have failed to perceive, through the muffling matter, the living stuff of tones. Music was there; there was an intention which transpired, even off the instruments of amateurs. The nine numbers supplied by the composer brought perfectly to Andreyev's drama the extension through music required by him. They are a re-creation, in a sister medium, of the play itself; flowing from a vision of it so profound and exact that it seems the composer must have stood while composing close to the point at which the dramatist stood when he made the dialogue. From these pieces, we receive a joy and satisfaction not incomparable to that which we receive from the score of Pelleas, from the Psalms of Bloch, the Möricke-songs of Wolf, or from any other musical composition in which a composer has actually created toward a poet: stood upon his own shoe-leather, and enormously enriched with his proper life-blood a literary expression. They have indeed the wild sinister pulse of Andreyev's dolorous fantasy, the sardonic and anguished cries, the flow of inky depressive current. Their tones utter, too, the chaos, the sorrow, the baffled frenzy of the mind which can no longer harmonize its visions, its many cruel, irreconcilable truths and lies disrupted in doubt. The music has the indefinite, vague outline of bitter, endless revery, of Hamlet-like melancholia streaming densely silently through rocky wastes and mocking perspectives underneath a sky eternally charged with murk. Lorenzo calls his musicians to play; and what sounds from their pieces gibbers and cavorts and shrieks like humiliating, destructive thoughts that will not down. A wedding-procession is organized; and wedding music is played fraught with the atrocious cries and furious irony consequent to a suddenly shattered dream, a suddenly yawning abysmal vision. More than the words, the music of Lorenzo's song curses life and confesses Satan. Mousic comes full of chill metaphysical brooding; deathly beautiful with the wind from out the inhuman spaces of the universe; stark and black with the sense of crucifixion. And last, while the flames of death beat back the storm of black maskers, the orchestra chants and exults and is transfigured with the cleansing, releasing resolving deed.
A psychic maturity, freshness of spirit, living culture, and technical control have opened into the realm of music in America. The music to The Black Maskers is no happy hit such as many slight talents make once in their lives; accidents liable as not never to repeat themselves again. The author is an artist. His workmanship
