n the terrible desert--

Dead! Dead! Dead!..."

When Chapelmaster Kreisler ended, all were silent; poetry, passionate,
weird, and grotesque, had poured from their friend's lips; a strange
nightmare pageant had swept by them, beautiful and ghastly, like a mad
Brocken medley of the triumph of Dionysos and the dance of Death.

They were all silent--all save one, and that one said: "This is all very
fine, but I was told we were to have music; a good, sensible sonata of
Haydn's--would have been much more the thing than all this." He was a
Philistine, no doubt, but he was right; a good, sensible sonata of
Haydn's--nay, the stiffest, driest, most wooden fugue ever written by
the most crabbed professor of counterpoint would have been far more
satisfactory for people who expected music. A most fantastic rhapsody
they had indeed heard, but it had been a spoken one, and the best
strings of the piano had remained hanging snapped and silent during the
performance.

Poor Chapelmaster Kreisler! He has long been forgotten by the world in
general, and even those few that still are acquainted with his weird
portrait, smile at it as at a relic of a far distant time, when life and
art and all other things looked strangely different from how they look
now. Yet the crazy musician of Hoffmann is but the elder brother of all
our modern composers. With the great masters of the last century, Haydn,
Mozart, Cimarosa, who were scarcely in their graves when he improvised
his great word fantasia, he has no longer any connection with our own
musicians, born half a century after his end, he is closely linked, for,
like him, they are romanticists. They do not indeed wear C sharp minor
coloured coats, nor do they improvise in the dark on pianos with broken
strings; they are perfectly sane and conscious of all their doings; yet,
all the same, they are but Kreisler's younger brothers. Like the poor
chapelmaster of Hoffmann, music itself has a fantastic madness in it;
like him, it has been crazed by disappointment, by jealousy, by impotent
rage at finding that it cannot now do what it once did, and cannot yet
do what will never be done; like Kreisler it deals no longer with mere
sequences of melody and harmony, but with thoughts, feelings, and
images, hopes and fears and despair, with wild chaotic visions of
splendour and of ghastliness. But the position of our music differs from
that of Kreisler in this much, that no friendly pair of snuffers crashes