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The Life, Work, and Opinions of Heinrich Heine
The Life Work and Opinions of Heinrich Heine Author:William Stigand Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. MTTSIO AND MUSICAL CRITICISM. Avoiding, then, the office of yearly chronicler of the decline of painting, Heine turned his attention to music.... more » Music, in fact, in the decline of the art of poetry, began from that time to assume that overwhelming dominion over the public taste, which it has maintained up to the present hour—a dominion to which indeed, except during the periods of decline of its sister arts, it never does attain. Heine himself, in chronicling the musical triumphs of his day, did not fail to recognise this truth, and therefore it was somewhat a contre cceur that he undertook the office of musical critic at all. One does not like to seem ungrateful to an art to which all persons who have the ordinary supply of senses, and enjoy ordinary opportunities, are indebted for much exquisite pleasure; however, it argues no lack of appreciation of the work of a "Vattel or an Tide to assert that the art of a Vattel or an Ude is not precisely on the same level with that of a Dante or a Michael Angelo;—and music has this at least, in common with cookery, that it begins to affect us by physical modifications, and is in great part a sensual art, and just as the lower forms of cookery are are capable of being appreciated even by animals, so too the lower forms of music are capable of giving pleasure to birds, beasts, and even to reptiles. A gourmet, who is nothing else .but a gourmet, looks with something like indifference on all matters but matters of the cuisine', so, too, the exclusive devotees of music, being in the main persons of inferior intelligence and inferior culture, arrogate for music an importance among the arts out of all proportion to its merits or significance. If, too, there is one thing more patent than another with respect to music, it is that...« less