Wagner's music, more than any other, is the sign and symbol of the
nineteenth century. The men to whom it was disclosed, and who first
sought to refuse, and then accepted it, passionately, without
reservations, found in it their truth. It came to their ears as the
sound of their own voices. It was the common, the universal tongue. Not
alone on Germany, not alone on Europe, but on every quarter of the globe
that had developed coal-power civilization, the music of Wagner
descended with the formative might of the perfect image. Men of every
race and continent knew it to be of themselves as much as was their
hereditary and racial music, and went out to it as to their own
adventure. And wherever music reappeared, whether under the hand of the
Japanese or the semi-African or the Yankee, it seemed to be growing from
Wagner as the bright shoots of the fir sprout from the dark ones grown
the previous year. A whole world, for a period, came to use his idiom.
His dream was recognized during his very lifetime as an integral portion
of the consciousness of the entire race.
For Wagner's music is the century's paean of material triumph. It is its
cry of pride in its possessions, its aspiration toward greater and ever
greater objective power. Wagner's style is stiff and diapered and
emblazoned with the sense of material increase. It is brave, superb,
haughty with consciousness of the gigantic new body acquired by man. The
tonal pomp and ceremony, the pride of the trumpets, the arrogant stride,
the magnificent address, the broad, vehement, grandiloquent
pronouncements, the sumptuous texture of his music seems forever
proclaiming the victory of man over the energies of fire and sea and
earth, the lordship of creation, the suddenly begotten railways and
shipping and mines, the cataclysm of wealth and comfort. His work seems
forever seeking to form images of grandeur and empire, flashing with
Siegfried's sword, commanding the planet with Wotan's spear, upbuilding
above the heads of men the castle of the gods. It dares measure itself
with the terrestrial forces, exults in the fire, soughs through the
forest with the thunderstorm, glitters and surges with the river, spans
mountains with the rainbow bridge. It is full of the gestures of giants
and heroes and gods, of the large proud movements of which men have ever
dreamed in days of affluent power. Even "Tristan und Isolde," the high
song of love, and "Parsifal," the mystery, spread richness and splendor
about them, are set in an atmosphere of heavy gorgeous stuffs, amid
objects of gold and silver, and thick clouding incense, while the
protagonists, the lovers and saviors, seem to be celebrating a worldly
triumph, and crowning themselves kings. And over the entire body of
Wagner's music, there float, a massive diadem, the towers and parapets
and banners of Nuremberg the imperial free city, monument of a
victorious burgherdom, of civic virtue that on the ruins of feudalism
constructed its own world, and demonstrated to all times its dignity and
sobriety and industry, its solid worth.
For life itself made the Wagnerian gesture. The vortex of steel and
glass and gold, the black express-packets plowing the seven seas, the
smoking trains piercing the bowels of the mountains and connecting
cities vibrant with hordes of business men, the telegraph wires setting
the world aquiver with their incessant reports, the whole sinister
glittering faëry of gain and industry and dominion, seemed to tread and
soar and sound and blare and swell with just such rhythm, such grandeur,
such intoxication. Mountains that had been sealed thousands of years had
split open again and let emerge a race of laboring, fuming giants. The
dense primeval forests, the dragon-haunted German forests, were sprung
up again, fresh and cool and unexplored, nurturing a mighty and
fantastic animality. Wherever one gazed, the horned Siegfried, the man
born of the earth, seemed near once more, ready to clear and rejuvenate
the globe with his healthy instinct, to shatter the old false barriers
and pierce upward to fulfilment and power. Mankind, waking from
immemorial sleep, thought for the first time to perceive the sun in
heaven, to greet the creating light. And where was this music more
immanent than in the New World, in America, that essentialization of the
entire age? By what environment was it more justly appreciated, Saxon
though the accents of its recitative might be? Germany had borne Wagner
because Germany had an uninterrupted flow of musical expression. But had
the North American continent been able to produce musical art, it could
have produced none more indigenous, more really autochthonous, than that
of Richard Wagner. Whitman was right when he termed these scores "the
music of the 'Leaves.'" For nowhere did the forest of the Niebelungen
flourish more lushly, more darkly, than upon the American coasts and
mountains and plains. From the towers and walls of New York there fell a
breath, a grandiloquent language, a stridency and a glory, that were
Wagner's indeed. His regal commanding blasts, his upsweeping marching
violins, his pompous and majestic orchestra, existed in the American
scene. The very masonry and river-spans, the bursting towns, the fury
and expansiveness of existence shed his idiom, shadowed forth his proud
processionals, his resonant gold, his tumultuous syncopations and
blazing brass and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody; appeared
to be struggling to achieve the thing that was his art. American life
seemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, its
madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its
loud, grandiose promise might attain something like eternal being.
