History of the Pianoforte and Players

Those were great days in which the foundation-stone was laid at Bayreuth. Days in which the creative philosopher of the stage threw his sceptre over the Ninth Symphony; days when choice spirits met together, who tremblingly passed through the moment in which they saw something never heard of become reality; days of a joyous intoxication when Liszt and Wagner embraced each other with tears; days that Nietzsche calls the happiest he had ever spent, when something brooded in the air that he could trace nowhere else—something ineffable but full of hope—those days, alas! return no more. In those days music, that music which the million greet with cheers of rapture, stood enthroned on the Stage, which gives to art its public hold upon the world. The living, new-creating music has to-day once more fled to the concert hall, to the haughty and more select rows of aristocratic amateurs who listen to the symphonic poems of Richard Strauss. These are tender and delicate creations beside the dramas of Wagner. They are elves, they elude us, and there are those, who see them not. We have been driven to them as the highest musical expressions of our time.