Taking him by and large, as the sailors say, Wagner is the most striking figure in the history of music. Whether the future will or will not accord to him the position granted by the musical world of the present—that of the greatest genius (though not the profoundest musician) the art has produced—he will remain fixed upon the records as the most commanding intellect that ever sought to express its thought and accomplish its purposes though the medium of music. His influence upon his contemporaries has been larger than that of any other master since the science of modern music began. One has only to study the latest operas of that real genius, Verdi, to perceive how one of the most gifted musical minds of our time was forced to yield to the convincing truth of Wagner’s ideas. As for those of less original force than Verdi, they have one and all—even Mascagni, who is as purely Italian as Wagner was purely Teutonic—been swayed by his irresistible influence. Even the symphonic writers have been guided by him, and no man can ever again write an orchestral score as if Wagner had not lived. The futile controversy about his theories and his style will probably be kept alive for some years by those who persistently refuse to remodel their inflexible conceptions of what ought to be after the splendid pattern of what is. But Wagner’s theories will live, for he was the fulfillment of the prophetic words of Herder on Gluck: “The progress of the century led us to a man, who, despising the frippery of wordless tones, perceived the necessity of an intimate connection of human feeling and of the myth itself with his tones. From that imperial height on which the ordinary musician boasts that poetry serves his art he stepped down and made his tones only serve the words of feeling, the action itself. He has emulators, and perhaps some one will soon outstrip him in zeal, overthrowing the whole shop of slashed and mangled opera-jingle, and erecting an Odeon, a consistently lyric edifice, in which poetry, music, action, and decoration unite in one.” [Illustration: N. J. Henderson.] [Illustration: THE ANIMATED FORGE MOVEMENT. ] [Illustration: PANTHEON OF GERMAN MUSICIANS (1740–1867.) _Reproduction of a painting by W. Lindenschmit._ ] [Illustration: Music in Germany] [Illustration: [Fleuron]] MUSIC IN GERMANY Germany, the foremost of musical nations, owes her present supremacy not only to the genius of her great masters, from Bach to Wagner, but also in a large degree to the native impulse of her people, who for centuries have been distinguished for their earnest love of music.