"HAS THE MUSICAL SYMPHONY HAD ITS DAY?

     Mr. Henry T. Fink [sic], the musical critic of the New York Evening Post, gives it as his opinion that the symphony, as a form of music art, is doomed to extinction. "There can be no doubt," he thinks, "that the art form of the future for orchestral music is the symphonic poem as constructed by Liszt, Sain-Saens [sic] and Dvorak." Mr. Fink writes further (in The Forum, October-December) as follows:

     "Beethoven undoubtedly improved [...]
     "As the three-volume novel has had its day, so the four-movement symphony is doomed to extinction. It is too long. Its writers usually labor under the strange delusion that genius consists in taking some insignificant theme and developing it interminably with the utmost display of technical skill and ingenuity. Genius, on the contrary, consists in the faculty of originating significant ideas, expressing them in the simplest possible way and stopping short when all that is new has been said, whether it makes one page or a dozen or more. In architecture there is some excuse for skyscrapers, because, if not beutiful [sic], they are at any rate useful and profitable. But long symphonies are the reverse of useful and profitable. A very talented composer who died six years ago, the Viennese Anton Bruckner, practically wrecked his whole career by writing skyscraper symphonies lasting up to an hour and a half. No conductor dared in risk the success of a whole concert on such works, and consequently they were ignored, and the poor deluded man died brokenhearted. He had been unable to read the signs of the times.
     "Apart from its usually excessive length the symphony has the fatal defect of not being an  organic form of art. With a few exceptions, there is no more connection between its four movements than there is between four Pullman cars; less, indeed, because the best Pullman trains are vestibuled, whereas Haydn made the blunder of entirely detaching the symphonic movements; and this blunder has been perpetuated to the present day, although Mendelssohn, Schumann, and a few more recent writers have, in single instances, run their movements together and also tried to connect them organically by employing, to a slight extent, the same material in two or more of them. But the symphony can hardly be saved by that device. It is too artificial in structure to survive much longer."