Even some of the music contemporaneous with the
magnificent Fourth Symphony is curiously ineffectual and pointless.
True, the color, the air and tone of the North are never entirely
absent from his work. His songs invariably recapture, sometimes almost
miraculously, the dark and mourning accents of the Scandinavian
folk-song. For all the modernity of medium they are simple and sober.
Moreover, in those of his compositions that approach banality most
closely, there is a certain saving hardness and virility and honesty.
Unlike his neighbor, Grieg, he is never mincing and meretricious. We
never find him languishing in a pretty boudoir. He is always out under
the sky. It is only that he is not always free and resourceful and
deeply self-critical. Even through the bold and rugged and splendid
Violin Concerto there flit at moments the shadows of Beethoven and
Wagner and Tchaikowsky. The first theme of the quartet "Voces intimae"
resembles not a little a certain theme in "Boris." The close of
"Nightride and Sunrise" is watered Brahms and watered Strauss. And there
are phrases in his tone-poem that commence with all his proper rhythmic
ardor and then suddenly degenerate. There are moments when his harmonic
sense, generally keen and true, abandons him completely.
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