mimes as Mozart disappears....

Behold, the great one approaches and the earth trembles at his
tread--Beethoven, the sublime, the conqueror, the demi-god! All that has
gone before, all that is to be, is globed in his symphonies, is divined
by the seer: a man, the first since Handel. And the eagles triumphantly
jostle the scarred face of the Sphinx.... Then appear Von Weber and
Meyerbeer, player folk; Schubert, a pan-pipe through which the wind
discourses exquisite melodies; Gluck, whose lyre is stringed Greek
fashion, but bedecked with Paris gauds and ribbons; Mendelssohn, a
charming girlish echo, Hebraic of profile; Schumann and Chopin, romantic
wrestlers with muted dreams, strugglers against ineffable madness and
stricken sore at the end; Berlioz, a primitive Roc, half monster, half
human, a Minotaur who dragged to his Crete all the music of the masters;
and then comes the Turk of the keyboard, Franz Liszt, with cymbalom,
[vc]zardas and crazy Kalamaikas. But now Stannum notices a shriller
accent, the accent of a sun that has lost its sex and is stricken with
soft moon-sickness. A Hybrid appears, followed by a vast cohort of
players. The orchestra begins playing, and straightway the Sphinx
smiles....

Stannum saw what man had never seen before--the tone-color of each
instrument. Some malign enchanter had seduced and diverted from its
natural uses the noble instrumental army. He saw strings of rainbow
hues, red trumpets, blue flutes, green oboes, garnet clarinets, golden
yellow horns, dark-brown bassoons, scarlet trombones, carmilion
ophecleides while the drums punctured space with ebon holes. That the
triangle had always been silver he never questioned; but this new
chromatic blaze, this new tinting of tones--what did it portend? Was it
a symbol of the further degradation and effeminization of music? Was art
a woman's sigh? A new, selfish goddess was about to be placed upon high
and worshipped--soon the rustling of silk would betray her sex. Released
from the wise bonds imposed upon her by Mother Church, music is a novel
parasite of the emotions, a modern Circe whose feet "take hold on hell,"
whose wand transforms men into listening swine. Gigantic as antediluvian
ferns, as evil-smelling and as dangerous, music in the hands of this
magician is dowered with ambiguous attitudes, with anonymous gestures,
is color become sound, sensuality in the mask of Beauty. This Klingsor
tears down, evirates, effeminates and disinteg