ury ago, a mediator between the composer and the audience. He is a
virtuoso who plays upon men instead of a key-board, upon a hundred
instruments instead of one. Music differs from her sister arts in many
respects, but in none more than in her dependence on the intermediary
who stands between her and the people for whose sake she exists. It is
this intermediary who wakens her into life.

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter,"

is a pretty bit of hyperbole which involves a contradiction in terms.
An unheard melody is no melody at all, and as soon as we have music in
which a number of singers or instrumentalists are employed, the taste,
feeling, and judgment of an individual are essential to its
intelligent and effective publication. In the gentle days of the long
ago, when suavity and loveliness of utterance and a recognition of
formal symmetry were the "be-all and end-all" of the art, a
time-beater sufficed to this end; but now the contents of music are
greater, the vessel has been wondrously widened, the language is
become curiously complex and ingenious, and no composer of to-day can
write down universally intelligible signs for all that he wishes to
say. Someone must grasp the whole, expound it to the individual
factors which make up the performing sum and provide what is called an
interpretation to the public.

[Sidenote: _"Star" conductors._]

That someone, of course, is the conductor, and considering the
progress that music is continually making it is not at all to be
wondered at that he has become a person of stupendous power in the
culture of to-day. The one singularity is that he should be so rare.
This rarity has had its natural consequence, and the conductor who can
conduct, in contradistinction to the conductor who can only beat time,
is now a "star." At present we see him going from place to place in
Europe giving concerts in which he figures as the principal
attraction. The critics discuss his "readings" just as they do the
performances of great pianists and singers. A hundred blowers of
brass, scrapers of strings, and tootlers on windy wood, labor beneath
him transmuting the composer's mysterious symbols into living sound,
and when it is all over we frequently find that it seems all to have
been done for the greater glory of the conductor instead of the glory
of art. That, however, is a digression which it is not necessary to
pursue.

[Sidenote: _Mistaken popular notions