wever, Strauss is not the only member of the post-Wagnerian group,
but he is the chief one who has kept his individual head above water
in the welter and chaos of the school. Where are Cyrill Kistner, Hans
Sommer, August Bungert, and the others? Humperdinck is a mediocrity,
even more so than Puccini. And what of the banalities of Bruckner? His
Wagnerian cloak is a world too large for his trifling themes.
Siegfried Wagner does not count, and for anything novel we are forced
to turn our eyes and ears toward the direction of France. After
Berlioz, a small fry, indeed, yet not without interest. The visit made
by Claude Debussy to Russia in 1879 and during his formative period
had consequences. He absorbed Moussorgsky, and built upon him, and he
had Wagner at his finger-ends; like Charpentier he cannot keep Wagner
out of his scores; the Bayreuth composer is the King Charles's head in
his manuscript. Tristan und Isolde in particular must have haunted the
composers of Louise, and Pelleas et Melisande. The Julien of
Charpentier is on a lower literary and musical level than Louise,
which, all said and done, has in certain episodes a picturesque charm;
the new work is replete with bad symbolism and worse music-spinning.
Debussy has at least a novel, though somewhat monotonous, manner. He
is "precious," and in ideas as constipated as Mallarme, whose
Afternoon of a Faun he so adequately set. Nevertheless, there is, at
times, magic in his music. It is the magic of suggestiveness, of the
hinted mystery which only Huysmans's superior persons scattered
throughout the universe may guess. After Debussy comes Dukas, Ravel,
Florent Schmitt, Rogier-Ducasse, men who seem to have caught anew the
spirit of the eighteenth-century music and given it to us not through
the poetic haze of Debussy, but in gleaming, brilliant phrases. There
is promise in Schmitt. As to Vincent d'Indy, you differ with his
scheme, yet he is a master, as was Cesar Franck a master, as are
masters the two followers of D'Indy, Albert Roussel and Theodat de
Severac. Personally I admire Paul Dukas, though without any warrant
whatever for placing him on the same plane with Claude Debussy, who,
after all, has added a novel nuance to art. But they are all makers of
anxious mosaics; never do they carve the block; exquisite
miniaturists, yet lack the big brush work and epical sweep of the
preceding generation. Above all, the entire school is minus virility;
its music is of the dis