Hitherto his whole mind
and thought had been placed on literature, the drama in particular, as a
career. Through Beethoven he first learned what a power music possesses
in the portrayal of the emotions and passions. He had, as he says, an
intimate love and knowledge of Mozart without apparently being much
influenced thereby. Up to this time Shakespeare had been his archetype.
Now, with a fine discriminating intelligence, marvellous in a youth of
sixteen, Beethoven is to be included in this hero-worship, and is
eventually to supplant his former ideal. "It was Beethoven who opened up
the boundless faculty of instrumental music for expressing elemental
storm and stress," he says in the "Art-Work of the Future," and
elsewhere in the same article, "the deed of the one and only
Shakespeare, which made of him a universal man, a very god, is yet but
the kindred deed of the solitary Beethoven, who found the language of
the artist-manhood of the future."
Wagner's criticisms on music are admirable. Here he expresses his
thoughts as plainly as in his compositions.
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