Modern Music and Musicians, Vol. 2 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Modern Music and Musicians, Vol. 2

The preparation of two volumes of critical and biographical sketches, including the masters of music from the earliest per-classical epoch do it in such a way as to hold the interest of the casual reader and command the respect of the musical enthusiast is doubly difficult. Yet it is hoped that this purpose has here been achieved.

A particularly unique feature is the inclusion of many monographs on celebrated composers that are the literary product of other equally celebrated composers, critics and specialists. As a composer, Saint-Saens is known the world over; and yet many may be surprised to realize that as a critic and musical litterateur he is one of the foremost in France. A monograph on Franz Liszt from the pen of Saint-Saens becomes, then, a rare moment in musical literature, and one which should find a permanent place in the library of every music lover, Edvard Grieg, writing upon Schumann and Mozart, affords not only a view of two composers through the intimate understanding of another composer, but at the same time offers a rare opportunity for a reverse analysis of a composer who for the moment has turned critic, - a view which in his particular case is perhaps possible through no other surviving medium of self-revealment.

These volumes are replete with any number of similar examples, wherein composers, who for the most part have expressed their inmost thoughts only in musical writings, employ the language of written speech for an intimate delineation such as would hardly be possible to the average critical writer on music, at the same time laying bare their own mental processes to a degree that is impossible in any other way. "Oh, that mine enemy would write a book," was the cry of one who realized with what fidelity the pen of the writer mirrors his own inner conscience, while ostensibly analyzing for the reader some wholly detached character or series of events.