Liszt used to say:  “I only value people by what they are to Wagner.”  There is no estimating the value of Wagner to those who came after him.  He was not satisfied, we are told, with either the melody of the Italians or the rhetorical excesses of the French.  The music of Beethoven was his ideal, and the dramas of Shakespeare, whose work, to his mind, compared with the early Greek plays, was like a scene in nature in comparison with a piece of architecture.  Mme. de Stael called beautiful architecture “frozen music.”  It was just this architectural, frozen, congealed condition that Wagner wished to overcome, without running into any frivolities.  He was in every sense a living, breathing man, and his work is pervaded by this virile, life-like quality.  In his first youthful attempt at drama, forty-two persons perished in the development of the plot and most of them had to be brought back as ghosts to enable him to complete the piece.  Now, however, one is haunted by the faithfulness to life of his creations, not by the ghosts of his slaughtered victims, and an aspiring young composer who adored him could not help imbibing some of his power.

Wagner thought that the musician should write his own lines in opera or song, and conceived and mastered a new form, taking poetry into music just as Sidney Lanier took music into poetry in his “Science of English Verse.”  Wagner also thought that because of the exactness of musical science, a composer became practically the actor of each of his parts, while the dramatic author could never be sure what meaning would be read into his lines.

The native poetic temperament of MacDowell and his almost invariable use of lines, figures or stanzas of poetry as inspiration in composition leads one to believe that he would have attempted opera when he had grown to it.  This was one of the few musical forms that he did not essay.  Perhaps he was of the opinion of Beethoven, as Wagner conceived him, who said when speaking of opera:  “The man who created a true musical drama would be looked upon as a fool—­and would be one in very truth if he did not keep such a thing to himself, but wanted to bring it before the public.”

MacDowell is frequently called a mystic, and most of his efforts breathe the Celtic spirit, which is full of melancholy, romance and tenderness.  Ghosts creep through their pages and wandering, restless spirits call from his most characteristic harmonies.  Wagner was a mystic at sixteen, dwelling largely in the abstract, but grew out of this, through varied experience, into an active philosopher, with every objective faculty on the alert, and thus escaped, perhaps, the fate of MacDowell.