s
both the center and the object of creation. For it called man the
consonance and nature the dissonance. The octave and the fifth, the
bases of the system, are of course, to be found only in the human voice.
They are, roughly, the difference between the average male and the
average female voice, and the difference between the average soprano and
alto. It is upon those intervals that the C-major scale and its
twenty-three dependents are based. But with the coming of a conception
that no longer separated man from the rest of creation, and placed him
in it as a small part of it, brother to the animals and plants, to
everything that breathes, the old scale could no longer completely
express him. The modulations of the noises of wind and water, the
infinite gradations and complexes of sound to be heard on the
planisphere, seemed to ask him to include them, to become conscious of
them and reproduce them. He required other more subtle scales. And with
Wagner the monarchy of the C-major scale is at an end. "Tristan und
Isolde" and "Parsifal" are constructed upon a chromatic scale. The old
one has had to lose its privilege, to resign itself to becoming simply
one of a constantly growing many. If this step is not a colossal one, it
is still of immense importance. The musical worthies who ran about
wringing their hands after the first performance of each of Wagner's
works, and lamented laws monstrously broken, and traditions shattered,
were, for once, right. They gauged correctly from which direction the
wind was blowing. They probably heard, faintly piping in the distance,
the pentatonic scales of Moussorgsky and Debussy, the scales of
Scriabine and Strawinsky and Ornstein, the barbarous, exotic and African
scales of the future, the one hundred and thirteen scales of which
Busoni speaks. And to-day there are no longer musical rules, forbidden
harmonies, dissonances. Siegfried has broken them along with Wotan's
spear. East and West are near to merging once again. No doubt, had there
been no Wagner, the change would have arrived nevertheless. However, it
would have arrived more slowly. For what he did accomplish was the rapid
emptying of the old wine that still remained in the wineskin, the
preparation of the receptacle for the new vintage. He forced the new to
put in immediate appearance.

The full impact of these reforms, the full might of Wagner, we of our
generation doubtlessly never felt. They could have been felt only by the