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The piano killed the quartet, and it is a great pity, for the quartet is the purest form of instrumental music. It is the first form the fountain of Hippocrene. Now instrumental music drinks from every cup and the result is that many times it seems drunk. To return to the Seven Words. Their symphonic form is the only one worth considering.
Well, it is settled so far. Your three last Symphonic Poems have once more filled me with painful joy. While reading them I was forced again to think of my miserable condition, which makes such things mute to me, to me who knows so little how to help himself. God knows the greatest delight, such as your "Mountain Symphony," is thus turned to sorrow for me.
A beautiful dissonant rhythm, always symphonic coulant longours de source; an exasperated vehemence and a continual desire of novelty penetrated and informed by a severely classical spirit that is my reading of this composition.
His symphonic poems reveal how difficult it was for him to make his music follow the curve of his ideas. In "Die Ideale," for instance, for the sake of a conventional close, he departed entirely from the curve of the poem of Schiller which he was pretending to transmute. The variations in which he reproduced Lamartine's verse are stereotyped enough.
The old themes are welded to or interwoven with new material, and a perfect symphonic whole results, one that can be listened to with delight without stage accessories.
He enlarged the musical vocabulary, he re-created and enriched technique and diction, and to him the musician of to-day owes a debt that should never be forgotten. "He is of the race of eagles," said his teacher, Elsner. "Let all who aspire follow him in his flights toward regions sublime." He will always be remembered as the creator of orchestral piano-playing and of the symphonic poem.
Camille Saint-Saëns, without doubt the most original and intellectual modern French composer, who at sixty-seven years of age is still in the midst of his activity, and who has made his own the spirit of the classic composers, owes to the symphonic poem a great part of his reputation, and has also written symphonies of great value.
Among Rachmaninoff's works are three operas, "Aleko," "The Miser Knight," "Francesca da Rimini"; two symphonies, Opus 13 and Opus 27; three concertos for pianoforte, Opus 1, 18 and 30; a symphonic poem "Die Toteninsel," Opus 29; a work for chorus and orchestra, "The Bells"; two 'cello sonatas, Opus 19 and Opus 28; a pianoforte trio, Opus 9; piano pieces, Opera 3, 5, 10, 16, 23, 32; and numerous songs.
To Leon Kantor, by who knows what symphonic scheme of things, life was a chromatic scale, yielding up to him, through throbbing, living nerves of sheep-gut, the sheerest semitones of man's emotions. When he tucked his Stradivarius beneath his chin the book of life seemed suddenly translated to him in melody.
I was able to obtain a favourable idea of the effect of our performance by the wish expressed by Dr. Wille to hear these things badly done, so that he could form a correct judgment, as he feared he might be seduced by the excellence of our execution. Besides these, Liszt's Symphonic Poems were played on two grand pianos.
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