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Updated: June 7, 2025
"I should say it depended on which parents and on which children were meant," advanced Neale guardedly. Marise had at first an affectionate smile for this, and then a laugh. She got up from the piano-stool and went to kiss him. He said with a whimsical suspicion of this, "Why so?" "Because you are so entirely you," she told him, and went back to Scriabine. September 22.
Beside the Doctor of Music there stands the Talmudic Jew, the man all intellect and no feeling, who subtilizes over musical art as though it were the Law. The compositions of this period constitute an artistic retrogression rather than an advance. They are not "modern music" for all their apparent stylistic kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine and Ornstein.
When they introduce a pianoforte into the orchestra, they either, like Brahms, treat it as the premier instrument, and write symphonies, or, like Scriabine and Strawinsky, reduce it to the common level. But M. Rachmaninoff has not participated in this change of attitude. He is still content with music that toys with the pianoforte. And he writes concerti of the old type.
The stream has commenced setting since the Arabian Nights, the Persian odalisques, the Tartar tribesmen became music. And the Chinese sensibility of Scriabine, the Oriental chromatics of the later Rimsky-Korsakoff, the sinuous scales and voluptuous colors and silken textures of Debussy, the shrill fantastic Japanese idiom of Strawinsky, have shown us the fusion was near.
And in Scriabine, that new intensity of sensation attained something near to heroic supernatural stature. What was beautiful and sick in his age entered into his art. Through it, we learn, not a little, how we feel. His music was a thing created in the flesh of a man, out of his agony. "Eine Entwicklung ist ein Schicksal," Thomas Mann once wrote.
For Scriabine must have suffered an almost inordinate subjugation to the manifestations of beauty, must have been consumed with a passion for communicating his burningly poignant adventures. There are moments when he seems scarcely able to speak, so intense, so enrapturing, is his voluptuous sensation.
Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui, Glazounov, Rachmaninov, Moussorgsky, Arensky, Scriabine and others, have all had a powerful bearing upon the musical thought of the times. Their virility and character have been due to the newness of the field in which they worked.
For even in those days, when Scriabine was a member of the Russian salon school, there were attractive original elements in his compositions. There is real poetry and freshness in these soft-colored pieces. The treatment of the instrument is bold, and, at moments, more satisfactory than Chopin's.
Had the new time produced no musical art, had no Debussy nor Scriabine, no Strawinsky nor Bloch, put in appearance, one might possibly have found oneself compelled to believe the mournful decadence of Richard Strauss the inevitable development awaiting musical genius in the modern world.
Isadora Duncan, Gordon Craig, Maeterlinck, Scriabine are perhaps too remote from the spirit of democracy, too tinged with old-world æstheticism, to be included in this particular category, but all are image-breakers, liberators, and have played their part in the preparation of the field for an art of democracy.
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