He has never been vivid and ingenuous and
spontaneous enough a musician even to develop a personal idiom. He has
always been hampered and bound. His earlier compositions, the quintet,
the orchestral "Les Vieillees de l'Ukraine" and "La bonne chanson," for
instance, are distinctly derivative and uncharacteristic in style. The
idiom is derived in part from Faure, in part from Wagner and other of
the romanticists. The string quintet has even been dubbed "A Musical
'Trip Around the World in Eighty Days.'" Nor is the idiom of his later
and more representative period primarily and originally any more
characteristic. It never seems to surge quite wholly and cleanly and
fairly. The chasing to which it has evidently been subjected cannot
quite conceal its descent. The setting of "La Cloche felee" of
Baudelaire, for instance, is curiously Germanic and heavy, for all the
subtlety and filigree of the voice and the accompanying piano and viola.
It is a fairly flat waltz movement that in "A Pagan Poem" is chosen to
represent the sublunary aspect of Virgil's genius. And "Hora mystica"
and "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," which have a certain
stylistic unity, nevertheless reveal the composer hampered by the
Gregorian and scholastic idiom which he has sought to assimilate.
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