The name is absent

138         Lecture on Music

artist without contracting either his personality or his heri-
tage. Relations of this sort in works of some of my prede-
cessors or contemporaries I shall be pointing out later on in
this lecture. It is very important to estimate these influences
carefully, inasmuch as they may be of good or ill effect,
depending upon the quality of the influence and even more
upon the strength of the personality subjected to them.
For example, the influence of Liszt on Wagner was alto-
gether considerable, and yet the personality of the latter
was in no way impaired, despite the generous way in which
he used the artistic heritage of his father-in-law. The the-
matic influence of Liszt on Wagner is certainly more than
obvious, but the æsthetie of Wagner, however extensive,
is essentially individual. Another significant influence, some-
what unique, and deriving at least partially from Chabrier,
is that of Eric Satie, which has had appreciable effect upon
Debussy, myself, and indeed most of the modern French
composers. Satie was possessed of an extremely keen intel-
ligence. His was the inventor’s mind par excellence. He was
a great experimenter. His experiments may never have
reached the degree of development or realization attained
by Liszt; but, alike in multiplicity and importance, these
experiments have been of inestimable value. Simply and
ingeniously Satie pointed the way, but as soon as another
musician took to the trail he had indicated, Satie would
immediately change his own orientation and without hesi-
tation open up still another path to new fields of experi-
mentation. He thus became the inspiration of countless pro-
gressive tendencies; and while he himself may, perhaps,
never have wrought out of his own discoveries a single com-
plete work of art, nevertheless we have to-day many such
works which might not have come into existence if Satie
had never lived. This influence of his was not in the least

<<   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   >>

More intriguing information