than a parody on
Weber, and "Parsifal" is "an outrage against religion, morals and
music." Daddy Liszt is "the inventor of the Liszt pupil, a bad piano
player, a venerable man with a purple nose--a Cyrano de Cognac nose."
Tschaikowsky is the Slav gone crazy on vodka. He transformed Hamlet into
"a yelling man" and Romeo and Juliet into "two monstrous Cossacks, who
gibber and squeak at each other while reading some obscene volume." "His
Manfred is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on God." And even Schumann
is a vanishing star, a literary man turned composer, a pathological
case. But, as I have said, a serious idea runs through all this
concerto for slapstick and seltzer siphon, and to me, at least, that
idea has a plentiful reasonableness. We are getting too much melodrama,
too much vivisection, too much rebellion--and too little music. Turn
from Tschaikowsky's Pathetique or from any of his wailing tone-poems to
Schubert's C major, or to Mozart's Jupiter, or to Beethoven's _kleine
Sinfonie in F dur_: it is like coming out of a _Kaffeeklatsch_ into the
open air, almost like escaping from a lunatic asylum. The one
unmistakable emotion that much of this modern music from the steppes and
morgues and _Biertische_ engenders is a longing for form, clarity,
coherence, a self-respecting tune. The snorts and moans of the pothouse
Werthers are as irritating, in the long run, as the bawling of a child,
the squeak of a pig under a gate. One yearns unspeakably for a composer
who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them with
both ears open, and then recapitulates them unashamed, and then hangs a
brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.

Sec. 5

So much for "Old Fogy" and the musical books. They constitute, not only
the best body of work that Huneker himself has done, but the best body
of musical criticism that any American has done. Musical criticism, in
our great Calvinist republic, confines itself almost entirely to
transient reviewing, and even when it gets between covers, it keeps its
trivial quality. Consider, for example, the published work of Henry
Edward Krehbiel, for long the _doyen_ of the New York critics. I pick up
his latest book, "A Second Book of Operas,"[37] open it at random, and
find this:

On January 31, 1893, the Philadelphia singers, aided by the New
York Symphony Society, gave a performance of the opera, under the
auspices of the Young Men's Hebrew Association, for the benef