The next German to write overtures with a deliberate purpose to foreshadow what followed was Carl Maria von Weber, whose greatest opera, “Der Freischuetz,” appeared in 1821.  The initial force of the German romantic school, he founded his operas on romantic themes, and depicted in tones the things of the weird, fantastic and elfish world that kindled his imagination.  He has been called the connecting link between Mozart and Wagner, and in many of his theories he anticipated the latter.  National to the core, he embodied in his music the finest qualities of the folk-song, and noble tone-painter that he was he excelled his predecessors in his employment of the orchestra as a means of dramatic characterization.

Richard Wagner was long regarded as the great iconoclast whose business it was to destroy all that had gone before him in art, but no one ever more profoundly reverenced Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Weber than he.  The public was persistently informed that his compositions were beyond ordinary comprehension, and yet designed, as they were, to picture man’s essential life, they have slowly but surely found their way to the popular heart.  It was the very essence of his musical dramatic creed that to have blood in its veins and sincerity in its soul art must come from the people and be addressed to the people.  He chose the national myth and hero tradition as the basis of his music-drama because of the universality of their content and application, and because he believed they reflected the German world-view.  Himself he regarded as the Siegfried whose mission it was to slay the dragon of sordid materialism and awaken the slumbering bride of German art.

Bach and Chopin had anticipated him in some of his most startling chord progressions.  The motives of Bach’s fugues and Beethoven’s sonatas and symphonies, and the so-called “leading motives” of the Frenchman, Hector Berlioz, had preceded his “typical motives.”  Moreover, the orchestration of Berlioz had been a precursor of his orchestral tone-coloring.  Nevertheless, everything he touched was so characteristically applied by him as to produce new impressions, and to emphasize the idea of music as a language.  So peculiarly were music and poetry blended in the delicate tissue of his genius that one seemed inseparable from the other.  United, he believed it to be their mission to inculcate high moral lessons of patriotism and love.

He gave the death-blow to an opera whose sole aim is to tickle the ear.  Many an exquisite melody of Rossini and other Italian composers will long continue to live, but their productions as wholes have mostly ceased to be satisfying to those of us who have Teutonic blood in our veins.  The Italian opera composer who holds the highest place to-day in the heart of the serious musician is that grand old man of music, Giuseppe Verdi, whose genius enabled him to yield four times to the spirit of the age, during his long career, and who in his ripe old age endeavored to give Italy what Wagner had given the German nation.