d life as
fully as it can be lived. And after one is dead, what does it all
matter?

Yet, though the world be full of men whose spiritual energies have been
lamed in kindred fashions, the terrible misadventure of Richard Strauss
remains deeply affecting. However far the millions of bright spirits who
have died a living death have fallen, their fall has been no farther
than this man's. There can be no doubt of the completeness of Strauss's
disaster. It is a long while since he has been much besides a bore to
his once fervent admirers, an object of hatred to thousands of honest,
idealistic musicians. He has completely, in his fifty-sixth year, lost
the position of leadership, of eminence that once he had. Even before
the war his operas held the stage only with difficulty. And it is
possible that he will outlive his fame. One wonders whether he is not
one of the men whose inflated reputations the war has pricked, and that
a world will shortly wonder, before his two new operas, how it was
possible that it should have been held at all by the man. Had he been
the most idealistic, the most uncompromising of musicians he could not
be less respected. Perhaps his last chance lay in the "Alpensymphonie."
Here was a ceremony that could have made him priest once again. Europe
had reached a summit, humanity had had a vision. Before it lay a long
descent, a cloudburst, the sunset of a civilization, another night.
Could Strauss have once more girded himself, once more summoned the
faith, the energy, the fire that created those first grand pages that
won a world to him, he might have been saved. But it was impossible.
Something in him was dead forever. And so, to us, who should have been
his champions, his audiences, his work already seems old, part of the
past even at its best, unreal except for a few of the fine symphonic
works. To us, who once thought to see in him the man of the new time,
he seems only the brave, sonorous trumpet-call that heralded a king who
never put in his appearance, the glare that in the East lights the sky
for an instant and seems to promise a new day, but extinguishes again.
He is indeed the false dawn of modern music.

Moussorgsky

The music of Moussorgsky comes up out of a dense and livid ground. It
comes up out of a ground that lies thickly packed beneath our feet, and
that is wider than the widest waste, and deeper than the bottomless
abysses of the sea. It comes up from a soil that descends do