For there is in all music an hypnotic power which is able to
reduce the mind to a state of voluptuous submission.
The cause of the artistic success of _Pelleas et Melisande_ is of a more
specially French character, and marks a reaction that is at once
legitimate, natural, and inevitable; I would even say it is vital--a
reaction of French genius against foreign art, and especially against
Wagnerian art and its awkward representatives in France.
Is the Wagnerian drama perfectly adapted to German genius? I do not
think so; but that is a question which I will leave German musicians to
decide. For ourselves, we have the right to assert that the form of
Wagnerian drama is antipathetic to the spirit of French people--to their
artistic taste, to their ideas about the theatre, and to their musical
feeling. This form may have forced itself upon us, and, by the right of
victorious genius, may have strongly influenced the French mind, and may
do so again; but nothing will ever make it anything but a stranger in
our land.
It is not necessary to dwell upon the differences of taste. The
Wagnerian ideal is, before everything else, an ideal of power.
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