As for yourself, you are too much the
"virtuosic genius"; too much, at heart, the actor. Your music is perhaps
the most cunningly carpentered for effect, the most artificial known to
us. You are perhaps the most brilliant artifex of music.
We always seem to see you sitting on the concert-platform before us,
immersed in the expression of your passion, your disgust of passion,
your renunciation of passion. But the absorption is not quite as
complete as it would appear to be. During the entire performance, you
have been secretly keeping one wicked little eye trained on the ladies
of the audience.
Sometimes you play the religious. Perhaps there truly was in you a vein
of devotion and faith. The fact that you took Holy Orders to escape
marrying the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, who pursued you those many
years and doubtlessly bored you with her theological writings, does not
entirely disprove its existence. Indeed, your "Dante" symphony, with
its Hell full of impenitent sexual offenders, its Purgatory full of
those who repent them of their excesses, its Paradise represented by a
hymn to the Virgin, suggests what manner of role, and how real a one,
religion might have played in your luxurious existence. But, for the
most part, the religiosity of your music recalls overmuch the
fashionable confessor's.
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