sited in the composer's
portfolio. The moment in which Bloch is to find it possible for him to
realize the work has not yet arrived. Planned at first to follow
directly upon "Macbeth," "Jezabel" promises fairly to become the goal of
his first great creative period. But out of the conception of the opera
itself, out of the desire of creating a work around this Old
Testamentary figure, out of the train of emotion excited by the project,
there have already flowed results of a first magnitude for Bloch and for
modern music. For in the process of searching out a style befitting this
biblical drama, and in the effort to master the idiom necessary to it,
Bloch executed the compositions that have placed him so eminently in the
company of the few modern masters. The three Psalms, "Schelomo,"
"Israel," portions of the quartet, have but trodden further in the
direction marked out by the "Trois Poemes juives." "Jezabel" has turned
out to be one of those dreams that lead men on to the knowledge of
themselves.

And yet, the "Jewish composer" that the man is so often said to be, he
most surely is not. He is too much the man of his time, too much the
universal genius, to be thus placed in a single category. His art
succeeds to that of Moussorgsky and Debussy quite as much as does that
of Strawinsky and Ravel; he rests quite as heavily on the great
European traditions of music as he does on his own hereditary strain.
Indeed, he is of the modern masters one of those the most conscious of
the tradition of his art. He falls heir to Bach and to Haydn and to
Beethoven quite as much as any living musician. Quite as much as that of
any other his music is an image of the time. In the quartet, his
magistral work, the Hebraic element is only one of several. The trio of
the scherzo is like a section of some Polynesian forest, with its tropic
warmth, its monstrous growths, its swampy earth, its chattering monkeys
and birds of paradise. There is the beat of the age of steel in the
finale. And the delicate Pastorale is redolent of the gentle fields of
Europe, smells of the hay, gives again the nun-like close of day in
temperate skies. It is only that as a Jew it was necessary for Ernest
Bloch to say yea to his own heredity before his genius could appear. And
to what a degree it has appeared, one can gauge from the intensity with
which his age mirrors itself in the music he has already composed. His
music is the modern man in his lately gotten sense o