And just as in Wagner's music there sounds the age's cry of material
triumph, so, too, there sounds in it its terrible cry of homesickness.
The energy produced and hurled out over the globe was sucked back again
with no less a force. The time that saw the victory of industrialism saw
as well the revival or the attempted revival of medieval modes of
feeling. Cardinal Newman was as typical a figure of nineteenth-century
life as was Balzac. The men who had created the new world felt within
themselves a passionate desire to escape out of the present into the
past once more. They felt themselves victors and vanquished, powerful
and yet bereft and forlorn. And Wagner's music expresses with equal
veracity both tides. Just as his music is brave with a sense of outward
power, so, too, it is sick with a sense of inner unfulfilment. There is
no longing more consuming, no homesickness more terrible, no straining
after the laving, immersing floods of unconsciousness more burning than
that which utters itself through this music. There are passages, whole
hours of his, that are like the straining of a man to return into the
darkness of the mothering night out of which he came. There is music of
Wagner that makes us feel as though he had been seeking to create great
warm clouds, great scented cloths, wide curtains, as though he had come
to his art to find something in which he could envelop himself
completely, and blot out sun and moon and stars, and sink into oblivion.
For such a healer Tristan, lying dying on the desolate, rockbound coast,
cries through the immortal longing of the music. For such a divine
messenger the wound of Amfortas gapes; for such a redeemer Kundry,
driven through the world by scorching winds, yearns. His lovers come
toward each other, seeking in each other the night, the descent into the
fathomless dark. For them sex is the return, the complete forgetfulness.
Through each of them there sounds the insistent cry:
"Frau Minne will
Es werde Nacht!"
There is no tenderness, no awareness of each other, in these men and
women. There is only the fierce, impersonal longing for utter
consumption, the extinction of the flaming torch, complete merging in
the Absolute, the weaving All. In each of them, desire for the void
mounts into a gigantic, monstrous flower, into the shimmering thing that
enchants King Mark's garden and the rippling stream and the distant
horns while Isolde waits for Tristan, or into the devastating fever that
chains the sick Tristan to his bed of pain.
For all these beings, and behind them Wagner, and behind him his time,
yearn for the past, the pre-natal, the original sleep, and find in such
a return their great fulfilment. Siegmund finds in the traits of his
beloved his own childhood. Siegfried awakes on the flame-engirdled hill
a woman who watched over him before he was born, and waited unchanged
for his ripening. It is with the kiss of Herzeleide that Kundry enmeshes
Parsifal. Brunhilde struggles for the forgiving embrace of Wotan, sinks
on the breast of the god in submission, reconciliation, immolation. And
it is towards an engulfing consummation, some extinction that is both
love and death and deeper than both, that the music of his operas
aspires. The fire that licks the rock of the Walkyrie, the Rhine that
rises in the finale of "Götterdämmerung" and inundates the scene and
sweeps the world with its silent, laving tides, the gigantic blossom
that opens its corolla in the Liebestod and buries the lovers in a rain
of scent and petals, the tranquil ruby glow of the chalice that suffuses
the close of "Parsifal," are the moments toward which the dramas
themselves labor, and in which they attain their legitimate conclusion,
completion and end. But not only his finales are full of that
entrancement. His melodic line, the lyrical passages throughout his
operas, seem to seek to attain it, if not conclusively, at least in
preparation. Those silken excessively sweet periods, the moment of
reconciliation and embrace of Wotan and Brunhilde, the "Ach, Isolde"
passage in the third act of "Tristan," those innumerable lyrical flights
with their beginnings and subsidings, their sudden advances and
regressions, their passionate surges that finally and after all their
exquisite hesitations mount and flare and unroll themselves in
fullness--they, too, seem to be seeking to distill some of the same
brew, the same magic drugging potion, to conjure up out of the
orchestral depths some Venusberg, some Klingsor's garden full of subtle
scent and soft delight and eternal forgetfulness.
