t 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.

BAYREUTH

When the Bayreuth Festival Playhouse was at last completed, and opened
in 1876 with the first performance of The Ring, European society was
compelled to admit that Wagner was "a success." Royal personages,
detesting his music, sat out the performances in the row of boxes set
apart for princes. They all complimented him on the astonishing "push"
with which, in the teeth of all obstacles, he had turned a fabulous and
visionary project into a concrete commercial reality, patronized by
the public at a pound a head. It is as well to know that these
congratulations had no other effect upon Wagner than to open his eyes
to the fact that the Bayreuth experiment, as an attempt to evade the
ordinary social and commercial conditions of theatrical enterprise,
was a failure. His own account of it contrasts the reality with his
intentions in a vein which would be bitter if it were not so humorous.
The