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.

XI

Certain Famous Oratorios

About the middle of the sixteenth century, San Filippo Neri, a zealous
Florentine priest, opened