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ring, groping, stretching. An almost immovable weight seems to lie upon his voice. And when it speaks, it seems to tear itself through shrouds; to come out as agony, as hysteria even. The ecstatic voluptuousness of Debussy, by the side of this of Schoenberg, is like a thing safely delivered, safely carried across to its goal. It buds like flowers in the grass. Wagner's will, undercut as it was, seems free and direct by the side of this mortally wounded will. In these works, the cry of Amfortas and of the sick Tristan is become shrill, piping, broken. The tones are full of anguish; of anguish almost suffocated; but drumming and roaring underneath the blanket of silence.
Anguish speaks out of the sweetest dreams. Eine Blasse Wischerin is like a cool hand upon a pain-rent head; like the cool linens that release the body after states of exhaustion. It is out of some starvation-pit that the Pierrot yearns for Columbine. She is the drink of water to a black and leathern mouth. Moments of health are only moments of lessened sickness; moments when desire twists and takes a happier way, and suffuses the dried heart with dew; shivers of beauty that fall from the sky into his solitude at some street-corner and for a fraction of a second thrill the heart with unknown irretrievable bliss. For an instant, the past sings in the blood, and scatters some delicious old perfume, some pale gold light, into the grey air. More often, the pain speaks direct. Sometimes, as in the first of the Five Pieces, it is merely the image of the states of sick presentiment the music brings up before us. Again, the fourth of the Five brings before us more of the silent and atrocious music that goes on in the body during bad quarter hours. Savage tearing arpeggios of the brass and woodwind in contrary motion. In the interstices of the grinding storm, the muted horns sing voiceless, broken song; a flight of clarinets; and the world topples in. And at other, the music cries with the pain of someone held down oni an operating-table and only half anaesthetized; and out of the unendurable tension of overtaxed and shattered nerves. The piccolo shrieks in alarm. The voice gasps under the pressure.
A score of tortured and bizarre moods are expressed by this strange man. The melodrama is full of them; and they follow upon each other with capricious inconsequentiality. Some of them are poisonous; express themselves through the caricature and de-