be admitted, is lamentable.  There was no Italian suppleness and grace in Wagner’s nature:  when he was in deadly earnest, and striving to express himself without thinking of models, he wrote gorgeous stuff; when the inspiration waned, or when he deluded himself with the belief that what he supposed to be Bellini-like tunes really expressed the feeling of the moment, then he gave us pages as dry and dreary as Spontini and Marschner at their worst.  Besides those I have already mentioned there are in the love duet—­if it can be called a love duet—­mere figurations over bar on bar on leaden-footed, heavy chords; and these figurations are not true melody.  These tunes in regular four-bar lengths are melody of an amorphous sort; only when they were tightened up, made truer, more pregnant—­in a word, when they were so shaped as to stand really and truly for the thought and feeling in the composer—­did they become the beautiful things we find in Lohengrin, foretelling the sublime things we find in Tristan.  Eric’s tunes are as colourless as Donizetti’s.  All this we may joyfully admit, knowing how much there is to be said on the other side, and seeing in the Dutchman only a foretaste of Wagner’s greatest work.  A really great work it assuredly is.  We have the magnificent sea-music, and, in spite of outer incoherences, the smell and atmosphere of the sea maintained to the last bar of the opera.  In his music at least Vanderdecken is a deeply tragic figure.  There is the ballad, by very far the finest in music; there is Senta’s declaration of faith.  Whenever it was possible for the composer to be inspired he instantly responded.  Had he not lived to write another note his memory would live by the Dutchman.  It is an enormous leap from Rienzi.  There brilliancy is attained by huge choruses and vigorous orchestration and rhythms that continually verge on the vulgar.  In the Dutchman it is the stuff and texture of the music that make the effect.  Play Rienzi on a piano, and you have nothing; play the Dutchman, and you have immediately the roar of the sea, the Dutchman’s loneliness and sadness, Senta’s exaltation.  I have spoken of Wagner having finished his apprenticeship when he went to Magdeburg, and in a sense he had; but perhaps in the fuller sense he finished it only with the Dutchman.  He made mistakes, and thanks largely to them, so mastered his own personal art that he was prepared to take another and a vaster leap—­from the Dutchman to Tannhaeuser.  He cast the slough of the old Italian opera form.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Some characteristics of his harmony and instrumentation will most conveniently be considered later.  For the present I wish to draw my reader’s attention rather to Wagner the musico-dramatist than to Wagner the technical musician.

CHAPTER VII

DRESDEN