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Updated: June 6, 2025
It becomes for the devout believer almost a kind of church-liturgy, a Mass by the Abbé Liszt. Rare qualities there undoubtedly are in the music: a reality of passion; a certain simplicity of plan; the sensuous beauty of melodic and harmonic touches.
It consists of four quartettes for piano and strings in B flat, D, E, and G minor, also three string quartettes. With the orchestral works should go two intermezzi for "The Masque of Pandora," finished later than the overture. Her many part-songs, duets, and solos are imbued with rare melodic charm, as may be seen from the famous duet, "Oh, that we two were maying."
Hence we never come upon those happy inventions, those artless scenes, which captivate all our sympathies and leave a blissful impression on the soul. "Harmony reigns supreme, instead of being the foundation from which the melodic groups of the musical picture stand forth.
And through the silken melodic line, the sweet, rich harmonies, there already makes itself felt something that is to Chopin's spirit as Russian iron is to Polish silver. It is perhaps only in the compositions subsequent to Opus 50 that Scriabine emerges in the fullness of his stature.
Of his life, indeed, music, in its most advanced and audacious manifestations had always been as much an essential a part as literature, hence the wonderful melodic effects of the more remarkable of his poems. Already an excellent Arabic scholar, he had as early as 1875 resolved upon a translation of The Arabian Nights, and he commenced the task in earnest on 5th February 1877.
He is first, and perhaps greatest, of all the musicians who have attempted landscape; and that froth of seemingly superfluous colour and excess of melodic embroidery, instead of being in excess and superfluous, are the very essence of his music.
We look in vain for beauty of melody and harmony; dreary unisons, querulous melodic phrases, hollow-eyed chords, hard progressions and modulations throughout every part of the polonaise proper. We receive a pathological rather than aesthetical impression. Nevertheless, no one can deny the grandeur and originality that shine through this gloom.
What colors, forms, tones, emotions, ideas, favorably stimulate? What combinations of these bring to repose? All the modern studies in so-called physiological aesthetics, into the emotional and other especially motor effects of color, tone-sensation, melodic sequence, simple forms, etc., find here there proper place.
It was rated as a successful work, but some of the wiser critics doubt if its power of melodic expression can wholly atone for the lack of certain essentially dramatic qualities. In 1887 the Hanover post was exchanged for a similar one at Weimar. There her husband performed excellent service in keeping alive the traditions of Liszt and his followers.
A climactic phrase of trumpets ends with a burst of all the chorus on stirring harmony, where in diminishing strokes of bells long rings the melodic note. The teasing motive of the nixie returns while the trumpet sounds a shadowy echo of its phrase, again to dying peal of bells. A chorus of eerie voices sing the mocking air, and again sounds the refrain of trumpet as in rebuke.
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