His
music is the modern man in his lately gotten sense of the tininess of
the human elements in the race, the enormity of the animal past. For
Ernest Bloch, the primeval forest with its thick spawning life, its
ferocious beasts, its brutish phallic-worshiping humanity, is still
here. Before him there still lie the hundreds and hundreds of thousands
of years of development necessary to make a sapient creature of man.
And he writes like one who has been plunged into a darkness and sadness
and bitterness all the greater for the vision of the rainbow that has
been given him, for the glimpse he has had of the "pays du soleil," the
land of man lifting himself at last from the brute and becoming human.
For he knows too well that only aeons after he is dead will the night
finally pass.
And he is the modern insomuch as the fusion of East and West is
illuminated by what he does. The coloration of his orchestra, the cries
of his instruments, the line of his melody, the throbbing of his pulses,
make us feel the great tide sweeping us on, the wave rolling over all
the world. In his art, we feel the earth itself turning toward the light
of the East.
APPENDIX
WAGNER
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig on May 22nd, 1813. He died in
Venice February 13th, 1883.
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