Old Fogy | Page 4

He is a skilled writer. He has his chamber-music moments,
his lyric outbursts; his early songs are sometimes singable; it is his
perverse, vile orgies of orchestral music that I speak of. No sane man
ever erected such a mad architectural scheme. He should be penned
behind the bars of his own mad music. He has no melody. He loves
ugly noises. He writes to distracting lengths; and, worst of all, his
harmonies are hideous. But he doesn't forget to call his monstrosities
fanciful names. If it isn't Don Juan, it is Don Quixote--have you heard
the latter? [O shades of Mozart!] This giving his so-called compositions
literary titles is the plaster for our broken heads--and ear-drums. So
much for your three favorite latter-day composers.
Now for my Coda! If the art of today has made no progress in fugue,
song, sonata, symphony, quartet, oratorio, opera [who has improved on
Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert? Name! name! I
say], what is the use of talking about "the average of today being
higher"? How higher? You mean more people go to concerts, more

people enjoy music than fifty or a hundred years ago! Do they? I doubt
it. Of what use huge places of worship when the true gods of art are no
longer worshiped? Numbers prove nothing; the majority is not always
in the right. I contend that there has been no great music made since the
death of Beethoven; that the multiplication of orchestras, singing
societies, and concerts are no true sign that genuine culture is being
achieved. The tradition of the classics is lost; we care not for the true
masters. Modern music making is a fashionable fad. People go because
they think they should. There was more real musical feeling, uplifting
and sincere, in the Old St. Thomaskirche in Leipsic where Bach played
than in all your modern symphony and oratorio machine-made concerts.
I'll return to the charge again!
Dussek Villa-on-Wissahickon, Near Manayunk, Pa.

II
OLD FOGY GOES ABROAD
Before I went to Bayreuth I had always believed that some magic spell
rested upon the Franconian hills like a musical benison; some mystery
of art, atmosphere, and individuality evoked by the place, the tradition,
the people. How sadly I was disappointed I propose to tell you,
prefacing all by remarking that in Philadelphia, dear old, dusty
Philadelphia, situated near the confluence of the Delaware and
Schuylkill, I have listened to better representations of the Ring and Die
Meistersinger.
It is just thirty years since I last visited Germany. Before the
Franco-Prussian War there was an air of sweetness, homeliness, an
old-fashioned peace in the land. The swaggering conqueror, the
arrogant Berliner type of all that is unpleasant, modern and insolent
now overruns Germany. The ingenuousness, the naïve quality that
made dear the art of the Fatherland, has disappeared. In its place is
smartness, flippancy, cynicism, unbelief, and the critical faculty
developed to the pathological point. I thought of Schubert, and sighed

in the presence of all this wit and savage humor. Bayreuth is full of
doctrinaires. They eagerly dispute Wagner's meanings, and my
venerable notions of the Ring were not only sneered at, but, to be quite
frank with you, dissipated into thin, metaphysical smoke.
In 1869 I fancied Reinecke a decent composer, Schopenhauer
remarkable, if somewhat bitter in his philosophic attitude towards life.
Reinecke is now a mere ghost of a ghost, a respectable memory of
Leipsic, whilst Schopenhauer has been brutally elbowed out of his
niche by his former follower, Nietzsche. In every café, in every
summer-garden I sought I found groups of young men talking heatedly
about Nietzsche, and the Over-Man, the Uebermensch, to be quite
German. I had, in the innocence of my Wissahickon soul, supposed
Schopenhauer Wagner's favorite philosopher. Mustering up my best
German, somewhat worn from disuse, I gave speech to my views, after
the manner of a garrulous old man who hates to be put on the shelf
before he is quite disabled.
Ach! but I caught it, ach! but I was pulverized and left speechless by
these devotees of the Hammer-philosopher, Nietzsche. I was told that
Wagner was a fairly good musician, although no inventor of themes.
He had evolved no new melodies, but his knowledge of harmony,
above all, his constructive power, were his best recommendations. As
for his abilities as a dramatic poet, absurd! His metaphysics were green
with age, his theories as to the syntheses of the arts silly and
impracticable, while his Schopenhauerism, pessimism, and the rest
sheer dead weights that were slowly but none the less surely strangling
his music. When I asked how this change of heart came about, how all
that I had supposed that went to the making of the Bayreuth theories
was exploded moonshine, I was curtly reminded of Nietzsche.