Almost immediately after Schubert there come composers in whom the new tendency is more marked. Mendelssohn entered the domain of the romantic in 1826, with his overture to the "Midsummer Night's Dream," and directly after him came Schumann, with a luxuriant succession of deeply moved, imaginative, quasi-descriptive, or at any rate representative, pianoforte pieces. Schumann, indeed, did not need to read a poem in order to find musical ideas flowing in unaccustomed channels. The ideas took these forms and channels of their own accord, as we see in his very first pieces, his "Papillons," "Intermezzi," "Davidsbundlertänze" and the like. So, too, with Chopin. There is very little of the descriptive and the picture-making element in his works. Nevertheless, they chimed in so well with the unrest, the somewhat Byronic sentiment, the vague yearning of the period, that they found a public without loss of time, and established themselves in the popular taste without having had to find a propaganda movement for explaining them as the foretokens of a "music of the future."
This representative work in music has been very much helped by the astonishing development of virtuosity upon the violin, the pianoforte and other instruments, which distinguishes this century. Beginning with Paganini, whose astonishing violin playing was first heard during the last years of the eighteenth century, we have Thalberg, Chopin, Liszt, Rubinstein, Joachim, Tausig, Leonard, and a multitude of others, through whose efforts the general appreciation of instrumental music has been wonderfully stimulated, and the appetite for overcoming difficulties and realizing great effects so much increased as to have permanently elevated the standard of complication in musical discourse, and the popular average of performance.
Nor has virtuosity been confined to single instruments. There have been two great virtuosi in orchestration, during this century, who have exercised as great an influence in this complicated and elaborate department, as the others mentioned have upon their own solo instruments. The first of these was Hector Berlioz, the great French master, whose earlier compositions were produced in 1835, when the instruments of the orchestra were combined in vast masses, and with descriptive intention, far beyond anything by previous writers. In his later works, such as the "Damnation of Faust," and the mighty Requiem, Berlioz far surpassed these efforts, every one of his effects afterward proving to have been well calculated. Directly after his early works came the first of that much discussed genius, Richard Wagner, who besides being one of the most profound and acute intelligences ever distinguished in music, and a great master of the province of opera (in which he accomplished stupendous creations), was also an orchestral virtuoso, coloring when he chose, with true instinct, for the mere sake of color; and massing and contrasting instruments in endless variety and beauty.
The activity in musical production during the nineteenth century has been so extraordinary in amount and in the number of composers concerned in it, and so ample in the range of musical effects brought to realization, as fully to illustrate the truth of the principle enunciated at the outset of this narrative, namely: That the course of musical progress has been toward greater complication of tonal effects in every direction; implying upon the part of composers the possession of more inclusive principles of tonal unity; and upon the part of the hearers, to whom these vast works have been addressed, the possession of corresponding powers of tonal perception, and the persistence of impressions for a sufficient length of time in each instance for the underlying unity to be realized.
As an incident in the rapidity of the progress on the part of composers, we have had what is called "the music of the future"; namely, productions of one generation intelligible to the finer intelligences of that generation, yet "music of the future" to all the others; but in the generation following, these compositions have gone into the common stock, through the progress of the faculties of hearing and of deeper perceptions of tonal relations. Meanwhile there has been created another stratum of music of the future, which may be expected to occupy the attention of the generation next ensuing, to whom in turn it will become the music of the present.
In the nature of the case, there is not, nor can there be, a stopping place, unless we conceive the possibility of a return to the conservatism of Plato and the ancient Egyptians, and the passage of statute laws permitting the employment of chords and rhythms up to a certain specified degree of complexity, beyond which their use would constitute a grave statutory offense. It is possible that the ideal of art might again be "reformed" in the direction of restriction from the uncomely, the forced and the sensational, and in favor of the beautiful, the becoming and the divine. Nevertheless, it is the inevitable consequence of a prescription of this kind to run into mere prettiness and tuneful emptiness. Protection is a failure in art. The spirit must have freedom, or it will never take its grandest flights. And it is altogether possible that the needed corrective will presently be discovered of itself, through the progress of spirit into a clearer vision, a higher aspiration and a nobler sense of beauty. This we may hope will be one of the distinctions of the coming ages, which poets have foretold and seers have imagined, when truth and love will prevail and find their illustration in a civilization conformed of its own accord to the unrestricted outflowing of these deep, eternal, divine principles.
