Book Description

Excerpt from My Musical Life, Vol. 2 Beethoven was a musician only. His glory is to have carried the art of music to its extreme limits of develop ment: no one has yet gone beyond him. Wagner said, I have invented nothing. You cannot invent metre after the Greeks, or the modern drama after shakspere, or colo'uring and perspective after the Italians - there is a point at which an art ceases to grow and stands full-blown like a flower. Most people admit that in music, as in other arts, that point has been reached. What then remained? This, according to richard wagner: to concentrate into one dazzling focus all the arts, and, having sounded and developed the expressional depth, and determined the peculiar function of each, to combine them at length into one perfect and indivisible whole. Words seem childishly inadequate to render all at once such a conception as this. Slowly we may master some of 299. Its details and allow them to orb into a perfect m on whole. If you stand at the foot of one of the Alps, you can see but a little portion of it a hamlet, a mping patch of vineyard, and a pine copse beyond; but as you ascend the winding path the prospect opens to right and left cascades leap by to lose themselves in the torrent below - you plunge into the gloom of a forest and emerge on to the higher meadows and pleasant scenes of pastoral life - yonder the soil grows rocky, and tumbled boulders lie around you - the cloud lifts, and a vista of mountains and valleys is suddenly Opened up, and pressing forward you leave far below the murmurs of one world, and raise your enraptured eyes to the black eagle, as he wheels aloft in the golden air beyond the stainless and eternal snows. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.