ven. This curiosity, he continues,
will be a much more potent factor in his chance of becoming
known than all his newspaper articles and the propaganda of
his friend, Franz Liszt.

For the German opera there were half a dozen
_Boersenplaetze_--Berlin for the northwest, Hamburg for
the northeast, Frankfort for the southwest, Munich for the
southeast. As Riehl says, a success in Frankfort meant a
success in all the Frankfort clay deposit and sandstone systems,
but in the chalk formation of Munich it stood no chance. Thus
Germany had no musical centre. But after Meyerbeer found such
a centre in Paris, all other Germans, including Wagner, looked
to Paris for fame.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Vienna was the art centre;
nevertheless Gluck had to go to Paris for recognition.

Mendelssohn only succeeded by his _Salonfaehigkeit_. Always
respectable in his forms, no one else could have made music
popular among the cultured classes as could Mendelssohn. This
also had its danger; for if Mendelssohn had written an opera
(the lack of which was so bewailed by the Philistines),
it would have taken root all over Germany, and put Wagner
back many years. At the death of Mendelssohn, the Philistines
heralded the coming of a new German national school, founded on
his principles (formalism), one that would clarify the artistic
atmosphere of the turgid and anarchistic excesses of Wagner and
Berlioz and their followers. These critics found already that
Beethoven's melodies were too long and his instrumentation too
involved. They declared that the further music departed from
its natural simplicity the more involved its utterance became,
the less clear, and consequently the poorer it was. Music was
compared to architecture, and thus the more Greek it was, the
better; forgetting that architecture was tied to utilitarianism
and poetry to word-symbols, and that painting is primarily an
art of externals.

Riehl says that art is always in danger of ruin when its simple
foundation forms are too much elaborated, overlooking the fact
that music is not an art, but psychological utterance.

It needed all Wagner's gigantic personality to rise above this
wave of formalism that looked to the past for its salvation,
a past which was one of childish experimenting rather than of
aesthetic accomplishment. The tendency was to return to the
dark cave where tangible walls were to be touched by the hands,
rather than to emerge into a sunlight th