The two extracts from this Quintett which are quoted below will illustrate better, no doubt, than any written description both the weakness and the strength of this composer. The first movement has much ingenuity, but little charm. Counterpoint and modulation are copiously poured out, and are indeed made to do service for those higher qualities without which there is no true art. [Music: 1ST MOVEMENT, STRING QUINTETT IN F. ANTON BRUCKNER.] The adagio, on the other hand, reveals a feeling for emotional beauty of no ordinary kind, and doubtless it is writing of this character, which is found also in the slow movements of the Orchestral Symphonies, that explains the effect which Bruckner’s works have created on the Continent. [Music: 3RD MOVEMENT, STRING QUINTETT IN F. ANTON BRUCKNER.] [Sidenote: =Hanslick on Bruckner’s Works=] [Sidenote: =Krehbiel on Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony=] The scherzo of the Fourth (Romantic) Symphony may also be cited as a movement full of character, and while good, is pleasing even in the popular sense of that word. Music such as this, indeed, justifies the bringing forward of Bruckner’s name, and renders it difficult to acquiesce in some of the severe judgments which have been passed on his works. For example, when a new Symphony of Bruckner’s was performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Society some few years ago, Dr. Edward Hanslick, the well-known critic, said, in his notice printed in the _Neue Freie Presse_, that he had left the concert-room before the performance began, because he did not wish to witness the desecration of the hall! And in his notice of a New York concert, in which Mr. Theodore Thomas conducted Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, Mr. H.E. Krehbiel, the musical critic of _The Tribune_, says:—“As an instance of what the intellect can do in music it is perhaps as startling and interesting as anything that the century has produced. But as a musical composition it is nine-tenths cold intellectuality and one-tenth beauty. It is polyphony gone mad. If one wants originality, here it is in abundance. There is nothing under the heaven, or on the earth, or in the waters under the earth like unto this symphony. Those who think the thematic work in _Tristan_ and _The Ring_ complex and laboured, should hear this symphony, if for no other reason than to see how, in comparison with it, Wagner’s is a complete exemplification of good music as defined by Galuppi in a conversation with Dr. Burney one hundred and sixteen years ago: ‘Beauty, clearness, and good modulation.’ Every element of symphonic writing which Herr Bruckner uses he uses in a manner which stamps a unique character on the work. But it is only unique, not beautiful.”