The clumsiness of the music is due to several causes.  He modelled it, he says, upon three composers, Beethoven, Spontini and Marschner—­the second and third being by far the more potent influences.  Now, gracefulness is not a characteristic of either of them.  Then we must consider that Wagner was not yet one-tenth fully grown, and it is the hobbledehoy who is so heavy on his feet, not the athlete with all his muscles completely trained:  Wagner needed years of training before he gained the sure, light touch of Lohengrin and the Mastersingers.  His very deadly earnestness over the “lesson” of his opera and his desire to express his feeling accurately and logically led to his overweighting small melodies with ponderous harmonies.  The orchestration of the day was heavy.  The art of Mozart had been forgotten; Weber scored cumbrously—­as was inevitable; Spontini and Marschner scored cumbrously also, partly because they could not help it, partly because they wanted to fill the theatre with sound.  Wagner naturally followed them.  But it may be noted that the orchestration of The Fairies is not so widely different from that of the Faust overture composed a short while afterwards.  A sense of the contrasts to be obtained by alternating word-wind and strings is peculiarly his.  Mozart and Beethoven had alternated them, but on the simple plan adopted in their violin sonatas:  in those sonatas the violin is given a passage and the piano accompanies, then the same passage is given to the piano and the violin accompanies; in all the symphonies of Mozart, and the earlier ones of Beethoven, virtually the same plan is followed, strings and wind standing for violin and piano.  Wagner from the first discarded this mechanical notion; wind and strings are played off against one another, but there are none of these mechanical alternations, one holding the bat while the other has the ball.  On the whole The Fairies is very beautifully scored.

CHAPTER V

PARIS

I

The late Sir Charles Halle, probably retailing a story he had heard, relates in his reminiscences that when Heine heard of a young German musician coming from Russia to Paris to try his luck with an empty pocket, a half-finished opera and a few introductions from Meyerbeer—­amongst them one to a bankrupt theatre—­he clasped his hands and raised his eyes to heaven, in silent adoration before such unbounded and naive self-confidence; and probably he had not then learnt the whole truth of the matter.  The journey from Riga, via the Russian frontier into Germany, and thence by Pillau, the Baltic, the North Sea, London, the Channel and Boulogne, is surely the maddest, most fantastic dream ever turned into a reality.  That he turned the dream into a reality shows how completely Wagner’s character was now formed:  in no essential does the Wagner who built Bayreuth in the ’seventies differ from the Wagner of ’39.  He had unshakable tenacity of purpose and perfect faith in his own genius; he was absolutely sure he could accomplish the impossible; he took the wildest risks.  As a creative artist his development had just begun; but the qualities which were in after years to enable him to force his creations on an indifferent world were all there, ripe and strong.