And with Wagner, the new period of music begins. He stands midway
between the feudal and the modern worlds. In him, the old and classical
period is accomplished. Indeed, so much of his music is sum, is
termination, that there are times when it seems nothing else. There are
times when his art appears entirely bowed over the past; the confluence
of a dozen different tendencies alive during the last century and a
half; the capping of the labor of a dozen great musicians; the
fulfilment of the system regnant in Europe since the introduction of the
principle of the equal temperament. For the last time, the old
conceptions of tonality obtain in his music dramas. One feels throughout
"Tristan und Isolde" the key of D-flat, throughout "Die Meistersinger"
the key of C-major, throughout "Parsifal" the key of A-flat and its
relative minor. Rhythms that had been used all through the classical
period are worked by him into new patterns, and do service a last time.
Motifs which had been utilized by others are taken by him and brought to
something like an ultimate conclusion. The ending, the conclusion, the
completion, are sensible throughout his art. Few musicians have had
their power and method placed more directly in their hands, and
benefited so hugely by the experiments of their immediate predecessors,
have fallen heir to such immense musical legacies. Indeed, Wagner was
never loath to acknowledge his indebtedness, and there are on record
several instances when he paraphrased Walther's song to his masters, and
signaled the composers who had aided him most in his development.
To-day, the debt is very plain. At every turn, one sees him benefiting,
and benefiting very beautifully, by the work of Beethoven. The structure
of his great and characteristic works is based on the symphonic form.
The development of the themes of "Tristan" and "Die Meistersinger" and
"Parsifal" out of single kernels; the fine logical sequence, the
expositions of the thematic material of "Parsifal" in the prelude and in
Gurnamanz's narrative, and its subsequent reappearance and adventures
and developments, are something like a summit of symphonic art as
Beethoven made it to be understood. And his orchestra is scarcely more
than the orchestra of Beethoven. He did not require the band of
independent instrumental families demanded by Berlioz and realized by
the modern men. He was content with the old, classical orchestra in
which certain groups are strengthened and to which the harp, the English
horn, the bass-tuba, the bass-clarinet have been added.
And his conception of an "unending melody," an unbroken flow of music
intended to give cohesion and homogeneity to his music-dramas, was a
direct consequence of the efforts of Mozart and Weber to give unity to
their operatic works. For although these composers retained the old
convention of an opera composed of separate numbers, they nevertheless
managed to unify their operas by creating a distinct style in each of
them, and by securing an emotional development in the various arias and
concerted numbers. The step from "Don Giovanni" and "Euryanthe" to
"Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin" does not seem quite as long a one to-day as
once it did. Indeed, there are moments when one wonders whether
"Lohengrin" is really a step beyond "Euryanthe," and whether the
increase of power and vividness and imagination has not been made at the
expense of style. Moreover, in much of what is actually progress in
Wagner the influence of Weber is clearly discernible. The sinister
passages seem but developments of moments in "Der Freischütz"; the grand
melodic style, the romantic orchestra with its sighing horns and
chivalry and flourishes, seem to come directly out of "Euryanthe"; the
orchestral scene-painting from the sunrise and other original effects in
"Oberon."
Even Meyerbeer taught Wagner something more than the use of certain
instruments, the bass-clarinet, for instance. The old operatic
speculator indubitably was responsible for Wagner's grand demands upon
the scene-painter and the stage-carpenter. His pompous spectacles fired
the younger man not only with "Rienzi." They indubitably gave him the
courage to create an operatic art that celebrated the new gold and power
and magnificence, and was Grand Opera indeed. If the works of the one
were sham, and those of the other poetry, it was only that Wagner
realized what the other sought vainly all his life to attain, and was
prevented by the stock-broker within.
And Chopin's harmonic feeling as well as Berlioz's orchestral wizardry
played a rôle in Wagner's artistic education. But for all his
incalculable indebtednesses, Wagner is the great initiator, the
compeller of the modern period. It is not only because he summarized the
old. It is because he began with force a revolution. In expressing the
man of the nineteenth century, he discarded the old major-minor system
that had dominated Europe so long. That system was the outcome of a
conception of the universe which set man apart from the remainder of
nature, placed him in a category of his own, and pretended that he was
both the center and the object of creation. For it called man the
consonance and nature the dissonance. The octave and the fifth, the
bases of the system, are of course, to be found only in the human voice.
