for Florestan, she would no sooner get
him home than she would ask him how he came to be such a fool as to
get into Pizarro's clutches. Anyhow, Ternina's conception of Leonora
as a mixture of the contemptible will-less German haus-frau with the
strong-willed woman of action, was to me a mixture of contradictions.
Yet, despite all these things, the opera made the deep impression it
does and always will make.

That impression is due entirely to the music and not to the drama.
Dramatic music, in the sense that Mozart's music, and Wagner's, is
dramatic, it is not. There is not the slightest attempt at
characterisation--not even such small characterisation as Mozart
secured in his "La ci darem," with Zerlina's little fluttering,
agitated phrases. Nor, in the lighter portions, is there a trace of
Mozart's divine intoxicating laughter, of the sweet sad laugh with
which he met the griefs life brought him. There is none of Mozart's
sunlight, his delicious, fresh, early morning sunlight, in Beethoven's
music; when he wrote such a number as the first duet, intended to be
gracefully semi-humorous, he was merely heavy, clumsy, dull. But when
the worst has been said, when one has writhed under the recollection
of an adipose prima donna fooling with bear-like skittishness a German
tenor whose figure and face bewray the lager habit, when one has
shuddered to remember the long-winded idiotic dialogue, the fact
remains firmly set in one's mind that one has stood before a gigantic
work of art--a work whose every defect is redeemed by its overwhelming
power and beauty and pathos. There has never been, nor does it seem
possible there ever will be, a finer scene written than the dungeon
scene. It begins with the low, soft, throbbing of the strings, then
there is the sinister thunderous roll of the double basses; then the
old man quietly tells Leonora to hurry on with the digging of the
grave, and Leonora replies (against that wondrous phrase of the
oboes). After that, the old man continues to grumble; the dull
threatening thunder of the basses continues; and Leonora, half
terrified, tries to see whether the sleeping prisoner is her husband.
Then abruptly her courage rises; her short broken phrases are
abandoned; and to a great sweeping melody she declares that, whoever
the prisoner may be, she will free him. These twenty bars are as
great music as anything in the world: they even leave Senta's
declaration in the "Dutchman" far behind; they