rved an
arduous apprenticeship to that trade and no other. Wagner was very far
from having attained equal mastery at thirty-five: indeed he himself has
told us that not until he had passed the age at which Mozart died did he
compose with that complete spontaneity of musical expression which can
only be attained by winning entire freedom from all preoccupation with
the difficulties of technical processes. But when that time came, he was
not only a consummate musician, like Mozart, but a dramatic poet and a
critical and philosophical essayist, exercising a considerable influence
on his century. The sign of this consummation was his ability at last to
play with his art, and thus to add to his already famous achievements in
sentimental drama that lighthearted art of comedy of which the greatest
masters, like Moliere and Mozart, are so much rarer than the tragedians
and sentimentalists. It was then that he composed the first two acts of
Siegfried, and later on The Mastersingers, a professedly comedic work,
and a quite Mozartian garden of melody, hardly credible as the work of
the straining artifices of Tanehauser. Only, as no man ever learns to do
one thing by doing something else, however closely allied the two things
may be, Wagner still produced no music independently of his poems. The
overture to The Mastersingers is delightful when you know what it is
all about; but only those to whom it came as a concert piece without any
such clue, and who judged its reckless counterpoint by the standard of
Bach and of Mozart's Magic Flute overture, can realize how atrocious
it used to sound to musicians of the old school. When I first heard it,
with the clear march of the polyphony in Bach's B minor Mass fresh in my
memory, I confess I thought that the parts had got dislocated, and that
some of the band were half a bar behind the others. Perhaps they were;
but now that I am familiar with the work, and with Wagner's harmony, I
can still quite understand certain passages producing that effect organ
admirer of Bach even when performed with perfect accuracy.

THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

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
summi