of the C major are at home only with orchestral instruments. The work was all but unprecedented for its time in length and difficulty; it is Schubert’s finest effort in sustained and noble expression, and, though thoroughly romantic in tone, his nearest approach to ‘absolute’ music. It seems outmoded and at times a bit childlike to-day, but by sheer beauty holds its place steadily on orchestral programs. Schubert’s other symphonies have dropped almost completely out of sight. Mendelssohn’s four symphonies, including the ‘Italian,’ the ‘Scotch,’ and the ‘Reformation,’ have had a harder time holding their place. It seems strange that Mendelssohn, the avowed follower of the classics, should not have done his best work in his symphonies, but these compositions, though executed with extreme polish and dexterity, sound thin to-day. A bolder voice might have made them live. But the ‘Scotch’ and ‘Italian’ in them are seen through Leipzig spectacles, and the musical subject-matter is not vigorous enough to challenge a listener in the midst of modern musical wealth. As for the ‘Reformation’ symphony, with its use of the Protestant chorale, _Ein feste Burg_, a technically ‘reformed’ Jew could hardly be expected to catch the militant Christian spirit. Yet these works are at their best precisely in their romantic picturesqueness; as essays in the ‘absolute’ symphony they cannot match the nobility and strength of Schubert’s C major. Schumann, the avowed romantic, had much more of worth to put into his symphonies, probably because he was an apostle and an image-breaker, and not a polite ‘synthesist.’ The ‘Spring’ symphony in B flat, written in the year of his marriage, 1840 (the year of his most exuberant productivity), remains one of the most beautiful between Beethoven and recent times. The austerity of the classical form never robbed him of spontaneity, for the ideas in his symphony are not inferior to any he ever invented. The form is, on the whole, satisfactory to the purist, and, beyond such innovations as the connecting of all four movements in the last symphony, he attempted little that was new. The four works are fertile in lovely ideas, such as the graceful folk-song intoned by ‘cellos and wood-wind in the third, or the impressive organ-like movement from the same work. Throughout there is the same basic simplicity of invention--the combination of fresh melodic idea with colorful harmony--which endears him to all German hearts. It is customary to say that Schumann was a mere amateur at orchestration. It is certainly true that he had no particular turn for niceties of scoring or for searching out endless novelties of effect, and it is true that he sometimes proved himself ignorant of certain primary rules, as when he wrote an unplayable phrase for the horns in his first symphony. But his orchestration is, on the whole, well balanced and adequate to his subject-matter, and is full of felicities of scoring which harmonize with the romantic color