A wholesome reaction there may be against excess.  When Gluck dared to move the hearts of his hearers instead of tickling their ears, he achieved his purpose by positive beauty, without actual loss.  In this sense every work of art is a work of revolution.  So Wagner, especially in his earlier dramas,[A] by sheer sincerity and poetic directness, corrected a frivolous tradition of opera.  But when he grew destructive of melody and form, by theory and practice, he sank to the role of innovator, with pervading trait of stereotype, in the main merely adding to the lesser resources of the art.  His later works, though they contain episodes of overwhelming beauty, cannot have a place among the permanent classics, alone by reason of their excessive reiteration.

[Footnote A:  The “Flying Dutchman,” “Lohengrin” and “Tannhaeuser” seemed destined to survive Wagner’s later works.]

One of the most charming instances of this iconoclasm is the music of Claude Debussy.[A] In a way we are reminded of the first flash of Wagner’s later manner:  the same vagueness of tonality, though with a different complexion and temper.  Like the German, Debussy has his own novel use of instruments.  He is also a rebel against episodic melody.  Only, with Wagner the stand was more of theory than of practice.  His lyric inspiration was here too strong; otherwise with Debussy.  Each article of rebellion is more highly stressed in the French leader, save as to organic form, where the latter is far the stronger.  And finally the element of mannerism cannot be gainsaid in either composer.[B]

[Footnote A:  Born in 1862.]

[Footnote B:  Some recurring traits Wagner and Debussy have in common, such as the climactic chord of the ninth.  The melodic appoggiatura is as frequent in the earlier German as the augmented chord of the fifth in the later Frenchman.]

Among the special traits of Debussy’s harmonic manner is a mingling with the main chord of the third below.  There is a building downward, as it were.  The harmony, complete as it stands, seeks a lower foundation so that the plain tower (as it looked at first) is at the end a lofty minaret.  It is striking that a classic figure in French music should have stood, in the early eighteenth century, a champion of this idea, to be sure only in the domain of theory.  There is a touch of romance in the fate of a pioneer, rejected for his doctrine in one age, taken up in the art of two centuries later.[A]

[Footnote A:  Rameau, when the cyclopaedic spirit was first stirring and musical art was sounding for a scientific basis, insisted on the element of the third below, implying a tonic chord of 6, 5, 3.  Here he was opposed by Fetis, Fux and other theoretic authority; judgment was definitively rendered against him by contemporary opinion and prevailing tradition.  It cannot be said that the modern French practice has justified Rameau’s theory, since with all the charm of the enriched chord, there is ever a begging of the question of the ultimate root.]