HIS YOUTH 1813-1834.


The old world is very remote from us now, but it is worth while making a
small attempt to realize how it stood to Wagner. When he was born, in
1813, Bach had been dead only a little over sixty years; Mozart had been
dead about twenty years, and Haydn about ten; Beethoven was in the full
splendour of his tremendous powers; Weber and Schubert had still their
finest work to do. To grasp all that this means, let us consider our
relation to Mendelssohn. He died nearly sixty years ago; yet, whatever
we may think of him as a composer, we can scarcely call him
old-fashioned: he remains indisputably one of the moderns. Now, Wagner
can never have looked upon Bach as a modern. He spoke of him and his old
periwig almost as one might allude to an extinct race of animals. The
history of an art cannot be measured off in years: in some periods it
moves slowly, in others with startling rapidity. Since Mendelssohn's day
composers have sought rather to develop old resources and forms than to
find and create new ones, whereas in the sixty years that lie between
Bach's death and Wagner's birth the whole form and content, the very
stuff, of music was changed. In 1750 he would have been a daring and
extraordinarily sapient being who prophesied that within forty years
Mozart's G minor Symphony would be written. Between Bach and Wagner is a
great gulf set, a gulf bridged by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven; between ourselves and Mendelssohn there is no such chasm and
certainly no such list of mighty names. It was in the period of swift
transition from Bach's fugues to Beethoven's Choral Symphony that Wagner
was born, a period when musical Germany was in a state of tumultuous
ebullition. Later we shall see for how much this counted in the growth
of Wagner's genius. In the meantime it may be observed that in externals
the world of 1813 was not so far removed from the world of 1750. All the