s: mediocrity is mankind in the normal, and
normal man demands of art what he can read without running, hear
without thinking. Every century produces artists who are forgotten in
a generation, though they fill the eye and the ear for a time with
their clever production. This has led to another general idea, that of
transition, of intermediate types. After critical perspective has been
attained, it may be seen that the majority of composers fall into this
category not a consoling notion, but an unavoidable. Richard Wagner
has his epigones; the same is the case with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven.
Mendelssohn was a delightful feminine variation on Bach, and after
Schumann came Brahms.

The Wagner-Liszt tradition of music-drama, so-called, and the
symphonic poem have been continued with personal modifications by
Richard Strauss; Max Reger has pinned his faith to Brahms and absolute
music, though not without a marked individual variation. In
considering his Sinfonietta, the Serenade, the Hiller Variations, the
Prologue to a Tragedy, the Lustspiel Overture, the two concertos
respectively for pianoforte and violin, we are struck not as much by
the easy handling of old forms, as by the stark emotional content of
these compositions. Reger began as a Brahmsianer, but he has not thus
far succeeded in fusing form and theme as wonderfully as did his
master. There is a Dionysian strain in his music that too often is in
jarring discord with the intellectual structure of his work. But there
is no denying that Max Reger is the one man in Germany to-day who is
looked upon as the inevitable rival of Richard Strauss. Their
disparate tendencies bring to the lips the old query, Under which
king? Some think that Arnold Schoenberg may be a possible antagonist
in the future, but for the present it is Reger and Strauss, and no
third in opposition.

The Strauss problem is a serious one. In America much criticism of his
performances has contrived to evade the real issue. He has been called
hard names because he is money-loving, or because he has not followed
in the steps of Beethoven, because of a thousand and one things of no
actual critical value. That he is easily the greatest technical master
of his art now living there can be no question. And he has wound up a
peg or two the emotional intensity of music. Whether this striving
after nerve-shattering combinations is a dangerous tendency is quite
beside the mark. Let us register the fact. Beginning