In a lesser degree it is the same with us. Beethoven’s compositions were at first considered wild and lawless. Those who admired Mozart and Haydn could not endure him. Afterwards the world was educated up to his Ninth Symphony, but some of his later sonatas for pianoforte and violin were played by Mendelssohn and David in my hearing, and they both shrugged their shoulders, and thought that the old man had been no longer quite himself when he wrote them. We have grown into them, or up to them, and now many a young man is able to enjoy them, and to enjoy them honestly. I remember the time when Schumann’s songs were published at Leipzig, and the very same songs which now delight us were then by the best judges called curious, strange, interesting, promising, but no more. Yes, there is habit in music, and we are constantly passing through a musical education; nay, the time comes when our education seems finished, and we can learn and take in no more. I have passed through a long school. I began with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, lived on with Mendelssohn, rose to Schumann, and reached even Brahms; but I could never get beyond, I could never learn to enjoy Wagner except now and then in one of his lucid intervals. No doubt this is my fault and my loss, but surely the _vulgus profanum_ also has its rights and may protest against being tired instead of being refreshed and invigorated by music. Would Mendelssohn have admired Wagner? Would Beethoven have listened to his music, would Bach have tolerated it? Yet these were musicians too, though perhaps not sufficiently educated. To be honest, a great deal of Wagner’s music seems tiresome to me, and I do not see why it should ever end. My musical education began very early, so early that I cannot remember ever passing through any drudgery. As long as I remember I could play, and I was destined to become a musician, till I went to the University, and Mendelssohn advised me to keep to Greek and Latin. I was born and brought up in Dessau, a small German town in an oasis of oak-trees where the Elbe and the Mulde meet, a town then overflowing with music. Such towns exist no longer.