but it is hard to forgive the stupidity that still makes the great composer appear ridiculous thirty years after his death.  This legend of Meyerbeer borrowing or thieving from Wagner is sheer rubbish; in all Wagner’s music there is not a bar which could have been of use to Meyerbeer.  The most rowdy tunes in Rienzi he could easily equal:  anything ever so remotely approaching the beautiful he did not want.  What! was he to run the chance of failure by writing, or copying, one really expressive measure?

It needed the cruel disillusionment of the Paris days, it needed also the time needful for Wagner’s normal growth, before he was driven to see that the music-drama, or something that ultimately evolved itself into the music-drama, was the form that he needed for his deepest utterances. Rienzi is old-fashioned opera, barefaced, blatant and unashamed.  Wagner wanted effective airs, duets, trios, choruses and marches; and no libretto-monger ever went to work in a more deliberate, matter-of-fact and business-like way to provide opportunities for these.  Both in Die Feen and in Das Liebesverbot his purpose had been more definitely, more disinterestedly, artistic.  Now he set to work to manufacture for the Paris market.  The subject was eminently suitable.  The personage Rienzi was intended for a great, heroic figure and the music written for a brilliant tenor.  The indispensable love-element was provided by Irene, a soprano (though it can well be sung by a mezzo), and Adriano, son of a patrician, a mezzo-soprano (almost a contralto part)—­which would be amazing did we not know Wagner’s aim.  A woman-man carries us back to the days of Handel and Gluck, and shows how little sincere Wagner was at the time, how absorbingly bent he was on tickling the ears of the Parisians.  The villains of the piece, Colonna and Orsini, with their patrician followers, are true stage-villains of melodrama in some situations—­proud, determined, unsparing; but in other situations they whine in a very un-patrician-like way for mercy.  In truth, Wagner was determined to give all the singers a chance of showing off their voices and their skill in every kind of music—­heroic or noisy, pathetic or whining, brave and obstreperous or feebly tender.  A few minutes’ consideration of the story as Wagner lays it before us, and the music he sets to it, will show that every character in the opera is an unhuman chameleon.  It is not worth while spending the reader’s time on an exhaustive analysis.  We shall have enough to do of that kind of thing when we come to the beginning of Wagner’s riper work, the Dutchman:  time and space would only be wasted if we examined Rienzi very closely.