than one of the younger generation of writers have died. fighting for freedom, died with the courage of men who have known how to live and to whom death has no terrors. We should reverence these "sacred battalions" of the youth of France, their example radiates all over the battlefields.

"The tree shall be known by its fruit" said Paul Bourget some years ago; to-day he has the consolation of seeing the soldiers of his country living and dying as befits the men of Catholic France.

To him in these days of peril comes the joy that he has helped some heroes on their way.

M. PEARDE BEAUFORT.

VOX ET PRAETEREA NIHIL

"In one weak, washy, everlasting flood."—Byron.

She talked--the Army-Buffs, Browns, Blacks and Blues-
Their movements, morals, dinners, dissipations,
Their balls and barracks, follies, feuds, flirtations,
And mopped the back-wash bilge of martial news.
She talked that mystery of the Brigsby-Browns-
How this was said, and that was more than hinted,
Why Martin married, and why Simon squinted,
When Martha rouged, where Mary got such gowns!

She talked-on dits" of cellar, shop, and steeple,
Who'd been in trade, and who were county-people-
A pauseless pendulum her tireless tongue!

Things sad! strange! shocking! Doris, Dick, and Dinah,
Silks, salads, sermons, cooks, coughs, cheese, and china,
Till stunned sensation staggering swayed unstrung!

JOHN J. HAYDEN.

041

THE NATIONAL ELEMENT IN MUSIC

TH

By GRACE O'BRIEN.

III. THE MUSIC OF RUSSIA

HE recent development of music in Russia is particularly interesting, as it shows us how a national school of music has arisen, in our days out of a highly characteristic folk music. And if it has grown so rapidly, it is because Russian composers have been able to profit by the experience that other countries have gained after centuries of groping and have found a perfected technique awaiting them.

For centuries secular music was a pleasure forbidden by the Orthodox Russian Church. This was probably due to the coarse character of the puppet shows and other entertainments of the strolling players, but all secular music without distinction came under the ban. In the middle of the seventeenth century we find the first official attempt to disregard this ecclesiastical regulation. Alexis Mikhailovich, the father of Peter the Great, having heard much of the musical festivities of other courts, decided that music would be an improvement to his own. Mrs. Rosa Newmarch, in her book "The Russian Opera," quotes the Oukaz he gave in 1672 by which a certain Count von Standen was ordered to go to Courland and get together “very excellent skilled trumpeters and masters who would know how to organise plays." But Russia had not a very good name as a place of residence in those days and the Courlanders did not respond to the invitation with any show of enthusiasm. Von Standen returned with one trumpeter and four musicians." However with the aid of a few Germans resident in Moscow they managed to get up some Biblical plays with music. These were the first musical performances

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given in Russia. But once introduced, music was encouraged by the succeeding rulers. Peter the Great brought in a German company and built a theatre for them in Moscow. Their plays were mostly translations from the German with incidental music and the performances were given only for the court. Music, at this time, had not become in any sense a popular art, but the great Russian magnates were beginning to appreciate it and started private bands in imitation of the German nobles.

It was under the Empress Anne in the early eighteenth century that Italian music came to Russia. A permanent Italian company was engaged and the composer Araga became director. The Empress Elizabeth continued. to patronise the Italian Opera. She seems to have been determined that her court should profit by it, for it is even said that any who were invited and failed to attend the court performances were fined fifty roubles. It is to her credit that she was the first to make a move in the direction of Russian Opera. She got together a company of Russian singers for whom Araga had to write operas to Russian words. Once started, this troupe continued to hold a modest place beside the Italian Opera, but their repertoire consisted chiefly of Italian Operas translated into Russian.

Under Catherine the Great music was enthusiastically cultivated. By this time every great landowner had his little private orchestra. Catherine brought many celebrated Italians such as Paisiello, Sarti, Cimarosa, and Salieri to direct their own operas. Great Italian singers were engaged at high fees and everything done to make the performances as perfect as possible as regards orchestra, chorus, staging, etc. As was the case in Germany, these years of Italian supremacy in music had their value. The public was trained to an appreciation of music and was given a high standard of technical perfection. Catherine herself wrote the libretti of five operas, one of which Sarti set to music.

