Undoubtedly, the enormous expansion of musical means of expression was a contributing factor. This expansion was brought about by instrument making, instrumental virtuosity, and, in connection with them, orchestration. A factor of even greater importance, however, was the art of singing, arguably the most important part of music. While the quest for deepening, for intellectualism resulted in a deplorable decline in vocal virtuosity, our vocal music was nevertheless saved from a complete fall backwards. Now it is vocal music that has achieved the most significant successes of our day, and not only in “musical drama,” but also in lyric and epic song. That purely instrumental music is becoming less important than vocal music may relate to the fact that our entire musical art strives toward character to a greater degree than it did in the past, and that it often believes that character cannot do without the supporting and explanatory word. A glance at our “program music” may provide one more piece of evidence in support of this view. It is probably neither as novel nor as dependent as its critics claim, nor does it correspond closely enough to the actual essence of instrumental music to be regarded as a perfect example of the entire genre.
The art of successive beholding, i.e. today’s dance, ranks immeasurably lower in its development. In fact, one can hardly speak in terms of development. After all, it is missing perhaps the most important prerequisite for any type of development: the means for recording its own creations, which the other two temporal arts have in the form of letters and musical notes. Whereas in these two arts, the achievements of high culture have far surpassed folk culture, which is unaware of its connection to the before and the after, in the art of dance we are encountering the opposite: national folk dances come much closer to the nature of art than the utterly inartistic dances of the “salon.” With very few exceptions, our ballet is an artistic nothingness as well. Other nations seem to have lost less of their appreciation for the beauty and character of expression than ours, which viewed an art form so new to Germany – one to which we were introduced by the English performances of the “Mikado” – with pleasure and acknowledgment. But that view, especially among the critics, was entirely without substance. Only with respect to the expressive, auxiliary art of drama, the art of actors, are things different. Here, two tendencies continue to develop side by side: one seeks to emphasize beauty in its achievements, the other character portrayal. The two schools are denoted, not entirely correctly, as the “idealistic” and the “realistic.” As in all the other arts, the latter is gaining in strength all the time.
It is impossible to render in a few broad strokes even the most cursory outline of the vague state of poetry today. In the literature of former periods, we could definitively identify “Romanticism,” “Young Germany,” and “Classicism” as distinct currents. But our poetry is like a point in the sea where all the various currents fight, impede, or jostle each other at one moment, and then become all mixed up the next: We cannot discern individual elements. Quite often, it proves impossible to classify the writers who are in their prime according to objective, aesthetic, or psychological commonalities.
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