itterness that the other has not. Like so much of Brahms, this
music comes out of the silence of the study, though the study in this
case is the chamber of a Jewish scholar more than that of a German. Were
the entire work of the fullness and lyricism of the last two movements;
were it throughout as impassioned as is the broad gray clamant germinal
theme that commences the work and sweeps it before it, one might easily
include the composer in the company of the masters of musical art.

Unfortunately, the magnificent passages are interspersed with unmusical
ones. It is not only that the work does not quite "conceal art," that it
smells overmuch of the laboratory. It is that portions of it are
scarcely "felt" at all, are only too obviously carpentered. The work is
full of music that addresses itself primarily to professors of theory.
It is full of writing dictated by an arbitrary and intellectual
conception of form. There is a great deal of counterpoint in it that
exists only for the benefit of those who "read" scores, and that
clutters the work. There are whole passages that exist only in obedience
to some scholastic demand for thematic inversions and deformations.
There is an unnecessary deal of marching and countermarching of
instruments, an obsession with certain rhythms that becomes purely
mechanical, an intensification of the contrapuntal pickings and peckings
that annoy so often in the compositions of Brahms. It is Schoenberg the
intellectualist, Schoenberg the Doctor of Music, not Schoenberg the
artist, who obtains here.

And it is he one encounters almost solely in the music of the third
period, the enigmatical little pieces for orchestra and piano. It is he
who has emerged victorious from the duel revealed by the D-minor
Quartet. Those grotesque and menacing little works are lineally
descended from the intellectualized passages of the great preceding one,
are, indeed, a complete expression of the theoretical processes which
called them into being. For while in the quartet the scholasticism
appears to have been superimposed upon a body of musical ideas, in the
works of the last period it appears well-nigh the generative principle.
These latter have all the airlessness, the want of poetry, the frigidity
of things constructed after a formula, daring and brilliant though that
formula is. They make it seem as though Schoenberg had, through a
process of consideration and thought and study, arrived at the
conclusion th