r can hardly any
longer, like Schumann in his setting of Heine's 'Das ist ein Floeten und
Geigen', afford to stultify great poetry by quoting from memory and
getting the adjectives deplorably wrong. Nor can he, like Beethoven in
'Adelaide' and the 'Entfernte Geliebte' cycle, let himself weave musical
structures many sizes too large for the proper structure of the words,
which have consequently to be repeated over and over again with very
little regard for poetical or even common sense. Schumann and Beethoven,
especially the former, were culturally very far from narrow-minded men;
but there was not in their days any general cultural pressure
sufficiently strong to influence them as composers. Now, the pressure is
so strong that few can resist. Most composers have now fully learned
their lesson of a fitting politeness towards their
poet-colleagues--learned it in the main, so far as not intuitively, from
the high examples set by Wolf and the modern French school--and have,
moreover, come to recognize the duty of setting such words as may be fit
not only to be sung but to be read, a duty shockingly neglected by many
of the greatest geniuses in musical history.

And the cultural pressure has gone farther than this. Not only has the
increasing complexity of life broadened the musician's personal outlook,
professional or unprofessional: it has also modified, whether for better
or for worse, the outlook of the music itself. We may conveniently
divide all music into two great classes: 'absolute' music, in which the
composer appeals to the listener through the direct medium of the pure
sound and that alone; and 'applied' music, in which the appeal is more
or less conditioned by words, either explicit or implicit by
association, or by bodily movement of some kind, dramatic or not, or by
any other non-musical factor that affects the nature of the composer's
thought and the method of its presentation. Up to the present
generation, instrumental music, unconnected with the stage, has been
virtually identifiable with absolute music; there are a handful of
exceptions--sporadic pieces, usually though not invariably thrown off in
composers' relatively easy-going moods, and an isolated figure or two of
serious revolt, like Berlioz and Liszt--but they only serve to prove
the rule. Now, this identification is far from holding good. More
consciously than ever before, instrumental music is straining beyond its
own special domain and asking for