"Anarchy! Hypocrisy! Back to antiquity! Dash to the extreme left! Damocles' sword of beauty! Degeneration! Regeneration! Pseudo-music! Celestial super-music! Hellish discords! - What a fine thing the slogan is, forsooth! It works like effervescent lemonade tablets; one sets them foaming according to his personal taste and regales himself and others, but more especially posterity, who will wonder how it was possible to label the latest querelle des bouffons with the poet Henckell's saying about our "mighty age." Besides, it is really comical how that repellantly-attractive young lady Salome is all at once shouldered with the responsibility for ideas which may have worn the charm of novelty some ten years ago. One surveying this scrimmage from a distance feels tempted to provide a prelude to Master Draeseke's now so familiar dictum: Confusion over the "confusion in music.""In all this there is nothing mighty, save intolerance; while the angle of vision is of the narrowest. So hedged in by the bounds of the realm, that through it all one can hear the too-importunate cry "Neu-Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!" (or "Beneath criticism!" as the case may be). In a word, it would seem that in Germany itself only a few members of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein might be mentioned who, by and large, have no cause to complain of the public, the critics, and the publishers. A sufficient reason for the more tolerant attitude of the antipodean Dioscuri Strauss and Reger, as contrasted with their opponents, towards even Mendelssohn, who, after all, was not wholly without talent."Now, what is all this hubbub about? At bottom, merely whether the so-called immutable canons of beauty in art permit one to write music as the laws of his being dictate. Whereupon music-history and musical aesthetics are forthwith brought into action - nota bene, by both sides - in order to solve a problem which is none. This prompts me to quote a paradox launched by the poet Georg Fuchs: "There is no art; there are only artists." For me there is far more wisdom in this flash of wit than in dogmas on the limitations and the true sphere of music, parading in their profundity as the sole means of grace. The artist has a right to express himself in tones as the spirit may move. Whoever, for any reason, finds no pleasure in the product, has an equal right to vent his displeasure through speech or pen, but he must not set up to be an art-pontiff or art-bailiff. No one man, not even a Bach, a Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, or Brahms, has yet possessed a monopoly in the development of music. No more have Richard Strauss, or Reger, and those who swell their train for reasons intrinsic or extrinsic. Each one simply contributes what his nature, influenced by the Zeitgeist, demands of him. Whether this is done in the flush of youthful zeal or with the cooler calculation of age, is unimportant. Nor does it matter whether he gains wealth and fame at a bound, or grows old hungering before his seed brings its harvest, or even has to await the music-historian, who in certain circles is painted as a kind of Satan with queue à la chinoise."