nda which began with
the composition of "Der Thurmbau zu Babel," in 1870, he not only
entered the literary field, but made personal appeal for practical
assistance in both the Old World and the New. His, however, was a
religious point of view, not the historical or political. It is very
likely that a racial predilection had much to do with his attitude on
the subject, but in his effort to bring religion into the service of
the lyric stage he was no more Jew than Christian: the stories to which
he applied his greatest energies were those of Moses and Christ.

Much against my inclination (for Rubinstein came into my intellectual
life under circumstances and conditions which made him the strongest
personal influence in music that I have ever felt), I have been
compelled to believe that there were other reasons besides those which
he gave for his championship of Biblical opera. Smaller men than he,
since Wagner's death, have written trilogies and dreamed of theatres
and festivals devoted to performances of their works. Little wonder if
Rubinstein believed that he had created, or could create, a kind of
art-work which should take place by the side of "Der Ring des
Nibelungen," and have its special home like Bayreuth; and it may have
been a belief that his project would excite the sympathetic zeal of the
devout Jew and pious Christian alike, as much as his lack of the
capacity for self-criticism, which led him like a will-o'-the-wisp
along the path which led into the bogs of failure and disappointment.

While I was engaged in writing the programme book for the music
festival given in New York in 1881, at which "The Tower of Babel" was
performed in a truly magnificent manner, Dr. Leopold Damrosch, the
conductor of the festival, told me that Rubinstein had told him that
the impulse to use Biblical subjects in lyrical dramas had come to him
while witnessing a ballet based on a Bible story many years before in
Paris. He said that he had seldom been moved so profoundly by any
spectacle as by this ballet, and it suggested to him the propriety of
treating sacred subjects in a manner worthy of them, yet different from
the conventional oratorio. The explanation has not gotten into the
books, but is not inconsistent with the genesis of his Biblical operas,
as related by Rubinstein in his essay on the subject printed by Joseph
Lewinsky in his book "Vor den Coulissen," published in 1882 after at
least three of the operas had been writte