]
* * * * *
In this sketchy portrait I must not forget one of the finest of this
composer's gifts--his talent as a teacher of music. Everything has
fitted M. d'Indy for this part. By his knowledge and his precise,
orderly mind he must be a perfect teacher of composition. If I submit
some question of harmony or melodic phrasing to his analysis, the result
is the essence of clear, logical reasoning; and if the reasoning is a
little dry and simplifies the thing almost too much, it is still very
illuminating and from the hand of a master of French prose. And in this
I find him exercising the same consistent instinct of good sense and
sincerity, the same art of development, the same seventeenth and
eighteenth century principles of classic rhetoric that he applies to his
music. In truth, M. d'Indy could write a musical _Discourse on Style_,
if he wished.
But, above all, he is gifted with the moral qualities of a teacher--the
vocation for teaching, first of all. He has a firm belief in the
absolute duty of giving instruction in art, and, what is rarer still, in
the efficacious virtue of that teaching.
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