It is our music. For we are the offspring of the
generation that assimilated Wagner. We, too, are the reaction from
Wagner. Through the discovery we have come to learn that music can give
us sensations different than those given us by Wagner's. We have learned
what it is to have music say to us, "It is thus, after all, that you
feel." We have finally come to recognize that we require of music forms,
proportions, accents different from Wagner's; orchestral movement,
color, rhythms, not in his. We have learned that we want an altogether
different stirring of the musical caldron. A song of Moussorgsky's or
Ravel's, a few measures of "Pelleas" or "Le Sacre du printemps," a
single fine moment in a sonata of Scriabine's, or a quartet or suite of
Bloch's, give us a joy, an illumination, a satisfaction that little of
the older music can equal. For our own moment of action is finally at
hand.
So Wagner has retreated and joined the company of composers who express
another day than our own. The sovereignty that was in him has passed to
other men. We regard him at present as the men of his own time might
have regarded Beethoven and Weber. Still, he will always remain the one
of all the company of the masters closest to us. No doubt he is not the
greatest of the artists who have made music.
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