Franck's D minor Symphony, Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, and Debussy's La Mer. Franck's symphony will, of course, be performed some time this winter, but the performance will fall on a day on which I have no ambition to hear it, and the other pieces will not, in all probability, be performed at all.
My temporary prejudices and tastes in music, indeed, seem ever at variance with my opportunities. For many years I longed to hear Vincent d'Indy's Istar. The idea of the music disrobing, as the goddess of the legend disrobed, awakened my curiosity, a curiosity whetted still sharper by the rhapsodies which Philip Hale and James Huneker have woven around this inverted set of variations. But even curiosity perishes with age and on the day when, finally, I saw the thing announced, I discovered, to my surprise, that all appetite had left me. Nevertheless, on this bright winter afternoon, when I should have preferred to walk in the park or even to attend a moving-picture theatre, I forced myself to enter the concert hall. The auditorium was overheated and stuffy; I was surrounded by a crowd of hysterical females who had come to see a Russian violinist, whose name, in translation, was Mike or Alec. I sat through a long program, for Istar was announced to close the concert, and when at last it was performed, I began idly
