Page:Red (1925).pdf/173

 burning, burning, and The Devil, prowling, runs about, both have their themes. The word crapule suggests Aristide Bruant's celebrated ditty A la Villette (often sung inimitably by Yvette Guilbert) to Mr. Loeffler, and he quotes from it. To decorate the word magister he involves the Ça Ira and La Carmagnole in a contrapuntal fracas. Death plays the fiddle in Saint-Saëns's tone-poem, La Danse Macabre, while skeletons click bones and bound about. There is surely some devilry in this business. At least one American composer, Henry Hadley, has done his bit for the devil. His work is a tone-poem, Lucifer, after Vondel's five-act tragedy. The music purports to describe the war between darkness and the powers of light, until the defeated Lucifer is cast down into chaos. The Lucifer theme has been described as "sinister, foreboding." The work has been performed in New York and Boston, but I have not heard it.

It is the Faust legend, however, which has principally encouraged composers for considerably over a century to go to hell. Many of these operas, symphonies, and overtures have disappeared and only musical dictionaries and white-haired gatherers of statistics remind us that they once existed. Even much of the incidental music composed to be performed with Goethe's tragedy has fallen into oblivion. The very names of