They are, roughly, the difference between the average male and the
average female voice, and the difference between the average soprano and
alto. It is upon those intervals that the C-major scale and its
twenty-three dependents are based. But with the coming of a conception
that no longer separated man from the rest of creation, and placed him
in it as a small part of it, brother to the animals and plants, to
everything that breathes, the old scale could no longer completely
express him. The modulations of the noises of wind and water, the
infinite gradations and complexes of sound to be heard on the
planisphere, seemed to ask him to include them, to become conscious of
them and reproduce them. He required other more subtle scales. And with
Wagner the monarchy of the C-major scale is at an end. "Tristan und
Isolde" and "Parsifal" are constructed upon a chromatic scale. The old
one has had to lose its privilege, to resign itself to becoming simply
one of a constantly growing many. If this step is not a colossal one, it
is still of immense importance. The musical worthies who ran about
wringing their hands after the first performance of each of Wagner's
works, and lamented laws monstrously broken, and traditions shattered,
were, for once, right. They gauged correctly from which direction the
wind was blowing. They probably heard, faintly piping in the distance,
the pentatonic scales of Moussorgsky and Debussy, the scales of
Scriabine and Strawinsky and Ornstein, the barbarous, exotic and African
scales of the future, the one hundred and thirteen scales of which
Busoni speaks. And to-day there are no longer musical rules, forbidden
harmonies, dissonances. Siegfried has broken them along with Wotan's
spear. East and West are near to merging once again. No doubt, had there
been no Wagner, the change would have arrived nevertheless. However, it
would have arrived more slowly. For what he did accomplish was the rapid
emptying of the old wine that still remained in the wineskin, the
preparation of the receptacle for the new vintage. He forced the new to
put in immediate appearance.
The full impact of these reforms, the full might of Wagner, we of our
generation doubtlessly never felt. They could have been felt only by the
generation to whom Wagner first disclosed himself, the generation that
attained maturity between 1850 and 1880. It was upon the men of those
days that he did his full work of destruction and revival. It was in
them he battered down walls. It was them he made to hear afresh, to
stretch and grow in the effort to comprehend him. At the moment we
encountered Wagner, his work was already something of a closed
experience, something we were able to accept readily and with a certain
ease because it had been accepted and assimilated by an entire world,
and become part of the human organism. Its power was already slightly
diminished. For instance, Wagner the musician was no longer able to make
either Wagner the poet or Wagner the philosopher exist for us as they
existed for the men of the earlier generation. Only Houston Stewart
Chamberlain still persisted in trying to stand upon the burning deck
whence all the rest had fled. For us, it was obvious that if Wagner's
work throned mightily it was because of his music, and oftentimes in
spite of his verse and his doctrine. For us, it was a commonplace that
dramatic movement and the filling up of scenes by the introduction of
characters who propose pointless riddles to one another and explain at
length what their names are not, are incompatible; that poetry does not
consist in disguising commonplace expressions in archaic and
alliterative and extravagant dress; that Wotan displays no grasp of the
essentials of Schopenhauer's philosophy when he insists on dubbing
Brunhilde his Will.
And yet, whatever the difference, most of Wagner's might was still in
him when first we came to know his music. The spell in which he had
bound the generation that preceded ours was still powerful. For us,
too, there occurred the moments when Siegfried's cavernous forest depths
first breathed on us, when for the first time "Die Meistersinger"
flaunted above the heads of all the world the gonfalon of art, when for
the first time we embarked upon the shoreless golden sea of "Tristan und
Isolde." For us, too, the name of Richard Wagner rang and sounded above
all other musical names. For us, too, he was a sort of sovereign lord of
music. His work appeared the climax toward which music had aspired
through centuries, and from which it must of necessity descend again.
Other, and perhaps purer work than his, existed, we knew. But it seemed
remote and less compelling, for all its perfection. New music would
arrive, we surmised. Yet we found ourselves convinced that it would
prove minor and unsatisfactory. For Wagner's music had for us an
incandescence which no other possessed. It was the magnetic spot of
music. Its colors blazed and glowed with a depth and ardor that seemed
to set it apart from other music as in an enchanted circle. It unlocked
us as did no other. We demanded just such orchestral movement, just such
superb gestures, just such warm, immersing floods, and were fulfilled by
them. That there would come a day when the magnetism which it exerted on
us would pass from it, and be seen to have passed, seemed the remotest
of possibilities.
