As the second of pianoforte composers, what giants Chopin leaves in his rear! Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Von Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and behind them many of lesser stature, Hummel, Clementi, Moscheles and such; and, still further back, the great average, the ephemeral multitude. Of all their pushing of pens, little will remain when, on some distant to-morrow, the stirred pulse and the suffused eye prove the tone-poems of the Polish musician an unfading charm, an undimmed worth, an eternal beauty, in the realms of art.
The years now with us are prophetic of a century notable from its beginning; a century destined to achieve perhaps beyond our boldest imagining. Already is the century achieving, as, like a youthful but formidable being, it assaults that citadel of mystery wherein Truth must relinquish, one by one, her most valued and guarded possessions.
To the observant, the present is a time of shaken foundations, a time of much actual overthrow, and even a time of planning that broader and deeper bases shall well sustain the super-imposed new. Amidst an upheaval of things social, political, scientific, ethical and æsthetic; an upheaval world-wide, and necessarily sourced in the sub-strata of the world of causes; Art, for instance, is unavoidably disturbed throughout its various provinces.
Only the over-sanguine will assume that the better must needs rise from upheaval and overthrow. Therefore let us look but for the reasonable, for does not many a desolated province of this material world belie the theory of uninterrupted advance?
Appearances indicate that the art of music is entering upon a period the most momentous of its existence, a period of transition more radical than when it was emerging from the Greek modes; a period perhaps of storm and stress, of morbid and eccentric individualism; a period like that which almost overwhelmed literature in the early days of Goethe and Schiller; or, perhaps, a period of real progress; but, in either event, a period from which it will come forth an art far different from that of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Wagner.
Because progressive, the human mind will not regard its greatest work with a complacency inimical to further effort. Ever it fashions and re-fashions, achieving yesterday, failing to-day, and then more than retrieving on some fortunate morrow. Strange doings and sayings are rife in the musical world of the present. Denying the validity of fixed key, Claude Debussy begins and ends his tone creations anywhere within the limit of the chromatic scale. Max Reger teaches the intimate fellowship of the entire twenty-four keys, while Richard Strauss has well-nigh outgrown the twelve semitones of our time-honored gamut which must be enlarged if it would meet the needs of his successors. It is the opinion of many that, in this event, the art of music will be merged in what we shall here call the art of sound. Concerning this realistic art, this art to be, let us explain briefly that, whereas the word sound signifies all that the ear cognizes, whether as euphony, cacophony or mere noise, yet, for sound to attain to the status of an art, art must endow with definite and adequate purpose not only euphony, but also every other sound, including mere noise.