Not even Wagner had an influence on the new age greater than yours, more largely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the good friend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntax and balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vague regions, the _terra incognita_ of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its general, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to the romantic period, your conviction that the content conditions the form of every piece makes you the link between classic and modern musical art. The symphonic poem, whether or not it originates in the overtures of Beethoven, is mainly your handiwork, since although you yourself were not sufficiently free of the classic formulas to create a symphonic form entirely programmatic, as Strauss has subsequently done, you nevertheless gave him the hint whereby he has profited most. The impressionists, too, seem to stem from you. The little piece called "Les jeux d'eau de La Villa d'Este" seems not a little to anticipate their style. And although you were not responsible for the music of the nationalistic Russian school, the robust, colorful barbarian in you nevertheless made you welcome and encourage their work. It made you write to Borodin and Moussorgsky those cordial letters which pleased them so much. For at that time they were but obscure workmen, while you were the very prince of musicians. Indeed, nothing is more princely, nothing better reveals the amplitude, the generosity of your spirit, than your relations with your fellow craftsmen. Artists are oftentimes so petty in their conduct toward each other that it is indeed refreshing to read with what infallible kindness you treated so many composers less fortunately situated than yourself. And not only Wagner and Cesar Franck benefited by your good deeds. Many obscurer and younger men, poor Edward MacDowell, for instance, knew what it was to receive cordial and commendatory letters from you, to be assisted by you in their careers, to have their compositions brought to performance by the best German orchestras through your aid. And you had no conceit in you, smilingly referred to your symphonic poems as "Gartenmusik," and replied to Wagner, when he informed you that he had stolen such and such a theme from you, "Thank goodness, now it will at least be heard!" Had you, O Liszt, expressed the nobility of your nature as purely in your composition as you expressed it in your social relations, we could have complained of no mountainous rubble, no squalor marring the perfect splendor of your figure.