For we accepted him with the world of our minority. For each individual
there is a period, varying largely in extent, during which his existence
is chiefly a process of imitation. In the sphere of expression, that
submission to authority extends well over the entire period of
gestation, well into the time of physical maturity. There are few men,
few great artists, even, who do not, before attaining their proper idiom
and gesture, adopt those of their teachers and predecessors. Shakespeare
writes first in the style of Kyd and Marlowe, Beethoven in that of Haydn
and Mozart; Leonardo at first imitates Verrocchio. And what the
utilization of the manner of their predecessors is to the artist, that
the single devotion to Wagner was to us. For he was not only in the
atmosphere, not only immanent in the lives led about us. His figure was
vivid before us. Scarcely another artistic personality was as largely
upon us. There were pictures, on the walls of music-rooms, of
gray-bearded, helmeted warriors holding mailed blonde women in their
arms, of queens with golden ornaments on their arms leaning over
parapets and agitating their scarves, of women throwing themselves into
the sea upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish men and young
girls conversing teasingly through a window by a lilac-bush, that were
Wagner. There were books with stories of magical swans and hordes of
gold and baleful curses, of phantasmal storm ships and hollow hills and
swords lodged in tree-trunks awaiting their wielders, of races of gods
and giants and grimy dwarfs, of guardian fires and potions of
forgetfulness and prophetic dreams and voices, that were Wagner. There
were adults who went to assist at these things of which one read, who
departed in state and excitement of an evening to attend performances of
"Die Walküre" and "Tristan und Isolde," and who spoke of these
experiences in voices and manners different from those in which they
spoke, say, of the theater or the concert. And there were magnificent
and stately and passionate pieces that drew their way across the
pianoforte, that seized upon one and made one insatiable for them. Long
before we had actually entered the opera house and heard one of Wagner's
works in its entirety, we belonged to him and knew his art our own. We
were born Wagnerians.
But of late a great adventure has befallen us. What once seemed the
remotest of possibilities has actually taken place. We who were born and
grew under the sign of Wagner have witnessed the twilight of the god. He
has receded from us. He has departed from us into the relative distance
into which during his hour of omnipotence he banished all other
composers.
He has been displaced. A new music has come into being, and drawn near.
Forms as solid and wondrous and compelling as his are about us. Little
by little, during the last years, so gradually that it has been almost
unbeknown to us, our relationship to him has been changing. Something
within us has moved. Other musicians have been working their way in upon
our attention. Other works have come to seem as vivid and deep of hue,
as wondrous and compelling as his once did. Gradually the musical
firmament has been reconstellating itself. For long, we were unaware of
the change, thought ourselves still opposite Wagner, thought the rays of
his genius still as direct upon us as ever they were. But of late so
wide has the distance become that we have awakened sharply to the
change. Of a sudden, we seem to ourselves like travelers who, having
boarded by night a liner fast to her pier and fallen asleep amid
familiar objects, beneath the well-known beacons and towers of the port,
waken suddenly in broadest daylight scarcely aware the vessel has been
gotten under way, and find the scene completely transformed, find
themselves out on ocean and glimpse, dwindling behind them, the harbor
and the city in which apparently but a moment since they had lain
enclosed.
It is the maturing of a generation that has produced the change. For
each generation the works of art produced by its members have a distinct
importance. Out of them, during their time, there sparks the creative
impulse. For every generation is something of a unit.
