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He whom one might suppose almost native to the Paris of Debussy and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave Kahn and Huysmans, has found comfortable an environment essentially tight and illiberal, a society that masks philistinism with toryism, and manages to drive its radical and vital and artistic youth, in increasing numbers every year, to other places in search of air.
And we have, too, a little band of musicians; among them, in the first rank, that great painter of dreams, Claude Debussy; that master of constructive art, Dukas; that impassioned thinker, Albéric Magnard; that ironic poet, Ravel; and those delicate and finished writers, Albert Roussel and Déodat de Séverac; without mention of the younger musicians who are in the vanguard of their art.
Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the one through a sort of mathematical harshness, the second through a Gothic severity, the third through a machine-like regularity, to give their work a new boldness, a new power and incisiveness of design.
And in its short career the Schola may already be credited with the training of young composers, such as MM. Roussel, Déodat de Séverac, Gustave Bret, Labey, Samazeuilh, R. de Castéra, Sérieyx, Alquier, Coindreau, Estienne, Le Flem, and Groz; and to these may be added M. d'Indy's private pupils, Witkowski, and one of the foremost of modern composers, Alberic Magnard.
If people wish to institute a joust between French and German art, let it be a fair one, I repeat; let Wagner be matched with Berlioz, and Strauss with Debussy, and Mahler with Dukas or Magnard. Such were the conditions of the combat; and they were, whether intentionally or not, unfavourable to France.
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.
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.
In France the well-known judge, Magnard, so honorably distinguished for his attitude towards cases of infanticide by young mothers, has said: "I heartily wish that alongside the institution of marriage as it now exists we had a free union constituted by simple declaration before a magistrate and conferring almost the same family rights as ordinary marriage." This wish has been widely echoed.
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