Those were great days in which the foundation-stone was laid at Bayreuth. Days in which the creative philosopher of the stage threw his sceptre over the Ninth Symphony; days when choice spirits met together, who tremblingly passed through the moment in which they saw something never heard of become reality; days of a joyous intoxication when Liszt and Wagner embraced each other with tears; days that Nietzsche calls the happiest he had ever spent, when something brooded in the air that he could trace nowhere else--something ineffable but full of hope--those days, alas! return no more. In those days music, that music which the million greet with cheers of rapture, stood enthroned on the Stage, which gives to art its public hold upon the world. The living, new-creating music has to-day once more fled to the concert hall, to the haughty and more select rows of aristocratic amateurs who listen to the symphonic poems of Richard Strauss. These are tender and delicate creations beside the dramas of Wagner. They are elves, they elude us, and there are those, who see them not. We have been driven to them as the highest musical expressions of our time. Since the trumpet-notes of Bayreuth died away we have conducted our musical devotions on a smaller, more intimate scale. Already, beyond the concert hall, we see opening the private chamber, holiest of all, and the chamber music, which is to the music of the stage what etching is to painting. It is the old ebb and flow. As we passed from the single instrument to the orchestra, from Beethoven’s orchestra with its travail for expression to Wagner’s stage with its world-embracing aims, so we are now passing back from the stage to undiluted music first before thousands of listeners, then before hundreds only. And now, if I had my way, I would bring the pianoforte before a small audience, say of ten persons, not in the concert hall but in the home, where the artist may give his little concerts, in the fitting hour of twilight, playing to a company every one of whom he knows. Under such circumstances, indeed, one can implicitly trust himself to the _intimate_ character of the pianoforte. Then stream from it the sweet tones of the harp, then, like strings of pearls, come chains of roses from its notes, or Titanic forces seem to escape from it, and my soul lies wholly in the player’s finger-tips. Is it then that the piano is a contemptible instrument compared with the violin or the string-quartet? Do I then remember how it sings so hoarsely, and how its scales are so broken, and how the soul of its melody is so dead without the breath of the rising and falling tone?