Music for the Movtes faced the issue: they still continue to try to force old wine into new bottles, arranging and rearranging melodies and harmonies contrived for quite other occasions and purposes. Even when scores have been written for pictures the result has not shown any imaginative advance over the arranged scores. It is curious that it seems to have occurred to no one that the moving-picture demands a new kind of music.
The composers, I should imagine, are only waiting to be asked to write it. Certainly none of them has ever displayed any hesitancy about composing incidental music for the spoken drama. Mendelssohn wrote strains for A Midsummer Night's Dream which seemed pledged to immortality until Granville Barker ignored them; the Wedding March is still in favour in Keokuk and Kankakee. Beethoven illustrated Goethe's Egmont; Sir Arthur Sullivan penned a score for The Tempest; Schubert was inspired to put down some of his most ravishing notes for a stupid comedy called Rosamunde; Grieg's Peer Gynt music is performed more often than the play. More recent examples of incidental music for dramas are Saint-Saëns's score for Brieux's La Foi, Mascagni's for The Eternal City, and Richard Strauss's for Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Is it necessary to prolong the list? I have only mentioned, to be sure, a few obvious instances
