Music is universal; Wagner’s operas, by the inherent necessities of speech, are necessarily and irrevocably Germanic.  “Les Maitres Chanteurs,” “The Dwarfs of Niebelheim,” “Elizabeta,” are impossibilities, whereas, for instance, Beethoven’s “Eroica” labours under no such disadvantage.  “Goodbye, My Dearest Swan,” invests part of “Lohengrin” with a certain grotesque colour that no one would ever dream of if there were no necessity for the singer to be tied down to the exigencies of palpable and certainly most materialistic language.  The thought in itself is beautiful, but the necessity for the words drags it into the mud.

This certainly shows the difference between the language of music and what is called articulate speech, the purely symbolic and artificial character of the latter, and the direct, unhampered utterance of the former.  Music can invariably heighten the poignancy of mere spoken words (which mean nothing in themselves), but words can but rarely, in fact I doubt whether they can ever, heighten the effect of musical declamation.  To my mind, listening to Wagner’s operas may be likened to watching a circus with three rings.  That containing the music should have our closest attention, for it offers the most wonderful sounds ever imagined by any man.  At the same time it is impossible for any human being not to have his attention often lured away to the other rings, in one of which Fricke’s rams vie with the bird and the dragon; or where the phantom ship seems as firmly fixed as the practical rainbow, which so closely betrays the carpenter.  In the other ring you can actually hear the dull jokes of Mimi and the Wanderer, or hear Walther explain that he has passed a comfortable night and slept well.

The music to these remarkable scenes, however, does not deign to stoop so low, but soars in wonderful poetry by itself, thus rejecting a union which, to speak in the jargon of our day, is one of the convincing symptoms of decadence; in other words, it springs from the same impulse as that which has produced the circus with three rings.

Summing up, I wish to state what I consider the four elements of music, namely, music that paints, music that suggests, music that actually speaks, and music that almost defies analysis, and is composed of the other three elements.

When we were considering the early works for harpsichord, I said that music could define certain things with quite reasonable exactitude.  Just as in the Egyptian hieroglyphics a wavy line stands for water, so it can in music, with the latitude that it can mean anything in nature that we might consider of the same genre.  Thus, the figure in Wagner’s “Waldweben” means in that instance waves of air, and we know it by the context.  His swaying figure of the “Prelude to Rheingold” is as plainly water as is the same figure used by Mendelssohn in his “Lovely Melusina.”  Not that Wagner plagiarized, but that he and Mendelssohn recognized the definiteness of musical suggestions; which is more than proved by their adopting the same musical ideas to indicate the same things.