Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

my New York sojourn, and on the other, the complicated petty problems common to anyone’s daily life. ; Less than a week after my return, I became ill with the grippe and have been in bed since. Lying in bed, with little to do but listen to the radio, and think the disturbances on both sides, mentioned above, seemed to magnify, and hedge me about until I felt inhibited and confined, and could see noway (sic) out. Now however, they all seemed to have faded, and do not seemed (sic) important enough to record here.; Perhaps the music I heard over the radio yesterday has done as much as anything to clarify the situation for me. First there came, at three o’clock, the N.Y. Philharmonic concert, which consisted of Weber’s Oberon overture, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, 2nd 4th movements from Dvorak’s 5th a tone-poem by, – “Bataan” and Sousa’s “Stars & Stripes Forever” – I heard the Beethoven Fifth in all its pristine glory again; perhaps it was Rodzinsky’s virile rigged treatment – or perhaps that I was ready for it, at any rate, it had all its epoch-making, elemental grandeur for me again, and I recalled vividly the spring of 1918 when I first hear it. The whole program filled me with fire – the new piece “Bataan” very stirring, and even the “Stars & Stripes Forever” was lifted out of its usual runtime march class.