MUSIC OF THE FUTURE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXIV, Issue 9166, 28 July 1890, Page 7

MUSIC OF THE FUTURE.

No matter what functions music may be called upon to perform (says a writer in “ ScribnerV’bwhether it be to appeal to our emotions and imagination as pure form and colour in the symphony or sonata, or to heighten and idealize the expressions o poetry in the song, the cantata, or the lyric drama, it would be contrary to every known law of nature for it to relinquish any principle of organic structure that has been evolved from its own substance and in accordance with its own laws. This or that particular musical form may become extinct and make way for others in the general and unceasing struggle for existence, and only the fittest will survive—and what is fit to-day may be unfit tomorrow. But the great principle of musical form and organism of some sort is eternal; and, if we may trust the lesson of the past, the evolution of the future will still be one from simpler to more complex and more highly organised forms. Just as the lack of musical organism in the old Florentine stile rappresentativo was soon felt to be a weakness, aiid not a source of strength, in the lyric drama, so will the similar lack of musical organism in the Wagnerian musicdrama be found to be a weakness, and in time be cured by a new formal evolution of some sort. Wagner’s famous dictum, that the composer in lyric drama must remember not to be too musical, will give way to Yon Balow’s far truer and profonnder counter apothegm, that a composer cannot, in any case, possibly be musical enough. A certain German critic once said that whatever might be thought of Wagner, ho was indisputably the gate through which the future path of the lyric drama lay. Yes, but the lyric drama must pass through this gate; stop at it it cannot.