to the Mastersinger: it is a piece of magnificent, gorgeous, heavy,
latter-day art, which has the pride to presuppose two centuries of music
as still living, in order that it may be understood:--it is an honour
to Germans that such a pride did not miscalculate! What flavours
and forces, what seasons and climes do we not find mingled in it! It
impresses us at one time as ancient, at another time as foreign, bitter,
and too modern, it is as arbitrary as it is pompously traditional, it
is not infrequently roguish, still oftener rough and coarse--it has fire
and courage, and at the same time the loose, dun-coloured skin of fruits
which ripen too late. It flows broad and full: and suddenly there is a
moment of inexplicable hesitation, like a gap that opens between cause
and effect, an oppression that makes us dream, almost a nightmare; but
already it broadens and widens anew, the old stream of delight--the most
manifold delight,--of old and new happiness; including ESPECIALLY
the joy of the artist in himself, which he refuses to conceal, his
astonished, happy cognizance of his mastery of the expedients here
employed, the new, newly acquired, imperfectly tested expedients of art
which he apparently betrays to us. All in all, however, no beauty, no
South, nothing of the delicate southern clearness of the sky, nothing
of grace, no dance, hardly a will to logic; a certain clumsiness even,
which is also emphasized, as though the artist wished to say to us: "It
is part of my intention"; a cumbersome drapery, something arbitrarily
barbaric and ceremonious, a flirring of learned and venerable conceits
and witticisms; something German in the best and worst sense of
the word, something in the German style, manifold, formless, and
inexhaustible; a certain German potency and super-plenitude of
soul, which is not afraid to hide itself under the RAFFINEMENTS of
decadence--which, perhaps, feels itself most at ease there; a real,
genuine token of the German soul, which is at the same time young and
aged, too ripe and yet still too rich in futurity. This kind of music
expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day
before yesterday and the day after tomorrow--THEY HAVE AS YET NO TODAY.