Identifier: modernmusicmusic02elso (find matches)
Title: Modern music and musicians : (Encyclopedic)
Year: 1918 (1910s)
Authors: Elson, Louis Charles, 1848-1920
Subjects: Piano Musicians Composers
Publisher: New York : The University Society Inc.
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University

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the composer probablydid not consider of as much importance as some others of his works forthe piano. One of them, Mazeppa, easily passed from piano to orches-tra, and became one of the Poemes Symphoniques. In these celebrated poems, so variously criticized, together with thesymphonies Dante and Faust, we are in the presence of a new Liszt—the Liszt of Weimar, the great, the true, whom the smoke of the in-cense burned on the altars of the piano had too long concealed from view.Boldly entering the path opened by Beethoven with the Pastoral Sym-phony, and so brilliantly trodden by Berlioz, he leaves the worship of FRANZ LISZT 237 pure music for that of so-called k program music, which claims to depictclearly and definitely both characters and feelings. Plunging headlonginto harmonic novelties, he dares what none other has dared before him;and if it sometimes chances that, to use the ingenious euphemism of one ofhis friends, he passes the limits of the beautiful, yet even here he makes
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THE HERDER-PLATZ IN WEIMAR. some happy hits, and also some brilliant discoveries. The mold of theancient symphony and the hoary overture is broken, and he proclaims thereign of music freed from all rules except those only which the authorhimself makes to fit the environment in which he has chosen to work. With the orchestral sobriety of the classic symphony he contrasts allthe wealth of the modern orchestra, and, as he has by marvels of inge-nuity reproduced this wealth on the piano, he now, turning the brilliantlight of his virtuosity upon the orchestra, creates a new orchestration ofinfinite richness by making use of the hitherto unexplored resourceswhich the more perfect manufacture of instruments, and the increaseddevelopment of technic in the performers, put at his command. Themethods of Richard Wagner are often cruel. He does not take into ac-count the fatigue which results from superhuman efforts. He constantlydemands the impossible. One must get through it in the best way poss

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