"Chaque génération d'hommes
Germant du champs maternal en sa saison,
Garde en elle un secret commun, un certain noeud
dans la profonde contexture de son bois,"
Claudel assures us through the mask of Tête d'Or. And the resemblances
between works produced independently of each other within the space of a
few years, generally so much greater than those that exist between any
one work of one age and any of another, bears him out. The styles of
Palestrina and Vittoria, which are obviously dissimilar, are
nevertheless more alike than those of Palestrina and Bach, Vittoria and
Haendel; just as those of Bach and Haendel, dissimilar as they are, have
a greater similarity than that which exists between those of Bach and
Mozart, of Haendel and Haydn. And so, for the men of a single period the
work produced during their time is a powerful encouragement to
self-realization, to the espousal of their destiny, to the fulfilment of
their life. For the motion of one part of a machine stirs all the
others. And there is a part of every man of a generation in the work
done by the other members of it. The men who fashion the art of one's
own time make one's proper experiment, start from one's own point of
departure, dare to be themselves and oneself in the face of the
gainsaying of the other epochs. They are so belittling, so
condescending, so nay-saying and deterring, the other times and their
masterpieces! They are so unsympathetic, so strange and grand and
remote! They seem to say "Thus must it be; this is form; this is beauty;
all else is superfluous." Who goes to them for help and understanding is
like one who goes to men much older, men of different habits and
sympathies, in order to explain himself, and finds himself disconcerted
and diminished instead, glimpses a secret jealousy and resentment
beneath the mask. But the adventure of encountering the artist of one's
own time is that of finding the most marvelous of aids, corroboration.
It is to meet one who has been living one's life, and thinking one's
thoughts, and facing one's problems. It is to get reassurance, to accept
oneself, to beget courage to express one's self in one's own manner.
And we of our generation have finally found the music that is so
creatively infecting for us. We have found the music of the
post-Wagnerian epoch. It is our music. For we are the offspring of the
generation that assimilated Wagner. We, too, are the reaction from
Wagner. Through the discovery we have come to learn that music can give
us sensations different than those given us by Wagner's. We have learned
what it is to have music say to us, "It is thus, after all, that you
feel." We have finally come to recognize that we require of music forms,
proportions, accents different from Wagner's; orchestral movement,
color, rhythms, not in his. We have learned that we want an altogether
different stirring of the musical caldron. A song of Moussorgsky's or
Ravel's, a few measures of "Pelléas" or "Le Sacre du printemps," a
single fine moment in a sonata of Scriabine's, or a quartet or suite of
Bloch's, give us a joy, an illumination, a satisfaction that little of
the older music can equal. For our own moment of action is finally at
hand.
So Wagner has retreated and joined the company of composers who express
another day than our own. The sovereignty that was in him has passed to
other men. We regard him at present as the men of his own time might
have regarded Beethoven and Weber. Still, he will always remain the one
of all the company of the masters closest to us. No doubt he is not the
greatest of the artists who have made music. Colossal as were his
forces, colossal as were the struggles he made for the assumption of his
art, his musical powers were not always able to cope with the tasks he
set himself. The unflagging inventive power of a Bach or a Haydn, the
robustness of a Haendel or a Beethoven, the harmonious personality of a
Mozart, were things he could not rival. He is even inferior, in the
matter of style, to men like Weber and Debussy. There are many moments,
one finds, when his scores show that there was nothing in his mind, and
that he simply went through the routine of composition. Too often he
permitted the system of leading-motifs to relieve him of the necessity
of creating. Too often, he made of his art a purely mental game. His
emotion, his creative genius were far more intermittent, his breath far
less long than one once imagined. Some of the earlier works have
commenced to fade rapidly, irretrievably. At present one wonders how it
is possible that one once sat entranced through performances of "The
Flying Dutchman" and "Tannhäuser." "Lohengrin" begins to seem a little
brutal, strangely Prussian lieutenant with its militaristic trumpets,
its abuse of the brass. One finds oneself choosing even among the acts
of "Tristan und Isolde," finding the first far inferior to the poignant,
magnificent third. Sometimes, one glimpses a little too long behind his
work not the heroic agonist, but the man who loved to languish in
mournful salons, attired in furred dressing gowns.
Indeed, if Wagner seems great it is chiefly as one of the most delicate
of musicians. It is the lightness of his brush stroke that makes us
marvel at the third act of "Tristan," the first scene of the "Walküre."
It is the delicacy of his fancy, the lilac fragrance pervading his
inventions, that enchants us in the second act of "Die Meistersinger."
Through the score of "Parsifal" there seem to pass angelic forms and
wings dainty and fragile and silver-shod as those of Beardsley's "Morte
d'Arthur."
But the debt we owe him will always give him a vast importance in our
eyes. The men of to-day, all of them, stand directly on his shoulders.
It is doubtful whether any of us, the passive public, would be here
to-day as we are, were it not for his music.