Progress has been very much more rapid during the last twenty-five years than in any other period of the century. Indeed, so wonderfully has been the revolution in public taste effected by improved educational opportunities and the more artistic and expressive style of singing and playing introduced by the Wagnerian school, that musical art now finds itself in a completely new atmosphere, and hope leaps out, probably asking too much of the immediate future. The great lesson that requires to be brought home at the present time to all concerned, directly or indirectly, with musical affairs is that music is one of the fine arts, that it is subject to the laws of art and no others. This seems a painfully obvious principle when stated, but how rarely does anyone act on it! We find any number of persons pursuing music as a sport, others as a business, others as a mild discipline for children--a kind of drill,--others again as a learned subject, but very few as an art. The first result of mastering this lesson would be the shaking off of fixed ideas, such as that every composer must play the organ and write church music. Chopin wrote nothing but pianoforte pieces, yet his fame is undying, and much more is heard of his music now--fifty years after his death--than ever before, while plenty of composers whose works include voluminous compositions for choir and orchestra are absolutely forgotten in their own lifetime. The real artist is distinguished from other men above all by being enamoured of perfection. He finds what he can do and rests satisfied with doing that, whether it be a great thing or a small, whether it be one thing or many. CHAPTER XIII. DR. HANS RICHTER. (_October 20, 1897._) The genius of musical interpretation is a phenomenon of modern times. Beethoven marks the end of that great symphonic period which begins with Haydn, and though seventy years before the production of Beethoven's greatest symphony, Joseph Haydn had been drilling the little Esterhazy orchestra and trying to secure satisfactory performances, yet to the end of Beethoven's time the most important orchestras were usually filled up with amateurs for those special occasions on which a symphony was to be performed. It seems certain that the notion of a rendering actually corresponding to a symphonic composer's ideal intentions never dawned on musicians as a practical possibility till long after the greatest of symphonic composers was dead and buried. Beethoven, no less than Sebastian Bach, often wrote for the future--not even for the next generation, but for the distant future. And Mendelssohn, who re-discovered Sebastian Bach and did so much to stir up the lethargy of his musical contemporaries and re-awaken interest in the great works of the past--did not Mendelssohn announce, as a general principle for the guidance of conductors, that they should beware of slow _tempi_, and take everything at a good pace, so that the faults of phrasing might not be too obvious?