ing to all who endeavored to wring from
music a message it possessed not? When Wagner saw that Beethoven--Ah,
the sublime Beethoven!--could not do without the aid of the human voice
in his Ninth Symphony, he fashioned his music drama accordingly. With
the co-operation of pantomime, costume, color, lights, scenery, he
invented a new art--patched and tinkered one, said his enemies, who
thought him old-fashioned--and so "Der Ring," "Tristan und Isolde," "Die
Meistersinger" and "Parsifal" were born. True classics in their devotion
to form and freedom from the feverishness of the later men headed by
Richard Strauss--why should any one seek to better them, to supplant
them? Wagner had been the Mozart of his century. Down with the musical
Tartars of the East who spiritually invaded Europe to rob her of peace,
religion, aye, and morals!

Much censure of this kind was aimed at Illowski, who continued calmly.
Admiring Richard Strauss, he saw that the man did not dare enough, that
his effort to paint in tone the poetic heroes of the past century,
himself included, was laudable; but Don Juan, Macbeth, quaint Till
Eulenspiegel, fantastic Don Quixote were, after all, chiefly concerned
with a moribund aestheticism. Illowski best liked the Strauss setting of
"Also Sprach Zarathustra" because it approached his own darling project,
though it neither touched the stars nor reached the earth. Besides, this
music was too complicated. A new art must be evolved, not a synthesis of
the old arts dreamed by Wagner, but an art consisting of music alone: an
art for the twentieth century, a democratic art in which poet and tramp
alike could revel. To the profoundest science must be united a clearness
of exposition that only Raphael has. Even a peasant enjoys Velasquez.
The Greeks fathomed this mystery: all Athens worshipped its marbles, and
Phidias was crowned King of Emotions. Music alone lagged in the race,
music, part speech, part painting, with a surging undertow of passion,
music had been too long in the laboratories of the wise men. To free it
from its Egyptian bondage, to make it the tongue of all life, the
interpreter of the world's desire--Illowski dreamed the dreams of
madmen.

Chopin, who divined this truth, went first to the people, later to
Paris, and thenceforward he became the victim of the artificial.
Beethoven was born too soon in a world grown gray under scholars'
shackles. The symphony, like the Old Man of the Sea, weighed upon h