Musical Portraits | Page 6

adults who went to assist at these things of which
one read, who departed in state and excitement of an evening to attend
performances of "Die Walküre" and "Tristan und Isolde," and who
spoke of these experiences in voices and manners different from those
in which they spoke, say, of the theater or the concert. And there were
magnificent and stately and passionate pieces that drew their way
across the pianoforte, that seized upon one and made one insatiable for
them. Long before we had actually entered the opera house and heard
one of Wagner's works in its entirety, we belonged to him and knew his
art our own. We were born Wagnerians.
But of late a great adventure has befallen us. What once seemed the
remotest of possibilities has actually taken place. We who were born
and grew under the sign of Wagner have witnessed the twilight of the
god. He has receded from us. He has departed from us into the relative
distance into which during his hour of omnipotence he banished all
other composers.
He has been displaced. A new music has come into being, and drawn
near. Forms as solid and wondrous and compelling as his are about us.
Little by little, during the last years, so gradually that it has been almost
unbeknown to us, our relationship to him has been changing.
Something within us has moved. Other musicians have been working
their way in upon our attention. Other works have come to seem as
vivid and deep of hue, as wondrous and compelling as his once did.
Gradually the musical firmament has been reconstellating itself. For
long, we were unaware of the change, thought ourselves still opposite
Wagner, thought the rays of his genius still as direct upon us as ever
they were. But of late so wide has the distance become that we have
awakened sharply to the change. Of a sudden, we seem to ourselves

like travelers who, having boarded by night a liner fast to her pier and
fallen asleep amid familiar objects, beneath the well-known beacons
and towers of the port, waken suddenly in broadest daylight scarcely
aware the vessel has been gotten under way, and find the scene
completely transformed, find themselves out on ocean and glimpse,
dwindling behind them, the harbor and the city in which apparently but
a moment since they had lain enclosed.
It is the maturing of a generation that has produced the change. For
each generation the works of art produced by its members have a
distinct importance. Out of them, during their time, there sparks the
creative impulse. For every generation is something of a unit.
"Chaque génération d'hommes Germant du champs maternal en sa
saison, Garde en elle un secret commun, un certain noeud dans la
profonde contexture de son bois,"
Claudel assures us through the mask of Tête d'Or. And the
resemblances between works produced independently of each other
within the space of a few years, generally so much greater than those
that exist between any one work of one age and any of another, bears
him out. The styles of Palestrina and Vittoria, which are obviously
dissimilar, are nevertheless more alike than those of Palestrina and
Bach, Vittoria and Haendel; just as those of Bach and Haendel,
dissimilar as they are, have a greater similarity than that which exists
between those of Bach and Mozart, of Haendel and Haydn. And so, for
the men of a single period the work produced during their time is a
powerful encouragement to self-realization, to the espousal of their
destiny, to the fulfilment of their life. For the motion of one part of a
machine stirs all the others. And there is a part of every man of a
generation in the work done by the other members of it. The men who
fashion the art of one's own time make one's proper experiment, start
from one's own point of departure, dare to be themselves and oneself in
the face of the gainsaying of the other epochs. They are so belittling, so
condescending, so nay-saying and deterring, the other times and their
masterpieces! They are so unsympathetic, so strange and grand and
remote! They seem to say "Thus must it be; this is form; this is beauty;

all else is superfluous." Who goes to them for help and understanding is
like one who goes to men much older, men of different habits and
sympathies, in order to explain himself, and finds himself disconcerted
and diminished instead, glimpses a secret jealousy and resentment
beneath the mask. But the adventure of encountering the artist of one's
own time is that of finding the most marvelous of aids, corroboration. It
is to meet one who has been living one's life, and thinking one's
thoughts, and facing one's problems. It