MUSICAL CHRONICLE
TWO miserable performances took place the fifteenth and sixteenth of October. But that is not news. News is never that a dog goes mad and bites a man, but only that a man goes mad and bites a dog; and three hundred odd singers and players wading under the direction of Mr Bodanzky through a lengthy work devoid of all value, and the Philadelphia Orchestra muffling a Beethoven symphony under the baton of Mr Stokowsky, are events quite as banal as spasms of canine frenzy. If these concerts justify any mention whatsoever, it is merely because of certain comments passed on them in one of the morning newspapers; having set forth to draw the picture of a machine, we cannot in fairness leave off before having limned all its component parts.
The Pfitzner "romantic cantata," premier offering of our own little society for the appreciation of corpses, is a classical work of impotence. Men full of something to sing have not to play upon their audiences' sympathies through extra-musical means. But this manoeuvre seems habitual with Pfitzner. Some years since, when Busoni wrote Towards a New Aesthetic of Music, and demonstrated the logic of not twenty-four, but of one hundred and three gamuts, Pfitzner sought to discredit the theory, not by refuting Busoni on musical ground, but with talk of "We Germans do not need new scales"; "Wälscher Tand," et cetera. And the "romantic composer" is still playing, a trifle overmuch, that particular scale. His cantata he labels Von Deutscher Seele. Himself he calls a romantic composer; and the audience is assured that this choral piece, like all other of his works, "was created from an inner necessity which is really only a higher play-impulse." Throughout the composition, sourness tries to arrive at milk by making the gesture of golden-heartedness. And, of course, the goods are mysteriously derailed somewhere en route. A true romanticist would not to-day be found attempting to write "romantic" music. There is not a fresh and expressive note in the long work. Throats, instruments, sound unending emptiness. First you wonder what is suddenly the matter with yourself. Later, you wonder what is, and has for a long while been, the matter with Pfitzner.—And the Seventh Symphony under
