BOO KS
129
Mahler's use of the first-movement framework, in our own century,
for
his
musical thinking. And a final reality to point out is that the
kind of continuity and form Newman argues for he is unable to
recognize when it is presented to him in the three movements of
Debussy's
La Mer,
in each of which the evocative fragments are fitted
together in a progression with coherence and superb cumulative effect:
all Newman can hear in this and the other major instrumental works
(he excepts
J
eux)
is evidence that "the constructive sense of Debussy
. . . so far as the larger forms
are
concerned, was no more than that
of a child."
This is one of the examples of Newman's failure in the critic's
primary task of perceiving and reporting what is to be heard in a
piece of music. Another is the characterization of Bellini as a "sac–
charine and flaccid melodist" that I mentioned earlier. And we find
him, in 1911, exclaiming: "Heaven knows how empty some of these
instrumental works of Mozart can be!"-this about one of the piano
concertos and the G-minor Symphony, which he says made him feel
sometimes that he was hearing "the nursery prattle of a bright child,"
as against the Strauss
Burleske, Also sprach Zarathustra
and
Dance of
the Seven Veils
on the same program, which filled
him
"with a kind
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