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BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER
MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC
BRAHMS, TSCHAÏKOWSKY, CHOPIN, RICHARD STRAUSS, LISZT AND WAGNER
12mo. $1.50
"Mr. Huneker is, in the best sense, a critic; he listens to the music and gives you his impressions as rapidly and in as few words as possible; or he sketches the composers in fine, broad, sweeping strokes with a magnificent disregard for unimportant details. And as Mr. Huneker is, as I have said, a powerful personality, a man of quick brain and an energetic imagination, a man of moods and temperament—a string that vibrates and sings in response to music—we get in these essays of his a distinctly original and very valuable contribution to the world's tiny musical literature."—J. F. Runciman, in London Saturday Review.
MELOMANIACS
12mo. 31.50
Contents: The Lord's Prayer in B—A Son of Liszt—A Chopin of the Gutter—The Piper of Dreams—An Emotional Acrobat—Isolde's Mother—The Rim of Finer Issues—An Ibsen Girl—Tannhäuser's Choice—The Red-Headed Piano Player—Brynhüd's Immolation—The Quest of the Elusive—An Involuntary Insurgent—Hunding's Wife—The Corridor of Time—Avatar—The Wegstaffes give a Musicale—The Iron Virgin—Dusk of the Gods—Siegfried's Death—Intermezzo—A Spinner of Silence—The Disenchanted Symphony—Music the Conqueror.
"It would be difficult to sum up 'Melomaniacs' in a phrase. Never did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater contrasts, not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clearness and obscurity. It is inexplicably uneven, as if the writer were perpetually playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of thought from intellectual chaos. There is method in the madness, but it is a method of intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is genius written over a large portion of it, and to a musician the wealth of musical imagination is a living spring of thought"—Harold E. Gorst, in London Saturday Review (Dec. 8, 1906).