Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/642

 gradually become clear, his later works would certainly not have been more than a passing marvel. But the solution of the Wagner problem belongs to the later period (see sec. 230).

The influence of the great triumvirate, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, stimulated, if it did not occasion, the advance of several groups who explicitly aimed at setting up 'new' styles of composition, first the 'new-German,' then the 'new-Russian,' and the 'new-French,' followed by others, each desiring to express its national individuality in terms other than those of past academic formulæ. In perhaps all of these there was something of a feverish reaction against tradition, an over-exaltation of temperament and mood, a curious search for impressionistic effects, even an untamed recklessness and wildness. Yet the revolt from mere authority and the craving for vitality, and even for 'realism,' were inevitable expressions of the spirit of the age. They helped to advance imperfect processes to completion and to open gateways into unoccupied domains (see secs. 231-232).

It may be said, however, that from this period came the now conspicuous tendency to exalt forms and styles of music that appeal only to a limited class of connoisseurs. At the very moment that music was reaching more people than ever before, at least in its more elaborate expressions, it was also becoming more specialized and even esoteric. It is true that music-history has repeatedly shown that sensitiveness to musical art is capable of extraordinarily rapid development, so that what is abstruse to one generation becomes commonplace to the next. But, even with this qualification, some tendencies bequeathed by this middle period to the later one have aroused a degree of question.

However this may be, the period was extraordinarily rich in those enterprises of education and literature that are always the connecting links between rudimentary and advanced art, between popular thought and artistic specialization. These mediating factors included not only the schools of music, the army of detached teachers, the musical periodicals, and the books about music in its many aspects, but also every organized project for presenting the larger musical works to the public, especially the opera and both vocal and instrumental concerts. Through all these avenues of education, as never before, musical art was now beginning to attain its place as a conspicuous and valuable force in the personal and communal culture of modern society.