As qualifying factors, however, in the influence which he was to exert upon the future, there were two facts in general which characterized him: his profession, which was usually that of pianist and piano teacher, and his anathematization of Wagner. While Beethoven was his musical god, in his capacity of pianist he also spread the influence of that side of the romantic movement which perpetuated, and developed, the tradition of piano music. Thus Schumann and Chopin, and their contemporaries, came to a measurable fullness of appreciation in America at a time when Wagner was held to be a mad and dangerous musical anarchist. Quite aside from this group of circumstances, it was also true that nothing could be more remote from the American civilization of the time than the possibility of any semblance of the realization of Wagner's ideals. Opera was the most fitful and exotic of institutions, and the theatre in general, except for such occasional meteoric apparitions as Edwin Booth, was in a condition of the greatest crudity, as well as being under the ban of a puritanism which, fortunately, in these latter days, is beginning somewhat to relax its tenacity. Because of the unripeness of American life for a creative art of music, the influence of the early German invasion did not produce many composers. It had, however, implanted ideals which were to assume the greatest importance in the future. When the overwhelming Wagnerian flood at last arrived, in the splendid productions of the music-dramas under the direction of Seidl and the Damrosches, it found the ideals of the classical and romantic schools already well implanted; more than that, it found a rapidly increasing group of young composers who had arisen under the influence of those ideals. The result was that these composers, who did not share the prejudices of their Teutonic musical forbears, drank in with avidity the wonderful new harmonies of Wagner, and set about incorporating them, not in music-dramas, but in the sonatas and symphonies arising from the classical tradition, and all manner of free forms to which the romantic school had given birth. The Wagnerian harmonies were accepted, but the forms of the earlier movements were retained, except where the followers of Liszt ventured forth on scantily charted seas of formal emancipation. Similarly other new influences began to be felt, and Tschaikowsky, in a new symphonic emotionalism, and Brahms, in a new flowering of thematic development, gave encouragement in the retaining of earlier forms. The dual product of these various influences was, on the one hand, a romanticism which claimed both harmonic and formal freedom, and a neo-classicism which welcomed the new harmonic world opened up by Wagner, but inclined to cling to the forms of the classical epoch. I