I
Germany, it will be remembered, was, during Wagner's lifetime, divided into two camps: the classic-romantic Mendelssohn-Schumann school which later rallied about the person of Brahms, on the one hand, and the Wagner-Liszt, sometimes called the late-romantic or 'New German' school, on the other. The adherents of the former are those whom we have called the poets, the latter the painters, in music; terms applying rather to the manner than to the matter, since the 'painters,' for another reason—namely, because they believed that a poetic idea should form the basis of the music and determine its forms—might with equal rights call themselves 'poets.' And, indeed, their followers, the 'New Germans,' among whom we reckon Mahler and Strauss, constitute what in a later chapter we have called the 'poetic' school of contemporary Germany.
Few musicians accepted Wagner's gospel in his lifetime. Raff and other Liszt disciples, the Weimar group, in other words, were virtually the only ones. A host, however, worshipped the names of Mendelssohn and Schumann. They gathered in Leipzig, their citadel, where Mendelssohn reorganized the Gewandhaus concerts in 1835,[2] and founded the Royal Conservatory in 1843, and in the Rhine cities, where Schumann's influence was greatest. These men flourished during the very time that Wagner was the great question of the day. While preaching the gospel of romanticism, they also upheld the great classic traditions. The advent of Brahms, indeed, brought a revival of pure classic feeling. This persists even to-day in the works of men whose romantic inspirations, akin to Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Chopin, find expression in forms of classic cast.
Both Schumann and Wagner were reformers interested in the broadening of musical culture, the improvement of taste, and the establishment of a standard of artistic propriety—Wagner on the stage, Schumann in the concert room. The former was successful, the latter only partially so. For, while the standards of the concert room are much higher to-day than they were in Schumann's day, musical taste in the home, which should be guided by these standards, has, if anything, deteriorated. The reason for this lies primarily in one of the inevitable developments of musical romanticism itself—the genre tendency; secondarily, in the fact that, while the Wagnerians were propagandists, writers of copious polemics and agitators, the classic romanticists were purely professional musicians who disdained to write, preferring deeds to words (and incidentally doing far too much), or else, like Hiller, were feuilletonists, pleasant gossips about their art and nothing more.
The development of the small forms, the miniature, the genre in short, and the corresponding decay of the larger forms was perhaps the most outstanding result of the romantic movement. Wagner alone, the dramatic romanticist, continued to paint large canvases, frescoes in vivid colors. The 'poetic' romanticists were of a lyric turn, and required compact and intimate forms of expression. They had created the song, they had built up a new piano literature out of small pieces, miniatures like Schubert's 'Musical Moments,' Schumann's 'Fantasy Pieces,' Mendelssohn's 'Songs without Words,' Field's 'Nocturnes,' Chopin's Dances, Preludes, and Études. Franz, Jensen, Lassen, and others continued the song; Brahms, with his Intermezzi; Henselt, Heller, and Kirchner, with his piano miniatures, the piano piece. The first degenerated into Abt, Curschmann, and worse, the second into the type of thing of which 'The Last Hope' and 'The Maiden's Prayer' were the ultimate manifestations. Sentiment ran over in small gushes and drippings, even the piano study was made the vehicle for a sigh. The sonata of a former day became a sonatina or an 'impromptu' of one kind or another.
The parallel thing now happened in other fields. The concert overture of Mendelssohn had in a measure displaced the symphony. What has been called the 'genre symphony' of Mendelssohn, Schumann, et al. was also in the direction of minimization. Even Brahms in his gigantic works emphasizes the tendency by the intermezzo character of his slow movements, by the orchestral filigree partaking of the chamber music style. Now came the revival of the orchestral suite by Lachner and Raff, the sinfonietta, and the serenade for small orchestra. Again we sense the same trend in the appearance of the choral ballad and in the tremendous output of small dramatic cantatas for mixed or men's voices.
In France, instrumental literature during the nineteenth century had been largely tributary to that of Germany, just as its opera earlier in the century was of Italian stock. But the development of the 'grand' opera of Meyerbeer, on the one hand, and the opéra comique, on the other, had produced a truly Gallic form of expression, of which the romanticism of the century made use. Gounod and his colleagues of the lyric drama; Bizet, the genius of his generation, with his sparkling rhythms, his fine tunes and his orchestral freshness; Délibes and David with their oriental color, compounded a new French idiom which already found a quasi-symphonic expression in the L'Arlésienne suites of Bizet. Berlioz stands as a colossus among his generation and to this day has perhaps not been quite assimilated by his countrymen. The Germans have profited from his orchestral reforms at least as much as the French. But he gave the one tremendous impetus to symphonic composition, stimulated interest in Beethoven and Weber and so pointed the way for his younger compatriots. Already he speaks of Saint-Saëns as an accomplished musician.
Saint-Saëns is, indeed, the next great exponent of the classic tradition as well as the earliest disciple of the late romantic school of Liszt and Wagner in France. Beside him, Massenet, no less great as technician, forms the transition to modernism on the operatic side, while Lalo and Godard devote themselves to both departments. César Franck, the Belgian, stands aloof in his ascetic isolation as the real creator of the modern French idiom.