f
which, in fact, the aesthetic effect of the new music chiefly if not
entirely depended. This law or principle was tonality. I have been told
that in a publication which I have never seen--although most probably
it has been sent to me, to go, with the greater part of the printed
matter and not a few of the letters that I receive, unread into my
waste-basket--I have been held up as a dreadful example of musical
incompetence on the ground that I cannot "appreciate Wagner's
magnificent [or splendid, or something of that sort] tonality." Of
course it cuts me to the heart to show that my criticaster was
thoroughly ignorant of the very meaning of the word that he used--a
word which is the name of a principle of paramount importance and
significance in the art of music, which, I believe, he in some sort
professes. But the demands of truth are inexorable.

Tonality is something which cannot be magnificent or splendid; nor can
it be attributed to a composer as being in the slightest degree a claim
to admiration. Indeed, one composer can hardly possess it in a greater
degree than another; and the writer of an ephemeral ballad, or of
"Thou, thou reignest in this bosom," has it, although not more largely,
with stronger manifestation than Mozart or Beethoven. And yet it so
happens that Wagner is in his later works _less_ governed by the law of
tonality than any other known composer of the day.

Tonality is simply the relation of a musical phrase, or air, or longer
composition, to a keynote or tonic chord. To this tonic chord the
harmonies of the composition must bear a close and constantly felt
relationship. The harmony almost always opens with this chord, and
continually recurs to it; and either in its simple form or in some of
its inversions, it, its dominant and subdominant, are the perceptibly
ruling harmonies of the composition; and upon this tonic chord the
composition always ends. That is tonality; nothing more nor less; and
to the influence of this principle of tonality is due the distinctive
character of modern music. Strange as it will probably seem to most
amateurs, news as we have already seen it is to one professor, it was
not until after Palestrina's time that the law of tonality asserted
itself in music, and that compositions were clearly written with any
tonic, that is, manifestly and strikingly in any particular key.[5] But
it so happens that Wagner's method of composition has actually led him
somewhat away from