Nobody else before Richard Strauss achieved Wagner's mastery of his new time-scale; and few, if any, of his contemporaries, whether hostile or friendly to him, realised its existence. Liszt was trying, in his symphonic poems, to make a music that filled its half-hour or forty minutes continuously; but his first effort of the kind, Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne, spends the first twenty of its forty minutes in a series of introductions, and the remaining twenty in retracing the series backwards. And his more success ful efforts, such as Orpheus and Les Preludes, are either essentially lyric or not on the new time-scale at all. He never achieved so effective a symphonic poem as Schubert had already long ago unwittingly produced in the "Wanderer" fantasia. Musicians who might not have been repelled by new doctrines of musical form found Liszt's style even more demimondaine than that of the early works of Wagner ; nor did Liszt show any tendency to purify it. Moreover he rivalled Meyerbeer in the efficiency of his press bureau by which he made propaganda, often in his own fluent French, more generously for others than for himself.
Meanwhile another musical development was arising, conscious of its continuity with the past, and, like Judaism as defined by Mathew Arnold, tinged with emotion in the morality of its aesthetic principles. Joachim, as great an interpreter on the violin as Liszt on the pianoforte, at first found in Liszt a congenial friend, until he saw his compositions. These horrified him, and the horror completed an estrangement already begun by his dis like of the atmosphere of Liszt's press-bureau. He and his younger friend Brahms were united not only in general musical taste but in personal devotion to the heroic widow of Schumann, who, after her husband's tragic and lingering death, was bringing up a large family on the proceeds of her concerts. These three artists soon came to regard the musical atmosphere of Weimar, where the Lisztianer gathered around their master, as unhealthy. In the correspondence and mutual criticism of Brahms and Joachim the word Lisztisch became synonymous with "devilish"; and indeed it is true that any characteristic Lisztian and many Wagnerian idioms would have a disgusting effect if intruded into Brahms's music. To-day we can be wise after the event and find matter for regret in the drastic outspokenness of Joachim and Brahms which elevated matters of taste into questions of artistic honour. If Liszt could have been contented with sachlich criticism on defin able issues of technique without requiring attestations of sym pathy and enjoyment, and if Joachim could have resolved matters of taste into questions of artistic proportion, the neo classical and neo-romantic musicians would have joined forces instead of condemning each other. Similar economies might be effected in nature if lions could be converted to vegetarianism.
The controversy was unequal, in two compensating ways. Wag ner had a tremendous, if acrid, fluency in prose and did not care where his vitriol might alight. Moreover, Wagnerian and Lisztian music was much easier to write about, whether in attack or defence, than music which had no literary aspect. Brahms, like Wagner, needed and found friends who adored his music, but he hated the idea of a press-bureau and snubbed anybody whose compliments aroused the least suspicion of flattery. These drawbacks had their own compensation. It might be difficult to write as interestingly
about Brahms as about Wagner ; but Wagner, whether in exile or enthroned at Bayreuth, had Wagnerian music-drama as his whole province, while Brahms reigned over the whole of the rest of music, instrumental, choral and lyric. If criticism came to perse cution, on the whole the neo-classics had the worst of it ; for Brahms had no equals since Joachim gave up composition, and the position of a champion of classical forms was easily confused with that of a persecutor of the prophets of progress. As a matter of fact, Brahms was no anti-Wagnerian and was annoyed when his friends bracketed Wagner with Liszt.
But, apart from the clash of flying inkpots, the recognition of Brahms was assured by two facts; first the propaganda of his work not by words but by consummate and authoritative per formance, and second, the very fact that his music required an experienced love of music for its understanding. A man might become an enthusiastic Wagnerian or even a well-equipped con ductor of Wagner's music and be as the brutes that perish about symphonic orchestration, choral music, chamber-music, songs and all pianoforte music except Chopin. But it was long before any musician could venture to tackle Brahms's music on any basis except that of the most comprehensive musical culture and tech nique. Brahms lived long enough to become worshipped unintel ligently; and after his death (in 1897) the reaction was more evident than the fashionable worship had beep. There are signs that the reaction is over by now.
The Wagnerians felt deeply that their propaganda was incom plete for lack of a master of purely symphonic music. This they found in Bruckner (q.v.). Brahms was appalled by the clumsiness of Bruckner's forms, and the most official Wagnerians admitted the frequent lapses of their symphonic master. On the other hand Bruckner's Nibelungen-tetralogy openings to his symphonies ob viously dwarfed the terse themes of Brahms. By the time Brahms and Bruckner had come into their own, the public had long lost all sense of form in its appetite for bleeding gobbets of musical butcher's-meat hacked from the living body of Wagnerian music-drama and served up in concert rooms as Waldweben, Karfreitagszauber and Walkfirenritt. After this it was pedantry to quarrel with any symphonic composer's form so long as his openings were vast enough. Brahms was no pedant; obvious weakness of form and style did not deter him from being the first to recognize Dvofak (q.v.) ; and he was drastic in his rebuff of anybody who thought to flatter him by talking against Wagner.
The song-writer Hugo Wolf (186o-19o3) became recognized too late to be made use of as a lyric-pawn in the Wagner-Bruckner party politics of music. As far as his theory of song can be summarized, it consists in the application of Wagnerian decla mation to lyric poetry. If his practice were not better than this essentially prose theory of verse-rhythm (see RHYTHM) and the perky censorship of classical musical declamation that goes with it, Hugo Wolf's art would not have survived his short and ailing life. But it is deeper than the theories on which it is supposed to rest and its apparent revolt from lyric melody only partly conceals a powerfully organized lyric form, and does not at all conceal a great gift of characterisation.