Die Feen—­The Fairies—­is based on a version of the child’s tale of Beauty and the Beast, Gozzi’s La Donna Serpente.  In Gozzi’s form a lady is changed to a serpent:  the handsome and valiant prince comes along and all ends well.  Wagner had not then dreamed of the Nibelung’s Ring with its menagerie of nymphs who could sing under water, giants, dwarfs, bears, frogs, crocodiles, “wurms,” dragons and birds with the gift of articulate speech; and he would have nothing to do with the serpent.  The lady must be changed into a stone.  Further, Wagner had now got hold of the notion that haunted him for the rest of his life—­a notion he exploited for all it was worth, and a good deal more—­the notion that woman’s function on the globe is to “redeem” man.  So the prince changes the lady back from a stone to a woman, and then, like Goldsmith’s dog, to gain some private ends, goes mad.  The lady is equal to the occasion:  she promptly redeems him—­that is, cures him—­and all ends well.

Here, at worst, we have the picture, or series of pictures, demanded by Wagner’s genius; here also is a dramatic idea of sorts.  His imagination immediately flamed.  The music is not like that of the symphony, dry and barren wood:  on the contrary, it contains many passages of rare beauty and feeling.  There is little of the fairy-like in it.  To Wagner’s criticism of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, that here we had not fairies but gnats, one might retort that in his own opera we have not fairies but baby elephants at play.  But throughout there is a quality almost or quite new in music, a feeling for light, a strange, uncanny light.  It is worth noticing this, because it is just this sense of all-pervading light which marks off Lohengrin from all preceding operas.  The hint came, it goes without saying, from Weber; but there is a vast difference between the unearthly light of Weber and the fresh sweetness of Lohengrin, and here, in his first boyish exploit, we find Wagner trying to utilise in his own way Weber’s hint.

For a boy of twenty the opera is wonderfully well planned.  Whether, had it been written by Marschner, we should take the trouble to look at it twice is a question I contentedly leave others to solve.  But, as it is by Wagner, we do take the trouble to look at it many times, and the main thing we learn is that from the beginning the composer could write his best music for the theatre, while for the concert-room he could only grind out sluggish counterpoint.  In addition we may see that it is a work of much nobler artistic aim than Rienzi.  Preposterous as is the idea of a woman sacrificing herself to “save” a man, it is an idea, and it stirred the depths of young Wagner’s emotional nature.  In Rienzi, as we shall see in a later chapter, there is no idea of any sort; that opera did not spring from his heart, nor, properly speaking, from his head, but simply and wholly from a hungry desire for fame and fortune.