "Pelleas"
theme, for instance, is lineally descended from the "Walter von
Stolzing" and "Parisfal" motives. The work reveals Schoenberg striving
to emulate Strauss in the field of the symphonic poem; striving,
however, in vain. For it has none of Strauss's glitter and point, and is
rather dull and soggy. The great, bristling, pathetic climax is of the
sort that has become exasperating and vulgar, rather than exciting,
since Wagner and Tchaikowsky first exploited it. On the whole, the work
is much less "Pelleas et Melisande" than it is "Pelleas _und_
Melisanda." And the other works of this period, more brilliantly made