its pathos is the feeling of a remoter time, the feeling that it all happened in ages that are past, the feeling for “old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago.”  This sense of the past, the historic sense—­call it what you will—­was thus strong in Wagner at this early period, and it grew even stronger later on, finding its most passionate expression in Tristan and its loveliest expression in the Mastersingers.  The faculty to shape pregnant musical themes is the stamp of the great master.  The early men are supposed to have “taken church melodies” and worked them up into masses:  what they did was to take meaningless strings of notes, bare suggestions, and give them form and meaning by means of rhythm (for only boobies talk of the old church music not possessing rhythm).  The later composers sometimes followed the same procedure—­which is equivalent to a sculptor “taking” a block of marble and hewing out a statue; but more and more they trusted to their own imaginations.  In either case the “mighty line” results; and there is not a great composition in the world which has not great themes; and, vice versa, when the themes are trivial the work evolved from them is invariably trivial.  I see modern works full of cleverness and colour:  I do not waste much time on them; there cannot be anything in them, and they will not survive.  Along with some weak motives—­or, to be more accurate, motives which are musically weak but dramatically a help—­Wagner has a huge list of tremendous ones, each a landmark.  However, this by way of digression.

Music evolved from this ballad forms, as I have said, the structural outline of the opera.  The overture is almost entirely shaped out of it, being one of that sort which is supposed to foreshadow the opera, to tell the tale in music before we see it enacted on the stage.  From the Dutchman onward Wagner nearly always constructed his introductions—­whether to whole operas or to single acts or even scenes—­on this plan, largely discarding the purely architectural forms.  Here, for example, we have at the outset the blind fury of the tempest, taken and developed from (n), with the Dutchman theme.  The storm reaches its height, and there is a brief lull, and Vanderdecken seems to dream of a possible redeemer; the elements immediately rage again, with the wind screaming fiercely through sails and ropes, and waves crashing against the ship’s sides; he yearns for rest (k), seems to implore the Almighty to send the Day of Judgment; and at length the Senta motive enters triumphantly, and with the redemption of the wanderer the thing ends.  That, one can see, is the chain of incidents Wagner has translated into tones, or illustrated with tones; but as a prelude to the opera, it is the atmosphere of the sea that counts:  the roar of the billows, the “hui!” of the wind, the dashing and plunging.  When the curtain rises the storm goes on while Daland’s men, with their hoarse “Yo-ho-ho,” add