Bohemian compositions "Furiant"--is compact and free from any trace of the rambling tendency. The finale is dominated by a dance theme in double time of enormous energy and vivacity. [Sidenote: =Dvoràk Quartet, Op. 96.= _December 6, 1900._] The Op. 96 Quartet might almost as well be called "From the New World" as the Symphony. Whether it was written during the composer's stay in America we do not know, but it is certainly an outcome of his American experiences no less than the "New World" symphony. All the themes of both those works are idealised Negro or Red Indian melodies, and though the results may not be in the Quartet quite so wonderfully felicitous as in the Symphony, they are fine enough to make it a most interesting feature in the music of the wonderful Bohemian composer's American period. That music has taught some of us a rather important lesson. The value of folk-melody has long been recognised, but until these works by Dvoràk became known it was pretty generally thought that Negro tunes formed an exception to the principle that all sincere, unsophisticated, and original musical utterance has artistic value. Dvoràk has taught us the danger of regarding any natural thing as common or unclean. He has shown that Negro melody may give rise to beautiful works of art no less than Irish, Hungarian, or Scandinavian melody. Dvoràk is the most impossible to classify of all composers. He is naïf and yet a master of complex and ingenious design; a scorner of scholastic device and at the same time a successful worker in the classical forms; the most original of the composers who became known during the latter half of the 19th century, yet suspected, on occasion, of the most barefaced plagiarism. It is hard to say whether his absolute musical invention, his skill, taste, and resource in laying out for single stringed instruments, or his ear for orchestral colouring is the most remarkable faculty. He is the musician who seems to have learned but little from text-books and professors, and yet, by a continual series of miracles, he avoids all the pitfalls that beset the path of the unlearned composer. He is never at a loss--never does anything feeble or ineffective,--but again and again overwhelms and delights us with his inexhaustible flow of racy and full-blooded melody and with his splendid handling of whatever instrument, or group of instruments, he may choose to handle. [Sidenote: =Beethoven Razoumoffsky Quartet, No. 3.= _December 5, 1901._]