Alexander I. introduced French Opera and Boieldieu spent many years at St. Petersburg. Great virtuosi of all kinds began to crowd to the capital attracted by its musical reputation, among others the Dublin pianist-composer, John Field, who made it his home for many years. But all this time

the native music was in its infancy. A few Russians had begun to compose, chiefly in imitation of their foreign models. Some tried to make use of the rich stores of national airs, but none were sufficiently talented to achieve anything worthy of notice.

Russian music dates only from last century and its history is that of the few men who built it up. The first really national composer was Glinka, born in 1804. He himself traced his feeling for national music to the Russian melodies which as a child he used to hear played by his uncle's private band. While at college, he had for a time piano lessons from Field, but he only studied as an amateur. He eventually became a government clerk. After a few years he was obliged to travel for his health in Italy and Germany and continued his musical studies there. Referring to that time in Italy, he wrote in his Memoirs later on: "All my compositions only helped to prove to me that I had not found the right way, and that I should never succeed in becoming really Italian. The feeling of home-sickness led me little by little to the idea of writing Russian music." On his return home, he fell in with a literary and artistic set of men, among them Gogol and Poushkin, all enthustically national in their ideas.. It was their aim to impregnate every form of art and literature with Russian characteristics and tradition. Glinka became fired with the same ambitions and determined to write a national opera. He chose a national historical subject. Upon this he wrote his first opera, the well-known "A Life for the Tzar." Thus artistic Russian music came into being. This was in 1836. There are traces of Italian influence in this first opera which disappear in his later works, but it is thoroughly Russian in feeling. Cui says of it: "It is impregnated with Russian nationality, and yet Glinka has only made use of a few national airs. . . . His own melodies bear the deepest marks of Russian character." The public were of course at first aghast at the innovation, but the opera became a great success and its composition was looked upon as an event of national importance.

Some of Glinka's friends were inspired to follow his example and take up music seriously. Of these the most

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famous was Dargomijsky, who was, like Glinka, in the government service. He too became attracted to national music and wrote his first opera La Roussalka" to a poem of Poushkin. Gradually Dargomijsky came entirely outside the influence of the conventional Italian style and in his last work" The Stone Guest" he arrived at a type as far removed from it as was Wagner's music drama, though working on different lines. He did not use the Leitmotiv, but aimed at dramatic realism and achieved a close union. between word and music by his use of melodic recitatif.

Around Dargomijsky gathered the group of young men who were to form the modern Russian school, the "Mighty Five," as the band was called later: Balakirev, Cui, Moussorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky Korsakov. Opposed to this national school was the cosmopolitan one, of which the most famous representatives were Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky. There was no love lost between the two schools. If Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky did nothing for the furtherance of national art, a movement at which they were inclined to look askance, they did a great deal for the general development of music in Russia, especially Rubinstein, who founded the St. Petersburg Conservatoire in 1862 and the Imperial Russian Musical Society which spread through all the big towns.

Tchaikovsky was Rubinstein's pupil. His works which show an extraordinary fertility of production are in no sense characteristically Russian. He always remained under the influence of Italian music and it is doubtless to this quality in his work that his popularity was due among a generation that had grown up in the Italian tradition.

The group of national musicians, brimful of enthusiasm and new ideas, which they fearlessly proclaimed, are certainly more interesting to follow. Glinka had already seen in Balakirev the man who was to carry on his work. Gradually, in the early sixties the others began to gather around him. First Cui and Moussorgsky, then Borodin and Rimsky Korsakov and the writer Stassov who was to be their spokesman and literary interpreter. The little group used to meet at Dargomijsky's house and work together towards the realisation of the national ideal in music. The