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PAUL ROSENFELD
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enness in the blood; and a quick extinction. A feeling comes from somewhere; and for an instant the world is afloat on moonbeams down to the safe still place of home. The sun sinks slow; and the painful splendour of election, of coronation, overwhelms; then flits away swifter than the swallow. The witchery of a Chopin waltz intoxicates; a phrase haunts and beckons mysteriously; but its magic remains incomprehensible: and the summons it insistently reiterates signals to something we have perhaps always unconsciously desired, but never seen more than faintly in our minds or known or understood. All the wine and hurt of vagrant evanescent unreasonable moods pour over us. But it is only the wine one drinks with eyes; and the hurt of shadow-swords that leave no fleshly wound. Where the quiver and panic and exaltation come from, is unknown. And they hardly connect at all with the forces of the world, and substantiate themselves; but disappear again into the arcana whence they came. All the election and crucifixion of a saviour goes on in the imagination of Pierrot, sick subject of the wandering moon. He too is apart from men and knows the sorrowing mother and the piercing nails. But the elevation and crucifixion go on only inside himself; and he remains indeed a white and dreamy half-man, part poet, part dandy, and part buffoon.


For the picture of Schoenberg we have lately gotten, we are obliged to the International Composers' Guild; to Greta Torpadie, Louis Gruenberg, and to the six musicians who played the instruments in the production of Dreimal Sieben Gedichte aus Albert Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire. Stokowski's presentation of the Five Orchestral Pieces last winter commenced the portrait. But the melodrama rounded it vigorously; for it was presented with far deeper musicianship and greater reverence. Certain of the instruments never came in correctly during the Philadelphia's performance; one could not hear the flight of clarinets which ended Péripétie. But no holes gaped during Pierrot Lunaire. Conductor Mengelberg, who heard the work under the direction of the composer himself, Darius Milhaud, who directed it in Paris, agreed on that point. The performance was almost perfect.

In Louis Gruenberg, who prepared the performance under immense difficulties, and conducted it in a spirit of complete self-