ting
lengths; and, worst of all, his harmonies are hideous. But he doesn't
forget to call his monstrosities fanciful names. If it isn't _Don Juan_,
it is _Don Quixote_--have you heard the latter? [O shades of Mozart!]
This giving his so-called compositions literary titles is the plaster
for our broken heads--and ear-drums. So much for your three favorite
latter-day composers.

Now for my _Coda_! If the art of today has made no progress in fugue,
song, sonata, symphony, quartet, oratorio, opera [who has improved on
Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert? Name! name! I say],
what is the use of talking about "the average of today being higher"?
How higher? You mean more people go to concerts, more people enjoy music
than fifty or a hundred years ago! Do they? I doubt it. Of what use huge
places of worship when the true gods of art are no longer worshiped?
Numbers prove nothing; the majority is not always in the right. I
contend that there has been no great music made since the death of
Beethoven; that the multiplication of orchestras, singing societies, and
concerts are no true sign that genuine culture is being achieved. The
tradition of the classics is lost; we care not for the true masters.
Modern music making is a fashionable fad. People go because they think
they should. There was more real musical feeling, uplifting and sincere,
in the Old St. Thomaskirche in Leipsic where Bach played than in all
your modern symphony and oratorio machine-made concerts. I'll return to
the charge again!

Dussek Villa-on-Wissahickon,
Near Manayunk, Pa.

II

OLD FOGY GOES ABROAD

Before I went to Bayreuth I had always believed that some magic spell
rested upon the Franconian hills like a musical benison; some mystery of
art, atmosphere, and individuality evoked by the place, the tradition,
the people. How sadly I was disappointed I propose to tell you,
prefacing all by remarking that in Philadelphia, dear old, dusty
Philadelphia, situated near the confluence of the Delaware and
Schuylkill, I have listened to better representations of the _Ring_ and
_Die Meistersinger_.

It is just thirty years since I last visited Germany. Before the
Franco-Prussian War there was an air of sweetness, homeliness, an
old-fashioned peace in the land. The swaggering conqueror, the arrogant
Berliner type of all that is unpleasant, _modern_ and insolent now
overruns Germany. The ingenuousness, the _naive_ quality that made