s of the Mendelssohn
Motet, _Judge Me, oh God_.

It was interpretation of this type too that gave the actor-singer
Wuellner such a tremendous hold upon his audiences a few years ago,
this artist achieving a veritable triumph by the tremendous sincerity
and vividness of his dramatic impersonations in singing German
_Lieder_, in spite of the fact that he possessed a voice of only
average quality.

It was an emotional response of this character that the Greek
philosophers must have been thinking of when they characterized drama
as a "purge for the soul"; and surely it must still be good for human
beings to forget themselves occasionally and to become merged in this
fashion in the wave of emotion felt by performer and fellow-listener
in response to the message of the composer.

It is emotion of this type also that the great composers have sought
to arouse through their noblest compositions. Handel is said to have
replied, when congratulated upon the excellence of the entertainment
afforded by the _Messiah_, "I am sorry if I have only entertained
them; I hoped to do them good." An English writer, in quoting this
incident, adds:[9]

What Handel tried to do ... by wedding fine music to an
inspiring text, Beethoven succeeded in doing through
instruments alone ... for never have instruments--no matter
how pleasing they were in the past--been capable of stirring
the inmost feelings as they have done since the beginning of
the nineteenth century.

[Footnote 9: C.F.A. Williams, _The Rhythm of Modern Music_, p. 13.]

There is danger, of course, here as everywhere, that one may go too
far; and it is entirely conceivable that both soloist and conductor
might go to such extremes in their display of emotion that the music
would be entirely distorted, losing what is after all its main _raison
d'etre_, _viz._, the element of beauty. But there seems at present to
be no especial danger that such an event will occur; the tendency
seems rather to be toward overemphasizing intellectualism in music,
and toward turning our art into a science.[10] The thing that we
should like to convince the prospective conductor of is that real
interpretation--_i.e._, genuinely expressive musical performance--demands
an actual display of emotion on the part of the conductor if the ideal
sort of reaction is to be aroused in the audience.

[Footnote 10: This danger is especially insidious just now in our
college and high sc