Musical Portraits | Page 7

is to get reassurance, to accept
oneself, to beget courage to express one's self in one's own manner.
And we of our generation have finally found the music that is so
creatively infecting for us. We have found the music of the
post-Wagnerian epoch. It is our music. For we are the offspring of the
generation that assimilated Wagner. We, too, are the reaction from
Wagner. Through the discovery we have come to learn that music can
give us sensations different than those given us by Wagner's. We have
learned what it is to have music say to us, "It is thus, after all, that you
feel." We have finally come to recognize that we require of music
forms, proportions, accents different from Wagner's; orchestral
movement, color, rhythms, not in his. We have learned that we want an
altogether different stirring of the musical caldron. A song of
Moussorgsky's or Ravel's, a few measures of "Pelléas" or "Le Sacre du
printemps," a single fine moment in a sonata of Scriabine's, or a quartet
or suite of Bloch's, give us a joy, an illumination, a satisfaction that
little of the older music can equal. For our own moment of action is
finally at hand.
So Wagner has retreated and joined the company of composers who
express another day than our own. The sovereignty that was in him has
passed to other men. We regard him at present as the men of his own
time might have regarded Beethoven and Weber. Still, he will always
remain the one of all the company of the masters closest to us. No
doubt he is not the greatest of the artists who have made music.
Colossal as were his forces, colossal as were the struggles he made for
the assumption of his art, his musical powers were not always able to
cope with the tasks he set himself. The unflagging inventive power of a
Bach or a Haydn, the robustness of a Haendel or a Beethoven, the

harmonious personality of a Mozart, were things he could not rival. He
is even inferior, in the matter of style, to men like Weber and Debussy.
There are many moments, one finds, when his scores show that there
was nothing in his mind, and that he simply went through the routine of
composition. Too often he permitted the system of leading-motifs to
relieve him of the necessity of creating. Too often, he made of his art a
purely mental game. His emotion, his creative genius were far more
intermittent, his breath far less long than one once imagined. Some of
the earlier works have commenced to fade rapidly, irretrievably. At
present one wonders how it is possible that one once sat entranced
through performances of "The Flying Dutchman" and "Tannhäuser."
"Lohengrin" begins to seem a little brutal, strangely Prussian lieutenant
with its militaristic trumpets, its abuse of the brass. One finds oneself
choosing even among the acts of "Tristan und Isolde," finding the first
far inferior to the poignant, magnificent third. Sometimes, one glimpses
a little too long behind his work not the heroic agonist, but the man
who loved to languish in mournful salons, attired in furred dressing
gowns.
Indeed, if Wagner seems great it is chiefly as one of the most delicate
of musicians. It is the lightness of his brush stroke that makes us marvel
at the third act of "Tristan," the first scene of the "Walküre." It is the
delicacy of his fancy, the lilac fragrance pervading his inventions, that
enchants us in the second act of "Die Meistersinger." Through the score
of "Parsifal" there seem to pass angelic forms and wings dainty and
fragile and silver-shod as those of Beardsley's "Morte d'Arthur."
But the debt we owe him will always give him a vast importance in our
eyes. The men of to-day, all of them, stand directly on his shoulders. It
is doubtful whether any of us, the passive public, would be here to-day
as we are, were it not for his music.

Strauss
Strauss was never the fine, the perfect artist. Even in the first flare of
youth, even at the time when he was the meteoric, dazzling figure

flaunting over all the baldpates of the universe the standard of the
musical future, it was apparent that there were serious flaws in his spirit.
Despite the audacity with which he realized his amazing and poignant
and ironic visions, despite his youthful fire and exuberance--and it was
as something of a golden youth of music that Strauss burst upon the
world--one sensed in him the not quite beautifully deepened man, heard
at moments a callow accent in his eloquence, felt that an unmistakable
alloy was fused with the generous gold. The purity, the inwardness, the
searchings of the heart, the religious sentiment of beauty,