“ A man must be judged by the conditions of his own time and compared with the men who worked by his side. And what compositions of Mozart's day, instrumental or operatic, have stood the test of the revenger Time? Even the mighty Gluck with his noble theories and statuesque music has bowed the knee to the younger rival. Figaro and Papageno and the dissolute Don Juan Tenorio y Salazar live to-day upon the stage; they are as familiar as the characters of the Old Testament; as Robinson Crusoe or Don Quixote; they are immortalized by the genius of the music-maker of Vienna. ”

“ For a time following he wrote but little; and then he pondered compositions of gigantic proportions. The pianoforte ceased to accommodate itself to his thoughts; the string quartet and the orchestra were constantly in his mind. "The most exalted, the most wondrous, the most inconceivable music," says Rubinstein, "was not written until after his total deafness. As the seer may be imagined blind, that is, blind to his surroundings, and seeing with the eyes of the soul, so the hearer may be imagined deaf to all his surroundings and hearing with the hearing of the soul." ”

“ Can any chamber music club dispense yet with his string quartets, quintets, or octet? And where is the pianist, however far advanced in virtuosity, who does not like to play sometimes his compositions for pianoforte with orchestra, or who fails to find grateful audience for the Lieder ohne Wörter? Indeed to ignore all this is to convict oneself of a very youthful bumptiousness of spirit, an arrogant fanaticism of unreasoning modernness in taste.
Four we count above all others in the temple of tone-art and genius:—Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven. ”

“ To comprehend, to appreciate Beethoven, the full knowledge of his compositions is necessary; and to the temperament of the composer must be added the corresponding temperament of a fit hearer. The Beethoven that has voiced the longings, the joys and the sorrows of humanity was not merely the man who walked in the streets of Vienna, not even the being to whom each tree sang the trisagion. The petty failings and the personal virtues of the individual assume in his music gigantic, supernatural proportions. ”

“ In his earlier works, he followed in some degree the path laid out by Haydn and Mozart; in his middle period, he appeared in the full strength and maturity of his wonderful originality; finally, in his last period, he revealed himself as a prophet and dreamer of unearthly things. But it is not strange that the style of a man of genius is modified by his age and his experience; that he thinks otherwise at forty than he thought at twenty; that his ideas are not rigid, immovable from youth to old age. ”

“ Now we are taught to believe that absolute music, music that does not "paint" or "personate" or follow a "program," is of little account; that unless it puts in clearer light some poetical thought or some determined emotion or natural phenomenon, it is worthless; that music is not merely the vehicle of musical thought, but is rather a means of expressing many ideas that might be better expressed in poetry, in prose, or on the canvas. So the times change and with them the fashions in art of every species. There is then perhaps no greatest composer. ”

“ The hearers of to-day, accustomed to the last quartets of Beethoven and the licenses of modern composers, are not shocked even by the celebrated false relations in the aforesaid introduction. Not only do these compositions display, in clearest light, the mastery of form and all contrapuntal devices; they are a mine of sensuous and spiritual riches. The quartet is ennobled; the minuet, that jolly, rustic dance of Haydn, becomes, with Mozart, the court dance of noble dames, full of grace and delicacy. The finales abound in dignified humor, and occasionally pathos is found. ”

“ Robert Schumann's career was not rich in striking events of a general interest, but it was of a more solitary character, revealing the inward life of a poetic dreamer whose language was to be music; of an artist who paved the way for a new and brilliant epoch of his art, who enlarged its domain, fought for its dignity, and by the splendid example of his own productions proved the possibility of his artistic creed. His works were his life; in him there was the closest union of man and artist. ”

“ In the Pantheon of art Beethoven holds a foremost place beside the great poets and artists of all time, with Æschylus and Dante, Michael Angelo and Shakespeare. Like these inspired men he has widened and ennobled the mind and the soul of humanity. "In his last works," says Edward Dannreuther, "he passes beyond the horizon of a mere singer and poet, and touches upon the domain of the seer and prophet, where in unison with all genuine mystics and ethical teachers he delivers a message of religious love and resignation, and release from the world." ”

“ Wagner pronounced the oration at his final resting-place, and thus emphasized the trait in his character which lay at the foundation of his greatest achievement in art: "Never lived a musician more German than thou! No matter where thy genius bore thee, in what far-away unfathomable realm of fancy, always did it remain fastened with a thousand sensitive fibres to the heart of the German people, with which it smiled and wept like an undoubting child listening to the fairy tales of its native land. ”

