The performance of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius at Diisseldorf in 1902, its enthusiastic reception there, and finally the generous speech of Richard Strauss then delivered in its honour, inaugu rated the recognition of modern English music on the continent and gave English critics and audiences a not unneeded lesson after their lukewarm reception of it at its inadequate first per formance at Birmingham. Elgar's rich and subtle orchestration is not more remarkable than the wealth of his invention of themes.
His contemporary, Bantock, is a prolific composer in a style far easier but not less personal and sincere, in which the influence of Strauss and the schematic purity of Rimsky-Korsakov's orches tration may be traced by their technical results but not by man nerisms. Nowhere in Europe is there a more radiant source of musical health.
In Italy the masterful personality of Boit° (1842-1918) de veloped in the 19th century but his musical ideas anticipate the loth. He wrote brilliant libretti to Verdi's last works and those of younger composers and achieved extraordinary musical fame by two operas, Mefistofele and the posthumous Nerone. These have taken their place among the historic documents of musical Italy on the strength of less actual musical content than any other operas in existence. Their aristocratic refinement and flair for atmosphere is unquestionable. Very different is the full blooded efficiency of Puccini (1858-1924) in whose hands Italian opera advanced in the estimation of a public that was in all coun tries becoming too experienced in music to be satisfied with per functory orchestration and histrionic convention. The razor-edge intellect of the great pianoforte artist Busoni (1866-1924) achieved important results in compositions for the pianoforte, the orchestra and the stage, in spite of the energy he spent in demonstrating how much more cleverly the classics would have been written if they had possessed his advantages. If Casals (q.v.) gets his way, the musical awakening of Spain will soon be a lead ing feature in the history of the modern art.
In England there are encouraging signs that musicians are beginning to think for themselves without confusing between independence of academic tradition and independence of truth. Gustav Holst's interest in oriental subjects was (like Bantock's) no whim for chinoiseries but a true expression of the nostalgia of the West for the East. His Hymn of Jesus is worthy of its awe inspiring Byzantine eucharistic text. Vaughan Williams, with less
of Holst's wide and clear-sighted exploration of pre-harmonic regions, composes with consistent nobility on a large scale and in a style that it would be an impertinence to try to trace to its various historic origins.
Thus the work of doctrinaires is not all that is happening in modern music; and, in any case, music is in the happy position of existing, like architecture, on practical terms which forbid mere lunacy to flourish unchecked. A large proportion of modern musical developments have been tested by enthusiastic and capable public performers almost before the ink of the manu script was dry. Immediately before the World War, Rutland Boughton's small-scale Glastonbury festivals of music-drama were a stimulus of incalculable importance in the history of modern British opera; and at the present day on the continent the younger composers of chamber-music have the help of knight-errants in the masterly Amar Quartet which, with Paul Hindemith as viola and his brother as violoncello, spare no pains to secure for the most difficult experiments (such as the quarter-tone works of Haba) a perfect performance. Hindemith himself is one of the boldest and most masterly experimenters, if indeed, he is not the master of them all. It is very significant that his vocal writing, which seems to contradict all previous orthodoxies, stays uncom monly firmly in the vocal memory once it is mastered; whereas many otiose modulations in the Lisztian music of the seventies, such as the part-songs of Cornelius, sink in pitch however much choirs may practice them. The young masters who sternly re nounce romance make a romantic gesture in the very act.
Much has been said as to the fructifying or deleterious in fluence of jazz. The highest class of jazz-band is undoubtedly composed of sensitive artists; but the conductor of a symphony orchestra in a musically not metropolitan town will, if he engages for a symphony concert the gentleman who handles the percus sion apparatus of the best local jazz-band, discover that that artist's methods are entirely extemporaneous, and that, except with a drumstick, he has never clashed the cymbals otherwise than flat on to the top of the big drum, and never counted rests in his life. Ordinary jazz-music distributes its rhythmic surprises over the most imperturbable eight-bar ambling trot that ever lulled the rhythmic sense to sleep. Most drugs that begin with a stimu lating action end as narcotics.