the trumpets in the
setting of the three Psalms and in the symphony "Israel." They, also,
might once have resounded through the courts of Herod's temple. The
unusual accents, the unusual intervals, give the instruments a timbre at
once imperious, barbaric, ritual. And how different from the theatric
Orientalism of so many of the Russians are the crude dissonances of
Bloch, the terrible consecutive fourths and fifths, the impetuous
rhythms, savage and frenetic in their emphasis. This music is shrill and
tawny and bitter with the desert. Its flavor is indeed new to European
music. Certainly, in the province of the string quartet, nothing quite
like the salty and acrid, the fruity, drugging savor of Bloch's work,
has ever before appeared.

And it was not until the Jewish note appeared in his work that Bloch
spoke his proper language. The works that precede the "Trois Poemes
juives," the first of his compositions in which the racial gesture is
consciously made, do not really represent the man as he is. No doubt,
the brilliant and ironic scherzo of the C-sharp minor Symphony, whose
verve and passion and vigor make the composer of "L'Apprenti sorcier"
seem apprentice indeed, is already characteristic of the composer of the
string quartet and the suite for viola and piano. But much of the
symphony is derivative. One glimpses the influence of Liszt and
Tchaikowsky and Strauss in it. So too with the opera "Macbeth," written
a few years after the composition of the symphony, when the composer was
twenty-four. Despite the effectiveness of the setting it gives the
melodrama cleverly abstracted from Shakespeare's tragedy by Edmond
Flegg, the score bears a still undecided signature. One feels that the
composer has recently encountered the personalities of Moussorgsky and
Debussy. No doubt, one begins to sense the proper personality of Bloch
in the delicate coloring of the two little orchestral sketches
"Hiver-Printemps," in the mournful English horn against the harp in
"Hiver," in the chirruping hurdy-gurdy commencement of "Printemps."
Unfortunately, the cantilena in the second number still points backward.
But with the "Trois Poemes juives," the original Bloch is at hand. These
compositions were conceived at first as studies for "Jezabel," the opera
Bloch intended composing directly after he had completed the scoring of
"Macbeth" in 1904. To-day, "Jezabel" still exists only in the libretto
of Flegg and in the series of sketches depo