antasia_. Indeed, I think it greater than its accompanying _D
minor Fugue_. In it are the harmonic, melodic, and spiritual germs of
modern music. The restless tonalities, the agitated, passionate,
desperate, dramatic recitatives, the emotional curve of the music, are
not all these modern, only executed in such a transcendental fashion as
to beggar imitation?

Let us turn to the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ and bow the knee of
submission, of admiration, of worship. I use the Klindworth, the Busoni
and sometimes the Bischoff edition, never Kroll, never Czerny. I think
it was the latter who once excited my rage when I found the C sharp
major prelude transposed to the key of D flat! This outrageous
proceeding pales, however, before the infamous behavior of Gounod, who
dared--the sacrilegious Gaul!--to place upon the wonderful harmonies of
the master of masters a cheap, tawdry, vulgar tune. Gounod deserved
oblivion for this. I think I have my favorites, and for a day delude
myself that I prefer certain preludes, certain fugues, but a few hours'
study of its next-door neighbor and I am intoxicated with _its_
beauties. We have all played and loved the _C minor Prelude_ in Book
one--Cramer made a study on memories of this--and who has not felt happy
at its wonderful fugue! Yet a few pages on is a marvelous _Fugue in C
sharp minor_ with five voices that slowly crawl to heaven's gate. Jump a
little distance and you land in the _E flat Fugue_ with its
assertiveness, its cocksure subject, and then consider the pattering,
gossiping one in E minor. If you are in the mood, has there ever been
written a brighter, more amiable, graceful prelude than the eleventh in
F? Its germ is perhaps the _F major Invention_, the eighth. A marked
favorite of mine is the fifteenth fugue in G. There's a subject for you
and what a jolly length!

Bach could spin music as a spider spins its nest, from earth to the sky
and back again. Did you ever hear Rubinstein play the _B-flat Prelude
and Fugue_? If you have not, count something missed in your life. He
made the prelude as light as a moonbeam, but there was thunder in the
air, the clouds floated away, airy nothings in the blue, and then
celestial silence. Has any modern composer written music in which is
packed as much meaning, as much sorrow as may be found in the _B-flat
minor Prelude_? It is the matrix of all modern musical emotion.

I don't know why I persist in saying "modern," as if there is any
p