the proverb, who despised tails. We try to solace ourselves for the perfunctory and uninspiring performances of the classics given by our two best-known orchestras by luxuriating in their ministration to the ear; and indeed they are splendid instruments: the Philharmonic has always been one of our best orchestras, and it may be doubted whether the wood-wind section of the New York Symphony is equalled by any other in the country. The speech may be empty, but the voice is sweet.
The brief career of the National Symphony Orchestra in New York is from this point of view most instructive. This began as a rather crude group of players, weak in the strings and coarse in the brass, but it was conducted by Mr. Bodanzky, whose love and understanding of the classics made his readings always interesting and often eloquent. What happened? Of course many of the critics talked insistently of the tonal limitations, and wanted to know why we needed another orchestra, whether there were not enough concerts already, and so on. Even today, when the quality of the players shows surprising improvement, the echoes of such criticism still reverberate. But those who love the soul of music better than its body quickly recognized that here was something appealing and persuasive, something that let a breath of fresh air into the stuffy atmosphere of our musical world, and rejoiced in such occasions as Mr. Bodanzky's performances of Elgar's First Symphony and Vincent d'Indy's "Jour d'Eté." The National Symphony Orchestra has been a yeast that has already leavened the lump of orchestral music in New York.
And so, to return to Mr. Gabrilowitsch, when he brought to us the other night his Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which, like the National, has improved surprisingly in a year, we were prepared for and little surprised by the comments of the sensationalism-luxury group. It may be that the oboe was a bit thin in the upper register, that the heavy brass was not always so mellifluous as the horns (said to have been taken over in a body from the Boston Symphony Orchestra). What does it all matter? When, starving in the wilderness of this world for the sustenance of thought and feeling, you suddenly hear human, sympathetic, intelligible speech, you do not criticise the voice which utters it. When the other night Mr. Gabrilowitsch gave us the Brahms Symphony with a justice of rhythmic, dynamic and tonal shading that fitted it like a glove, or rather like its own skin; when he set it on its feet, solidly and simply, in the splendid symmetry of its proportions, in its fine restraint and balance; when he made us hold our breath with its mystery, thrill with its nobility, melt with its poetry and tenderness—when he thus gave us the soul of this great, manly music of Brahms, we quite forgot about its body; we snapped our fingers at sonoritics; we simply listened spellbound to the beauty of that utterance. It was Brahms himself, the whole of Brahms (how grotesque it made that myth of his "dryness" seem!), and nothing but Brahms.
"Nothing but Brahms": therewith by implication we discard our third definition of the conductor's function, which makes of his "interpretation" something personal, peculiar to himself, and in the last analysis artificial. Matthew Arnold speaks somewhere of the use of certain lines from great poets as touchstones for the detection of the presence or absence of the poetic quality in the work of others. In similar fashion the self-effacement, the perfect transparency, the loyalty of an artist like Gabrilowitsch to his composer must reveal by comparison a something inferior and essentially inartistic in those conductors who try to color all they do with their own personality, who are always searching out "interpretations" instead of letting a work speak for itself. Even so great a conductor as Mr. Stokowski cannot, one fears, always be exonerated from this intrusion of personality where it does not belong, a tendency which in such a man as Nikisch becomes positively diseased. In tech-
