For him to examine, to arrange,
to classify, to combine, is a necessity. No one is more French in
spirit. He has sometimes been taxed with Wagnerism, and it is true that
he has felt Wagner's influence very strongly. But even when this
influence is most apparent it is only superficial: his true spirit is
remote from Wagner's. You may find in _Fervaal_ a few trees like those
in _Siegfried's_ forest; but the forest itself is not the same; broad
avenues have been cut in it, and daylight fills the caverns of the
Niebelungs.
This love of clearness is the ruling factor of M. d'Indy's artistic
nature. And this is the more remarkable, for his nature is far from
being a simple one. By his wide musical education and his constant
thirst for knowledge he has acquired a very varied and almost
contradictory learning. It must be remembered that M. d'Indy is a
musician familiar with the music of other countries and other times; all
kinds of musical forms are floating in his mind; and he seems sometimes
to hesitate between them. He has arranged these forms into three
principal classes, which seem to him to be models of musical art: the
decorative art of the singers of plain-song, the architectural art of
Palestrina and his followers, and the expressive art of the great
Italians of the seventeenth century.
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