The Nineteenth Century

When Wagner was born in 1813, music had newly become the most
astonishing, the most fascinating, the most miraculous art in
the world. Mozart's Don Giovanni had made all musical Europe
conscious of the enchantments of the modern orchestra and of
the perfect adaptability of music to the subtlest needs of the
dramatist. Beethoven had shown how those inarticulate mood-poems
which surge through men who have, like himself, no exceptional
command of words, can be written down in music as symphonies.
Not that Mozart and Beethoven invented these applications of
their art; but they were the first whose works made it clear that
the dramatic and subjective powers of sound were enthralling
enough to stand by themselves quite apart from the decorative
musical structures of which they had hitherto been a mere feature.
After the finales in Figaro and Don Giovanni, the possibility
of the modern music drama lay bare. After the symphonies of
Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that lies too deep for
words does not lie too deep for music, and that the vicissitudes
of the soul, from the roughest fun to the loftiest aspiration,
can make symphonies without the aid of dance tunes. As much,
perhaps, will be claimed for the preludes and fugues of Bach; but
Bach's method was unattainable: his compositions were wonderful
webs of exquisitely beautiful Gothic traceries in sound, quite
beyond all ordinary human talent. Beethoven's far blunter craft
was thoroughly popular and practicable: not to save his soul
could he have drawn one long Gothic line in sound as Bach could,
much less have woven several of them together with so apt a
harmony that even when the composer is unmoved its progressions
saturate themselves with the emotion which (as modern critics are
a little apt to forget) springs as warmly from our delicately
touched admiration as from our sympathies, and sometimes makes us
give a composer credit for pathetic intentions which he does not
entertain, just as a boy imagines a treasure of tenderness and
noble wisdom in the beauty of a woman. Besides, Bach set comic
dialogue to music exactly as he set the recitatives of the
Passion, there being for him, apparently, only one recitative
possible, and that the musically best. He reserved the expression
of his merry mood for the regular set numbers in which he could
make one of his wonderful contrapuntal traceries of pure ornament
with the requisite gaiety of line and movement. Beethoven bowed
to no ideal of beauty: he only sought the expression for his
feeling. To him a joke was a joke; and if it sounded funny in
music he was satisfied. Until the old habit of judging all music
by its decorative symmetry had worn out, musicians were shocked
by his symphonies, and,