But what of Brahms, one of the three great composers of the world? Incredible as it may seem, he is given a biography even shorter than that of Sir Arthur Sullivan! And Robert Franz, perhaps the greatest lyrical writer since Schubert, receives considerably less space than William Jackson. Richard Strauss is allotted only a column and two-thirds, about equal space with Charles Burney, the musical historian, and William Byrd; and in it we are given little idea of his greatness. In fact, the critic definitely says that it remains to be seen for what Strauss’s name will live! When one thinks of the tremendous influence which Strauss has had, and of the way in which he has altered the musical conceptions of the world, one can only wonder, astounded, why, in an encyclopædia as lengthy as the _Britannica_, he should be dismissed with so inadequate and inept a biography.
After such injustice in the case of Strauss, it does not astonish one to find that Max Bruch, one of the most noteworthy figures in modern German music, and Reinecke, an important composer and long a professor at the Leipsic Conservatory, should receive only thirty lines each. But the neglect of Strauss hardly prepared us for the brief and incomplete record which passes for Humperdinck’s biography—a biography shorter than that of Cramer, William Hawes, Henry Lazarus, the English clarinettist, and Henry Smart!
Mendelssohn, the great English idol, receives a biography out of all proportion to his importance—a biography twice as long as that of Brahms, and considerably longer than either Schumann’s or Schubert’s! And it is full of effulgent praise and more than intimates that Mendelssohn’s counterpoint was like Bach’s, that his sonata-form resembled Beethoven’s, and that he invented a new style no less original than Schubert’s! Remembering the parochial criterion by which the Encyclopædia’s editors judge art, we may perhaps account for this amazing partiality to Mendelssohn by the following ludicrous quotation from his biography: “His earnestness as a Christian needs no stronger testimony than that afforded by his own delineation of the character of St. Paul; but it is not too much to say that his heart and life were pure as those of a little child.”