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.