I have, I say, heard it fairly often and beg to testify that it is a miracle of dullness.  The themes are not good of their sort, the sort being, as he said, the sort that are useful for contrapuntal working.  That working is coldly mechanical, and is not distinguished either by lightness or by sureness of touch.  A dozen of Mendelssohn’s pupils could have done as well or better.  In the andante their is neither grace nor feeling:  the music does not flow spontaneously, but is got along by a clockwork tick-tick rhythm.  The best stuff is in the finale.  Here we find at least sturdiness if not much character.

This criticism of his boyish work is not a disparagement of Wagner:  one might as well, indeed, disparage Shakespeare, or Beethoven, or the sun and all the stars in heaven.  The symphony tells us, as plainly as words could tell, two things.  First, that as far as craftsmanship is concerned he fell between two stools:  had his aim been lower, it would have been also less confused, and the result would have turned out better.  That is, had he thought only of composing a well-constructed symphony, with skilful, easy-running counterpoint, he might have produced a more obviously clever if more superficial work.  That aim was missed by the fact that the Wagner who knew Beethoven by heart was not at all content to achieve mere cleverness:  he, too, wanted to write a great symphony.  But that ambition also was vague and robbed of its force by his instinctive struggle to acquire a thorough technique.  So he showed himself neither a great poet-composer nor a contrapuntal adept.  The second fact so plainly stated in the symphony is that he had not discovered what was to be the real driving force of his invention throughout his creative career—­the inspiration of a dramatic or pictorial (not poetic) idea.  The poetic idea is the inspiration of the composer of pure, “absolute,” music—­the poetic idea which is interpenetrated by the musical idea, the musical idea that is interpenetrated by the poetic idea, the two being one and indivisible.  As this book proceeds the reader will see how, before Wagner could shape fine music at all, he needed the pictorial-dramatic-musical idea (if so cumbrous a phrase may be allowed).  From the very first he never succeeded in the attempt to compose pure music of notable quality.  As years went on he tried again and again, but only such things as the Kaisermarsch, the Huldigungsmarsch and the Siegfried Idyll are of any value, and these, we may note, were meant to be played in a quasi-theatrical environment.  Immense crowds, flags, waving banners, uniforms, flashing swords, snorting chargers and so on set Wagner to work on the first as surely as the picture of the Hall of Song suggested the march in Tannhaeuser; the same is the case with the second; the Siegfried Idyll, of course, was written for performance at the bedroom door or window of Madame Cosima on that lady’s birthday.  A distinct picture was in the composer’s mind’s-eye; and besides, the themes came out of an opera already composed.