the Wifely Woman Artist, the singer with no voice, nor beauty, nor manners, but with a high character for correct morality, and a pressure of sentimentality that would move a traction-engine.  I remember seeing it played a few years ago, and can never forget a Leonora of sixteen stones, steadily singing out of tune, in the first act professing with profuse perspiration her devotion to her husband (whose weight was rather less than half hers), and in the second act nearly crushing the poor gentleman by throwing herself on him to show him that she was for ever his.  A recent performance at Covent Garden, arranged specially, I understand, for Ternina, was not nearly so bad as that; but still Ternina scared me horribly with the enormous force of her Wifely Ardour.  It may be that German women are more demonstrative than English women in public; but, for my poor part, too much public affection between man and wife always strikes me as a little false.  Besides, the grand characteristic of Leonora is not that she loves her husband—­lots of women do that, and manage to love other people’s husbands also—­but that, driven at first by affection and afterwards by purely human compassion, she is capable of rising to the heroic point of doing in life what she feels she must do.  Of course she may have been an abnormal combination of the Wifely Woman with the heroic woman; but one cannot help thinking that probably she was not—­that however strong her affection for Florestan, she would no sooner get him home than she would ask him how he came to be such a fool as to get into Pizarro’s clutches.  Anyhow, Ternina’s conception of Leonora as a mixture of the contemptible will-less German haus-frau with the strong-willed woman of action, was to me a mixture of contradictions.  Yet, despite all these things, the opera made the deep impression it does and always will make.

That impression is due entirely to the music and not to the drama.  Dramatic music, in the sense that Mozart’s music, and Wagner’s, is dramatic, it is not.  There is not the slightest attempt at characterisation—­not even such small characterisation as Mozart secured in his “La ci darem,” with Zerlina’s little fluttering, agitated phrases.  Nor, in the lighter portions, is there a trace of Mozart’s divine intoxicating laughter, of the sweet sad laugh with which he met the griefs life brought him.  There is none of Mozart’s sunlight, his delicious, fresh, early morning sunlight, in Beethoven’s music; when he wrote such a number as the first duet, intended to be gracefully semi-humorous, he was merely heavy, clumsy, dull.  But when the worst has been said, when one has writhed under the recollection of an adipose prima donna fooling with bear-like skittishness a German tenor whose figure and face bewray the lager habit, when one has shuddered to remember the long-winded idiotic dialogue, the fact remains firmly set in one’s mind that one has stood before a gigantic work of art—­a work whose every defect is redeemed