“ Utterances that spring from the depth of the human soul are clothed in the highest forms of art without losing their naiveté. We must thus rank Schubert among the most consummate masters of expression the world has ever seen. His songs represent the high-water mark of human achievement in one direction, as Beethoven's symphonies represent it in another. All subsequent composers, beginning with Mendelssohn and Schumann, have been pupils of Schubert in song-writing, but no one has yet equalled the master. ”

“ Indeed, whoever takes pains, in an earnest and loving mind to review these songs one by one, and to penetrate into their peculiar nature, style and beauty, will be surprised to observe that the composer has allowed not one to be published without having perfected it in every detail. Even the simplest folk-song had to be a true work of art, worthy of his name and genius, before he would send it upon its wanderings through the world. ”

“ Mendelssohn stands as the best modern representative of sound, many-sided, conservative, and yet progressive musical culture. He was artist to the marrow. Gifted with original creative genius—a genius not so deep and absolute, so elemental, so Titanic as that of Bach and Handel and Beethoven, nor of so celestial temper as that of Mozart;—trained to consummate musicianship through earnest study and personal absorption of the world's great musical inheritance ”

“ In his symphonies "he sought to give his melody, by way of compensation for its delivery by mere instruments, the depth of feeling and ardor that lies at the source of the human voice as the expression of the unfathomable depths of the heart"; and in this he succeeded by leading "the irresistible stream of richest harmony into the heart of his melody." Well might the cool-headed Ambros say of the last great three, "considered as pure music, it is hardly worth while to ask whether the world possesses anything more perfect." ”

“ Musicians of all schools have vied with men eminent in the other walks of life in the most extravagant eulogy. In this opera is seen the universality of Mozart's genius. His knowledge of humanity, his sympathy with all classes and conditions of men. It is the most realistic of his works; it is at the same time the most ideal. Not without reason did Goethe pass over Cherubini and von Weber, Auber and Rossini, Beethoven and the rest, and say that Mozart was the one who should have set his Faust to music. ”

“ But on the other hand, how much he has improved the orchestra, giving it increased interest and life, as well as variety of color, of timbre and of effect! What an important part it takes in certain situations, and how carefully, conscientiously and cleverly it is managed!
Conscience, indeed, was one of Meyerbeer's master qualities. Others, so richly gifted, might perhaps have been content to follow the course of their inspiration, without taking the trouble to enrich it, to fortify it with the aid of all the means which art puts at the disposal of the composer. ”

“ To inoculate the world with a passion for a special form of dance music is not such an easy thing as it seems at first sight. National customs and inclinations stand in the way. As Rubinstein has remarked, "A melody which moves a Finn to tears will leave a Spaniard cold, a dance rhythm which makes a Hungarian skip will not disturb an Italian in his rest, etc." To have made all the young people in the world dance to the rhythm of the Austrian waltz is, therefore, a feat which required the magic power of genius for its performance. ”

“ But in music, as in all true art, form is but the means to an end: which is to move the soul through the æsthetic sense of beauty. This ideal structure of tones was not the invention of one musician; it was built up gradually, in the course of a century and a half, by various composers until it reached its culmination in the works of Beethoven. ”

“ In the cyclical forms of instrumental music, Beethoven is preëminent from all points of view, formally, technically, aesthetically, and spiritually. Moreover, there is a Shakesperian quality in his wonderful tone-poems. Like the great poet he touches every chord of the heart and appeals to the imagination more potently than other poets. Beethoven's creations, like Shakespeare's, are distinguished by great diversity of character; each is a type by itself. His great symphonies stand in as strong contrast with each other as do the plays of Shakespeare with each other. ”

“ How could a man who was never in love have written that immortal Serenade in which all that is sweetest and most sacred in the love of man for woman comes forth like a fresh breath from heaven? Never was voice of love so passionate and so pure. Nowhere has human art ever found more consummate and faultless expression than in this song of songs. ”

“ Beethoven, it is true, thought the subject a scandalous one, unworthy of musical treatment; but it was admirably adapted to the dramatic temperament of Mozart. "Don Giovanni is a temperament of flame and fire that has no time for monologues; he acts; it is life without shackles, without curb, flowing as the lava of a volcano, which destroys everything in its path."
The various scenes, the conflicting passions, are marvellously reproduced in the music of Mozart. ”

“ The force and the meaning of the accompaniment is always in proportion with the degree of passion on the stage. When Pizarro meditates his vengeance and the orchestra mimics the storm within his breast, it matters little that the voice of the singer is drowned. And so the air of the delirious Florestan is less thrilling than the preceding prelude; and the oboe tells of his agony although he himself cries it to the dungeon walls. ”

