RECITATIONS WITH ACCOMPANIMENT.

5-7. There is little to say about the poems to which Schumann has set music. The published English translations are poor and the music seems superfluous all through. In "The Fugitives" it is far too boisterous, and in "Schön Hedvig" uninteresting.

8-13. The poems to which Liszt has added music are, with one exception, unknown to English audiences. The first is a legend of a melancholy ghost, which haunted a ruined castle. Whoever beholds it turns melancholy also and dies. A knight encamps in the ruin, beholds the spectre, and straightway rides into the lake and gets drowned. This is uninteresting, but there is some very creepy music. "Lenore" is better known, having been adapted more or less freely by several of our poets. The music is terribly difficult to play, but immensely effective. I have arranged it for orchestra, to the great enhancement of its beauties, as I venture to think. The accompaniment waits on the voice throughout, so there is no difficulty on this head. "The Dead Poet's Love" is a Hungarian legend so grotesque in conception that no audience could take it seriously. It is very long and the music is not striking. Tolstoi's ballad, "The Blind Minstrel," is also long and dull, in spite of the beautiful initial idea of the poor harper singing his best, flattered by what he takes for the rapt

silence of his audience and then finding that there is no audience at all. "Helgi's Troth" is much better, but the English version is not published. There is a great deal of music-it is, in fact, adapted from a vocal setting by F. Dräseke-and here for the first time we meet with sentences which must be declaimed exactly with the music, e.g.:

HELGI'S TROTH. 1.

Lento.

lu the thick of the fight king Helgi fell.

The last piece, "The Wandering Jew," is announced as being published among Liszt's posthumous works, but I have not yet met with it.

14. The well-known poem of "The Uncle" hardly needs more than passing mention. The music is very slight and intends to claim no attention whatever, but aims at fulfilling the same function as the melodramatic music used on the stage, which is usually all but inaudible.

15. In my "Minstrel's Curse" I have gone partly on the lines of Liszt's accompaniments. There is little speaking through music, but I have always found these few passages go badly in performance for the reason indicated above-the reciter ignores the music completely.

THE MINSTREL'S CURSE.

The

old man cried to Heaven, and

Lento.

pp

Heaven heard his pray'r: the walls lie wrecked and prostrate, gone is that

cres.

fz

dim.

castle fair. Now stands but one tall column to point its vanished

might, and this too, cracked and tott'ring may fall within a night.

pp

It is not, one would think, a very irksome task to make the two factors coincide at the points indicated, but it is never done unless I accompany it myself and rush after or wait for the reciter with much ingenuity.

16. "Thorvenda's Dream" is slight in texture, but pretty in performance. It has the original feature of a musical movement of some length in the middle to fill up a pause in the poem. This, however, has been done to far greater extent and effect in the piece to be next noticed.

THE ONE COMPLETE SUCCESS.

17. "Bergliot" is a magnificent piece, and decidedly the most effective accompanied poem yet written. It has the advantage of being a monologue in character without any explanatory parts, and the disadvantage that the events of the action are not quite clear to an average English audience (sometimes not even to the reciter, I have found). Some comments on it might find place here, therefore, as it is growing rapidly into popularity. In ancient Norway the country was split up by the feuds of various clans, and the poem deals with one of these party squabbles. Bergliot is the wife of a chieftain bearing the uncouth name of Einar Tambarskelfir (accent on the first and third syllables), who has gone to meet King Harald and settle terms of peace with him in the "All-Thing," or parliament house. The discussion becomes heated, Harald murders Einar and his son Eindridi, a general stampede reveals to the wife waiting without what has happened, and after a tremendous appeal to the people for vengeance—an appeal not responded to-she relapses into stony despair and accompanies the corpses of her dear ones home to the strains of one of the most affecting funeral marches ever penned. The English translation, like the original Norwegian poem, is in alliterative versethat is, lines of two strong accents, the same letter