THE name of Wagner leads to program-music. This has been set up as a contrast to so-called "absolute" music, and these concepts have become so petrified that even persons of intelligence hold one or the other dogma, without recognition for a third possibility beyond and above the other two. In reality, program-music is precisely as one-sided and limited as that which is called absolute. In place of architectonic and symmetric formulas, instead of the relation of Tonic to Dominant, it has bound itself in the stays of a connecting poetic--sometimes even philosophic--program. * * * Every motive--so it seems to me--contains, like a seed, its life-germ within itself. From the different plant-seeds grow different families of plants, dissimilar in form, foliage, blossom, fruit, growth and color.[G] [G] "... Beethoven, dont les esquisses _thématiques ou élémentaires_ sont innombrables, mais qui, sitôt les thèmes trouvés, semble par cela même en avoir établi tout le développement ..." [Vincent d'Indy, in "César Franck."] Even each individual plant belonging to one and the same species assumes, in size, form and strength, a growth peculiar to itself. And so, in each motive, there lies the embryo of its fully developed form; each one must unfold itself differently, yet each obediently follows the law of eternal harmony. _This form is imperishable, though each be unlike every other._ * * * The motive in a composition with program bears within itself the same natural necessity; but it must, even in its earliest phase of development, renounce _its own proper mode of growth_ to mould--or, rather, twist--itself to fit the needs of the program. Thus turned aside, at the outset, from the path traced by nature, it finally arrives at a wholly unexpected climax, whither it has been led, not by its own organization, but by the way laid down in the program, or the action, or the philosophical idea.