“ He erred, but nevertheless "Genoveva" remains a most interesting attempt of one of our greatest masters to solve the operatic problem, an attempt noble in its sincerity, rich in musical beauty and fine psychological detail, bright in color, yet of more of the style of oil-painting than the al fresco required by the stage. Long after the unsuccessful performances in Leipsic the opera has been revived in many German cities, still finding to-day a limited, but highly interested audience of those who love its author from his immortal masterworks in other fields. ”

“ The burden of the hymn heard above the symphonic struggle of the orchestra is joy, love and brotherhood for all mankind, or that charity which is the true essence of the Christian religion. Like Dante's Divine Comedy or Bach's Passion Music, the Ninth Symphony will live as one of the greatest monuments of genius. ”

“ If the sweetness of Mendelssohn's music does sometimes cloy; if with all the strength of his orchestral works, his oratorios and Greek plays, with all the Jewish masculinity of his Psalms, his male choruses and his part-songs, one feels the feminine, the sentimental minor vein predominate upon the whole; if his struggles with his formidable art-problems were less Titanic than those of Beethoven, and consequently his triumphs less complete ”

“ Lindpaintner, Dorn, and Reissiger are names that come to our ears like faint echoes of once-living voices. Kreutzer and Lortzing wake at long intervals in sporadic performances in small or provincial theatres. Marschner is in a more fortunate case, for his was greater genius. Three of his operas still have a considerable degree of vitality, and some of his stirring part-songs for men's voices are yet sung and heard with delight. But only in Germany. Dust lies deep upon his pianoforte and chamber music wherever it is. ”

“ Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art, but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers, like frost and snow, rain and dew, hailstorm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert, but that, the farther we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident! ”

“ In contrast with the later symphonies, the First and Second seem without the rare personality of the composer. Yet when the First Symphony appeared its opening was regarded as daring; and there is the seriousness of purpose that is found in all of his greater compositions. In the Second the introduction is built on broader foundations; there is a warmth in the slow movement that was unusual for the time, and the scherzo is new in character. But in the Heroic, Beethoven laid the cornerstone of modern symphonic music. It was written with a definite aim; the glorification of a great man. ”

“ In the musical succession there is an over-lapping, a concurrence of reigns, nearly all the time. The most significant phrase of this phenomenon is exemplified in the subject of this study. Gluck and Mozart might have come like the good fairies of the nursery tale to kiss him in his cradle. Haydn and Beethoven might have waited till their salutations would inspire his youth. He himself might have blessed the infancy of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Wagner. ”

“ There is here not so much of human sentiment and passion as in the G minor symphony, but there is the splendor, as well as the serenity that is peculiar to Mozart; and the finale is a masterpiece of contrapuntal skill that is unsurpassed in music, for the fugue is made on a symphonic plan, and thus two distinct art-forms are moulded into one. Jahn has said that the highest quality of these three symphonies is "the harmony of tone-color, the healthy combination of orchestral sound," and he admits at the same time the impotence of language to reproduce the substance of a musical work. ”

“ In its wild, tender, melancholy melody and coloring, its romantic, breezy, sea-shore character, it has affinity with the Hebrides overture. How deep and tender the introductory Andante con Moto, 3-4! And how charmingly the kindred Allegro melody, 6-8, sets out from it and runs so smoothly and so rapidly, most of the way in octaves between the first violins and low clarinet tones! How it winds in and out among the instruments, now quiet and individual, now borne along upon the swelling, roaring tide of the whole orchestra! ”

“ If we remember how late Schumann entered upon a musical career, how late he enjoyed a thorough theoretical instruction, how much he has also done in the field of literature, how early his health began to be impaired, and at what an early age he was called away, we are astonished at the mass of his works, so many of them of the widest scope and importance, which place his name among the noblest and greatest masters. ”

“ This need for expression, felt by every human creature, appears in men of profound and intense interior life as a creative impulse; it is so not only with artists and poets, but in many cases with scholars, philosophers, and scientific discoverers; the relief is found in giving objective form to the thoughts that come welling up from the depths of the spirit. But it is in art that creative expression most becomes in itself an overmastering end, and especially in the two arts that give swiftest and readiest outlet to emotion, in poetry and in music. ”

“ The Romanticism of the poets who inspired the musical Romanticists, consisted not only in their effort to overthrow the stilted rhetoric and pedantry of the German writers who were following stereotyped French models, but also in their effort to disclose the essential beauty which pervades the world of mystery beyond the plain realities of this life. They found the elements of their creations in the imaginative literature of the Middle Ages,—the marvellous and fantastic stories of chivalry and superstition. A man like Schumann touches hands with these poets in all of their strivings. ”