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The “good old” time is past, it sang itself out in Mozart—how happy are we that his rococo still speaks to us, that his “good company,” his tender enthusiasm, his childish delight in the Chinese and its flourishes, his courtesy of heart, his longing for the elegant, the amorous, the tripping, the tearful, and his belief in the South, can still appeal to something left in us! Ah, some time or other it will be over with it!—but who can doubt that it will be over still sooner with the intelligence and taste for Beethoven! For he was only the last echo of a break and transition in style, and not, like Mozart, the last echo of a great European taste which had existed for centuries. Beethoven is the intermediate event between an old mellow soul that is constantly breaking down, and a future over-young soul that is always coming; there is spread over his music the twilight of eternal loss and eternal extravagant hope—the same light in which Europe was bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it danced round the Tree of Liberty of the Revolution, and finally almost fell down in adoration before Napoleon. But how rapidly does this very sentiment now pale, how difficult nowadays is even the apprehension of this sentiment, how strangely does the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, and Byron sound to our ear, in whom collectively the same fate of Europe was able to speak, which knew how to sing in Beethoven!—Whatever German music came afterwards, belongs to Romanticism, that is to say, to a movement which, historically considered, was still shorter, more fleeting, and more superficial than that great interlude, the transition of Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon, and to the rise of democracy. Weber—but what do we care nowadays for Freischutz and Oberon! Or Marschner’s Hans Heiling and Vampyre! Or even Wagner’s Tannhäuser! That is extinct, although not yet forgotten music. This whole music of Romanticism, besides, was not noble enough, was not musical enough, to maintain its position anywhere but in the theatre and before the masses; from the beginning it was second-rate music, which was little thought of by genuine musicians. It was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master, who, on account of his lighter, purer, happier soul, quickly acquired admiration, and was equally quickly forgotten: as the beautiful episode of German music. But with regard to Robert Schumann, who took things seriously, and has been taken seriously from the first—he was the last that founded a school—do we not now regard it as a satisfaction, a relief, a deliverance, that this very Romanticism of Schumann’s has been surmounted? Schumann, fleeing into the “Saxon Switzerland” of his soul, with a half Werther-like, half Jean-Paul-like nature (assuredly not like Beethoven! assuredly not like Byron!)—his Manfred music is a mistake and a misunderstanding to the extent of injustice; Schumann, with his taste, which was fundamentally a petty taste (that is to say, a dangerous propensity—doubly dangerous among Germans—for quiet lyricism and intoxication of the feelings), going constantly apart, timidly withdrawing and retiring, a noble weakling who revelled in nothing but anonymous joy and sorrow, from the beginning a sort of girl and noli me tangere—this Schumann was already merely a German event in music, and no longer a European event, as Beethoven had been, as in a still greater degree Mozart had been; with Schumann German music was threatened with its greatest danger, that of losing the voice for the soul of Europe and sinking into a merely national affair.
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What a torture are books written in German to a reader who has a third ear! How indignantly he stands beside the slowly turning swamp of sounds without tune and rhythms without dance, which Germans call a “book”! And even the German who reads books! How lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he reads! How many Germans know, and consider it obligatory to know, that there is art in every good sentence—art which must be divined, if the sentence is to be understood! If there is a misunderstanding about its tempo, for instance, the sentence itself is misunderstood! That one must not be doubtful about the rhythm-determining syllables, that one should feel the breaking of the too-rigid symmetry as intentional and as a charm, that one should lend a fine and patient ear to every staccato and every rubato, that one should divine the sense in the sequence of the vowels and diphthongs, and how delicately and richly they can be tinted and retinted in the order of their arrangement—who among book-reading Germans is complaisant enough to recognize such duties and requirements,
