The success of Wagner has been so prodigious that to his dazzled disciples it seems that the age of what he called "absolute music must be at an end, and the musical future destined to be an exclusively Wagnerian one inaugurated at Bayreuth.All great geniuses produce this illusion.Wagner did not begin a movement:
he consummated it.He was the summit of the nineteenth century school of dramatic music in the same sense as Mozart was the summit (the word is Gounod's) of the eighteenth century school.
And those who attempt to carry on his Bayreuth tradition will assuredly share the fate of the forgotten purveyors of second-hand Mozart a hundred years ago.As to the expected supersession of absolute music, it is sufficient to point to the fact that Germany produced two absolute musicians of the first class during Wagner's lifetime: one, the greatly gifted Goetz, who died young; the other, Brahms, whose absolute musical endowment was as extraordinary as his thought was commonplace.
Wagner had for him the contempt of the original thinker for the man of second-hand ideas, and of the strenuously dramatic musician for mere brute musical faculty; but though his contempt was perhaps deserved by the Triumphlieds, and Schicksalslieds, and Elegies and Requiems in which Brahms took his brains so seriously, nobody can listen to Brahms' natural utterance of the richest absolute music, especially in his chamber compositions, without rejoicing in his amazing gift.A reaction to absolute music, starting partly from Brahms, and partly from such revivals of medieval music as those of De Lange in Holland and Mr.Arnold Dolmetsch in England, is both likely and promising; whereas there is no more hope in attempts to out-Wagner Wagner in music drama than there was in the old attempts--or for the matter of that, the new ones--to make Handel the starting point of a great school of oratorio.
