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As to Vincent d'Indy, you differ with his scheme, yet he is a master, as was César Franck a master, as are masters the two followers of D'Indy, Albert Roussel and Theodat de Sévérac. Personally I admire Paul Dukas, though without any warrant whatever for placing him on the same plane with Claude Debussy, who, after all, has added a novel nuance to art.
But it was from the monastic bodies alone that any opposition was offered to the actions of the Emperor. The most noteworthy case was that of the Abbot Nicephorus Blemmydes whose attempts to promote an understanding between the Eastern and Western Churches were foiled, because he had the temerity to deal harshly with the mistress of the Emperor John Dukas.
For this Alsatian, French in culture, temperamentally related to the décadents, writing music at first resembling that of Fauré and the Wagnerizing Frenchmen, later that of Dukas, and last that of d'Indy and Magnard, has lived the greater portion of his life in no other city than Boston.
M. Chevillard had been asked to conduct, not one of the works of our recent masters, like Debussy or Dukas, whose style he renders to perfection, but Franck's Les Béatitudes, a work whose spirit he does not, to my mind, quite understand. The mystic tenderness of Franck escapes him, and he brings out only what is dramatic.
It might possibly be so for Parsifal. Of all operas since Parsifal that I have seen, the Ariane et Barbe Bleue of Dukas and Maeterlinck seems to me the most beautiful, the most exalted in conception, the most finely symbolic, and surely of all modern operas it is that in which the ideas and the words, the music, the stage pictures, are wrought with finest artistry into one harmonious whole.
A Scherzo, after the ballad of Goethe, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," tells the famous story of the boy who in his master's absence compels the spirit in the broom to fetch the water; but he cannot say the magic word to stop the flood, although he cleaves the demon-broom in two. Dukas uses them later in divided violins, violas and cellos, having thus a triad of harmonics doubled in the octave.
Even Dukas, and perhaps other Gauls, in their critical heart of hearts, may admit that "wit" in music, is as impossible as "wit" at a funeral. The wit is evidence of its lack. Mark Twain could be humorous at the death of his dearest friend, but in such a way as to put a blessing into the heart of the bereaved. Humor in music has the same possibilities.
He was a great artist, and his oratorical successes were greatly owing to the arrangement of his speeches and the application of the strongest arguments in their proper places. Sixty, however, of these great productions of genius have come down to us, and are contained in the various collections of the Attic orators by Aldus, Stephens, Taylor, Reiske, Dukas, Bekker, Dobson, and Sauppe.
He assured the artistic success not only of the men like Magnard and d'Indy and Dukas, whose art shows obvious signs of his influence. Composers like Debussy and Ravel, who appear to have arrived at maturity independently of him, have nevertheless benefited immeasurably by his work.
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