assistance in both the Old World and the New. His, however, was a
religious point of view, not the historical or political. It is
very likely that a racial predilection had much to do with his
attitude on the subject, but in his effort to bring religion into
the service of the lyric stage he was no more Jew than Christian:
the stories to which he applied his greatest energies were those of
Moses and Christ.

Much against my inclination (for Rubinstein came into my
intellectual life under circumstances and conditions which made him
the strongest personal influence in music that I have ever felt), I
have been compelled to believe that there were other reasons
besides those which he gave for his championship of Biblical opera.
Smaller men than he, since Wagner's death, have written trilogies
and dreamed of theatres and festivals devoted to performances of
their works. Little wonder if Rubinstein believed that he had
created, or could create, a kind of art-work which should take
place by the side of "Der Ring des Nibelungen," and have its
special home like Bayreuth; and it may have been a belief that his
project would excite the sympathetic zeal of the devout Jew and
pious Christian alike, as much as his lack of the capacity for
self-criticism, which led him like a will-o'-the-wisp along the
path which led into the bogs of failure and disappointment.

While I was engaged in writing the programme book for the music
festival given in New York in 1881, at which "The Tower of Babel"
was performed in a truly magnificent manner, Dr. Leopold Damrosch,
the conductor of the festival, told me that Rubinstein had told him
that the impulse to use Biblical subjects in lyrical dramas had
come to him while witnessing a ballet based on a Bible story many