explode, exalt, blaspheme.

I give the conundrum the go-by; I only know that when I finally
surrendered myself to the composer he worked his will on my fancy and
on my raw nerves, and I followed the poems, loathing the music all the
while, with intense interest. Indeed, I couldn't let go the skein of
the story for fear that I might fall off somewhere into a gloomy chasm
and be devoured by chromatic wolves. I recalled one extraordinary
moment at the close of the composition when a simple major chord was
sounded and how to my ears it had a supernal beauty; after the
perilous tossing and pitching on a treacherous sea of no-harmonies it
was like a field of firm ice under the feet.

I told myself that it served me right, that I was too old to go
gallivanting around with this younger generation, that if I would eat
prickly musical pears I must not be surprised if I suffered from aural
colic. Nevertheless, when certain of the Schoenberg compositions
reached me from Vienna I eagerly fell to studying them. I saw then
that he had adopted as his motto: Evil, be thou my good! And that a
man who could portray in tone sheer ugliness with such crystal
clearness is to be reckoned with in these topsyturvy times.

I have called Arnold Schoenberg a musical anarchist, using the word in
its best estate--anarchos, without a head. Perhaps he is a superman
also, and the world doesn't know it. His admirers and pupils think so,
however, and several of them have recorded their opinion in a little
book, published at Munich, 1912, by R. Piper & Co.

The life of Arnold Schoenberg, its outer side, has thus far been
uneventful, though doubtless rich in the psychical sense. He is still
young, born in Vienna, September 13, 1874. He lived there till 1901,
then in the December of that year he went to Berlin, where he was for
a short time conductor in Wolzogen's Bunten Theatre, and also teacher
of composition at Stern's Conservatory. In 1903 he returned to Vienna,
where he taught--he is pre-eminently a pedagogue, even pedantic as I
hope to presently prove--in the K. K. Akademie fuer Musik. In 1911
Berlin again beckoned to him, and as hope ever burns in the bosom of
composers, young and old, he no doubt believes that his day will come.
Certainly, his disciples, few as they may be, make up by their
enthusiasm for the public and critical flouting. I can't help
recalling the Italian Futurists when I think of Schoenberg. The same
wrath may be noted in the g