harmony and the full and rhythmic serenity of its spirit.  And how pleasant it was after the tempests and convulsions of art in these later days.  Can we not tear ourselves away from that romantic suffering in music which was begun by Beethoven?  After a century of battles, of revolutions, and of political and social strife, whose pain has found its reflection in art, let us begin to build a new city of art, where men may gather together in brotherly love for the same ideal.  However Utopian that hope may sound now, let us think of it as a symptom of new directions of thought, and let us hope that Don Perosi may be one of those who will bring into music that divine peace, that peace which Beethoven craved for in despair at the end of his Missa Solemnis, that joy that he sang about but never knew.

FRENCH AND GERMAN MUSIC

In May, 1905, the first musical festival of Alsace-Lorraine took place at Strasburg.  It was an important artistic event, and meant the bringing together of two civilisations that for centuries had been at variance on the soil of Alsace, more anxious for dispute than for mutual understanding.

The official programme of the fetes musicales laid stress on the reconciliatory purpose of its organisers, and I quote these words from the programme book, drawn up by Dr. Max Bendiner, of Strasburg: 

“Music may achieve the highest of all missions:  she may be a bond between nations, races, and states, who are strangers to one another in many ways; she may unite what is disunited, and bring peace to what is hostile....  No country is more suited for her friendly aid than Alsace-Lorraine, that old meeting-place of people, where from time immemorial the North and South have exchanged their material and their spiritual wealth; and no place is readier to welcome her than Strasburg, an old town built by the Romans, which has remained to this day a centre of spiritual life.  All great intellectual currents have left their mark on the people of Alsace-Lorraine; and so they have been destined to play the part of mediator between different times and different peoples; and the East and the West, the past and the present, meet here and join hands.  In such festivals as this, it is not a matter of gaining aesthetic victories; it is a matter of bringing together all that is great and noble and eternal in the art of different times and different nations.”

It was a splendid ambition for Alsace—­the eternal field of battle—­to wish to inaugurate these European Olympian games.  But in spite of good intentions, this meeting of nations resulted in a fight, on musical ground, between two civilisations and two arts—­French art and German art.  For these two arts represent to-day all that is truly alive in European music.