The great line of
composers which descended from Bach and Haendel for two centuries has
wavered and diminished visibly during the last three decades. The proud
tradition seems to have reached a temporary halt in Wagner and Bruckner
and Brahms. It may be that modern Germany is a difficult terrain, that
the violent change in conditions of life, the furious acceleration, has
created, for the time being, a soil unusually inimical to the disclosure
of perfect works of art. The blight on the entire new generation of
composers would seem to point to some such common cause. There is, no
doubt, a curious coincidence in the fact that in each of the four chief
German musicians of the recent period there should be manifest in some
degree a failure of artistic instinct. The coarsening of the
craftsmanship, the spiritual bankruptcy, of the later Strauss, the
grotesque pedantry of Reger, the intellectualism with which the art of
Schoenberg has always been tainted, and by which it has been corrupted
of late, the banality of Mahler, dovetail suspiciously. And yet, it is
probable that the cause lies otherwhere, and that the conjunction of
these four men is accidental. There have been, after all, few
environments really friendly to the artist; most of the masters have had
to recover from a "something rotten in the state of Denmark," and many
of them have surmounted conditions worse than those of modern
Bismarckian Germany.
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