To return to the historical view, the course of the symphony during the
century cannot be adequately scanned without a glance at the music-drama
of Richard Wagner. Until the middle of the century, symphony and opera
had moved entirely in separate channels. At most the overture was
affected, in temper and detail, by the career of the nobler form.
The restless iconoclasm of a Liszt was now united, in a close personal
and poetic league, with the new ideas of Wagner's later drama. Both men
adopted the symbolic motif as their main melodic means; with both mere
iteration took the place of development; a brilliant and lurid
color-scheme (of orchestration) served to hide the weakness of intrinsic
content; a vehement and hysteric manner cast into temporary shade the
classic mood of tranquil depth in which alone man's greatest thought is
born.
But a still larger view of the whole temper of art in Europe of the
later century is needed. We wander here beyond the fine distinctions of
musical forms. A new wave of feeling had come over the world that
violently affected all processes of thought. And strangely, it was
strongest in the land where the great heights of poetry and music had
just been reached. Where the high aim of a Beethoven and a Goethe had
been proclaimed, arose a Wagner to preach the gospel of brute fate and
nature, where love was the involuntary sequence of mechanical device and
ended in inevitable death, all overthrowing the heroic idea that teems
throughout the classic scores, crowned in a greatest symphony in praise
of "Joy.
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