Consummator

Aeschylus was, indeed, pre-eminently a religious poet. He derived from the teaching of his great master Pythagoras a sublime conception of the divine attributes, — the mysterious and inscrutable ways, the irresistible will, the inviolable majesty of God. He shrinks from impiety as the fertile source of every woe. But most especially does he dwell on the Omnipotence and the Justice of the Supreme Being. On these two points hangs a large portion of his theology; the helplessness of man, his inevitable fall sooner or later, when under the wrath of heaven ; the dependence of every event on the will of Zeus ; the facility with which he works out his own counsels ; the certainty of sin being ultimately punished. Zeus knows no superior, but only that Eternal Destiny which even he is compelled to obey. He is the Consummator (τέλειος) of all things with this reservation, that Fate or Necessity must have preordained the event which he brings to pass. "What is there," the poet asks, "which is accomplished to mortals without thee!".

The time was ripe and the consummators came: Dante in the south, Eckhart in the countries north of the Alps.

A great figure like Bach faces both ways, towards the past as well as to the future; others, like Palestrina, gather up in themselves all the efforts of the preceding generations leading up to them; they are the consummators of an era. And other revolutionary spirits, like Philip Emmanuel Bach, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky, will only look boldly forward from some lonely outpost; inventors and prophets, they are just as important and indispensable to music as the great consummators of the eras themselves.