o artistic meaning whatsoever, known as the recitative. In a
word, the opera was a mere ballad concert. The recitative was so
utterly foolish and meaningless, as a rule, that men like
Beethoven and Weber, when they composed music-dramas, abolished
it altogether, and composed what is known as "Singspiel"--that
is, a number of ballads connected simply by spoken words. (The
well-known Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are really Singspiels
in a lesser form.) Thus it is obvious that the meaning of the
opera--that is, a drama whose significance is made more clear by
the aid of music suitable to the situation in hand--had been
entirely lost sight of.

In the average French or Italian opera, or in the singspiels, all
that matters is a number of songs, ballads or arias--call them
what you will--entirely disconnected and quite destructive to the
continuity that must be the essence of every drama. This
continuity is an absolute necessity to every spoken play; imagine
the effect if Shakespeare or Ibsen had written little pieces of
rhyming verse joined up by any jumble of nonsensical prose!
Neglect of this fact led every opera composer before Wagner
astray. We can imagine a pre-Wagner composer telling his
librettist, "Now, mind you arrange that in certain parts the
words will allow me to put in arias or choruses." In short, the
situation was summed up in Wagner's famous phrase, "The means of
expression (music) has been made the end, while the end of
expression (the drama) has been made the means." Now this state
of affairs is clearly wrong. If there is no dramatic idea kept as
end to work to, then what is the use of writing opera at all? Why
not be content with song-cycles or ballads, or lieder like
Brahms's and Schumann's?

There are no divisions into aria and recitative in Wagner's
operas, but dramatic continuity is retained by the voices of the
characters singing music the succession of whose notes is
determined by the emotional requirements of the moment.
Meanwhile, the orchestra forms a sort of musical background by
giving forth music which exactly suits the dramatic situation.
The orchestra, in a word, as Wagner himself said of _Tristan und
Isolde_, forms an emotional tide on which the voice floats like a
boat on the waters. The essential releva