MUSICAL CHRONICLE
FEU de Joie was the last of the group of Szymanowski's songs chanted by Alice Miriam the rare evening I heard her. And, long before the day a few weeks since when I was told of her death; ever, indeed, since the fleeting instants in which she had carolled out the abrupt, exclamatory tones of the ecstatic musical moment, she had been curiously, deliciously, blent in my memory with the quality of the delicate song itself. It seemed it was herself, with her hectic, birdlike, tense-strung body, her high, thrilling, almost shrilling voice, that was the little ephemeral bonfire. During the brief while the white-shouldered slender girl in her clinging peplus had swayed before the blue-hung stage of the Town Hall, producing the startled joyous tones prescribed, it was to me as though something was happening within her spirit that was like the crackle and burst of ignition. She warmed the hands and dazzled the eyes and made flare the heart with her performance, as the twisting sword felt by the composer when he wrote. The seraphic talent that had composed this "feu de joie" had indeed found an instrument exquisitely fitted to transmit the vision of fire.
Into the midst of the concert which preceded the performance of Carpenter's Krazy Kat ballet she had stepped as a sudden tentative streamer of flame snaps erect out of ash and half-charred logs. She was the artist. Before her there had come and gone people pathetic each in a different fashion; edges a little eaten into; talents wasting themselves in a sort of perverse asceticism upon objects not quite worthy of them. And after her, there were to come others equally dry of palm. But Alice Miriam had song in her. She had but to lift her voice, and after all the cloying syrups and bonbons, there was before one fine wheaten bread into which one might bite. She had found the medium through which she might give the charming gift of her spirit. The group of Szymanowski's songs—A la Lisière du Bois, St François, Feu de Joie were three of the five she held to the baptismal font—are among the most individual and poetical and nicely synthesized of the recent compositions of the diffident and exquisite Pole. What is most apart and fine in his oblique nature seems to have been expressed almost in spite of itself in these brief
