is at Bayreuth and there, save for sacrilegious New York, alone, with the utmost splendour of mounting, interpreted by artists devoted heart and soul to its cause, and listened to by an audience of the elect assembled from the four corners of the earth, ‘Parsifal,’ so to speak, is as yet surrounded by a halo of almost unearthly splendour.  It is difficult to apply to it the ordinary canons of criticism.  One thing however, may safely be said, that it stands alone among works written for theatrical performance by reason of its absolute modernity coupled with a mystic fervour such as music has not known since the days of Palestrina.

Of Wagner’s work as a whole it is as yet too early to speak with certainty.  The beauty of his works, and the value of the system upon which they are founded, must still be to a certain extent a matter of individual taste.  One thing, at any rate, may safely be said:  he has altered the whole course of modern opera.  It is inconceivable that a work should now be written without traces more or less important of the musical system founded and developed by Richard Wagner.

CHAPTER XI

MODERN FRANCE

GOUNOD—­THOMAS—­BIZET—­SAINT
SAENS—­REYER—­MASSENET—­BRUNEA
U—­CHARPENTIER—­DEBUSSY

If one were set upon paradox, it would not be far from the truth to say that up to the middle of the nineteenth century the most famous French composers had been either German or Italian.  Certainly if Lulli, Gluck, Rossini and Meyerbeer—­to name only a few of the distinguished aliens who settled in Paris—­had never existed, French opera of the present day would be a very different thing from what it actually is.  Yet in spite of the strangely diverse personalities of the men who had most influence in shaping its destiny, modern French opera is an entity remarkable for completeness and homogeneity, fully alive to tendencies the most advanced, yet firmly founded upon the solid traditions of the past.

Gounod (1818-1893) was trained in the school of Meyerbeer, but his own sympathies drew him rather towards the serene perfection of Mozart.  The pure influence of that mighty master, combined with the strange mingling of sensuousness and mysticism which was the distinguishing trait of his own character, produced a musical personality of high intrinsic interest, and historically of great importance to the development of music.  If not the actual founder of modern French opera, Gounod is at least the source of its most pronounced characteristics.

His first opera, ‘Sapho’ (1851), a graceful version of the immortal story of the Lesbian poetess’s love and death, has never been really popular, but it is interesting as containing the germs of much that afterwards became characteristic in Gounod’s style.  In the final scene of Sappho’s suicide, the young composer surpassed himself, and struck a note of sensuous melancholy which was new to French