Old Fogy | Page 8

with Wagner tell the
story.
I admit that Die Meistersinger is healthy. Only it is not art. And don't
forget, my children, that Wagner's prettiest lyrics came from Schubert
and Schumann. They have all been traced and located. I need not insult
your intelligence by suggesting that the Wotan motive is to be found in
Schubert's Wanderer. If you wish for the Waldweben just go to Spohr's
Consecration of Tones symphony, first movement. And Weber also
furnishes a pleasing list, notably the Sword motive from the Ring,
which may be heard in Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster. Parsifal I refuse
to discuss. It is an outrage against religion, morals, and music.
However, it is not alone this plagiarizing that makes Wagner so
unendurable to me. It is his continual masking as the greatest composer
of his century, when he was only a clever impostor, a theater-man, a
wearer of borrowed plumage. His influence on music has been
deplorably evil. He has melodramatized the art, introduced in it a
species of false, theatrical, personal feeling, quite foreign to its nature.
The symphony, not the stage, is the objective of musical art.
Wagner--neither composer nor tragedian, but a cunning blend of
both--diverted the art to his own uses. A great force? Yes, a great force
was his, but a dangerous one. He never reached the heights, but was
always posturing behind the foot-lights. And he has left no school, no
descendants. Like all hybrids, he is cursed with sterility. The twentieth
century will find Wagner out. Nunc Dimittis!

IV
IN MOZARTLAND WITH OLD FOGY

The greatest musician the world has yet known--Mozart. The greatest?
Yes, the greatest; greater than Bach, because less studied, less artificial,
professional, and doctrinaire; greater than Beethoven, because Mozart's
was a blither, a more serene spirit, and a spirit whose eyes had been
anointed by beauty. Beethoven is not beautiful. He is dramatic,
powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tempests; but his speech is
the speech of a self-centered egotist. He is the father of all the modern
melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, write what they see
therein--misery, corruption, slighting selfishness, and ugliness.
Beethoven, I say, was too near Mozart not to absorb some of his sanity,
his sense of proportion, his glad outlook upon life; but the dissatisfied
peasant in the composer of the Eroica, always in revolt, would not
allow him tranquillity. Now is the fashion for soul hurricanes, these
confessions of impotent wrath in music.
Beethoven began this fashion; Mozart did not. Beethoven had himself
eternally in view when he wrote. His music mirrors his wretched,
though profound, soul; it also mirrors many weaknesses. I always
remember Beethoven and Goethe standing side by side as some royal
nobody--I forget the name--went by. Goethe doffed his bonnet and
stood uncovered, head becomingly bowed. Beethoven folded his arms
and made no obeisance. This anecdote, not an apochryphal one, is
always hailed as an evidence of Beethoven's sturdiness of character, his
rank republicanism, while Goethe is slightly sniffed at for his
snobbishness. Yet he was only behaving as a gentleman should. If
Mozart had been in Beethoven's place, how courtly would have been
the bow of the little, graceful Austrian composer! No, Beethoven was a
boor, a clumsy one, and this quality abides in his music--for music is
always the man. Put Beethoven in America in the present time and he
would have developed into a dangerous anarchist. Such a nature
matures rapidly, and a century might have marked the evolution from a
despiser of kings to a hater of all forms of restrictive government. But
I'm getting in too deep, even for myself, and also far away from my
original theme.
Suffice to say that Bach is pedantic when compared to Mozart, and
Beethoven unbeautiful. Some day, and there are portents on the musical

horizon, some day, I repeat, the reign of beauty in art will reassert its
sway. Too long has Ugly been king, too long have we listened with
half-cracked ear-drums to the noises of half-cracked men. Already the
new generation is returning to Mozart--that is, to music for music's
sake--to the Beautiful.
I went to Salzburg deliberately. I needed a sight of the place, a glimpse
of its romantic surroundings, to still my old pulse jangled out of tune by
the horrors of Bayreuth. Yes, the truth must out, I went to Bayreuth at
the express suggestion of my grandson, Old Fogy 3d, a rip-roaring
young blade who writes for a daily paper in your city. What he writes I
know not. I only hope he lets music alone. He is supposed to be an
authority on foot-ball and Russian caviar; his knowledge of the latter he
acquired, so he says, in the great Thirst Belt of the United States. I
sincerely