itable; Spontini and
Marschner scored cumbrously also, partly because they could not help
it, partly because they wanted to fill the theatre with sound. Wagner
naturally followed them. But it may be noted that the orchestration of
_The Fairies_ is not so widely different from that of the _Faust_
overture composed a short while afterwards. A sense of the contrasts
to be obtained by alternating word-wind and strings is peculiarly
his. Mozart and Beethoven had alternated them, but on the simple plan
adopted in their violin sonatas: in those sonatas the violin is given
a passage and the piano accompanies, then the same passage is given to
the piano and the violin accompanies; in all the symphonies of Mozart,
and the earlier ones of Beethoven, virtually the same plan is
followed, strings and wind standing for violin and piano. Wagner from
the first discarded this mechanical notion; wind and strings are
played off against one another, but there are none of these mechanical
alternations, one holding the bat while the other has the ball. On the
whole _The Fairies_ is very beautifully scored.

CHAPTER V

PARIS

I

The late Sir Charles Halle, probably retailing a story he had heard,
relates in his reminiscences that when Heine heard of a young German
musician coming from Russia to Paris to try his luck with an empty
pocket, a half-finished opera and a few introductions from
Meyerbeer--amongst them one to a bankrupt theatre--he clasped his
hands and raised his eyes to heaven, in silent adoration before such
unbounded and naive self-confidence; and probably he had not then
learnt the whole truth of the matter. The journey from Riga, _via_ the
Russian frontier into Germany, and thence by Pillau, the Baltic, the
North Sea, London, the Channel and Boulogne, is surely the maddest,
most fantastic dream ever turned into a reality. That he turned the
dream into a reality shows how completely Wagner's character was now
formed: in no essential does the Wagner who built Bayreuth in the
'seventies differ from the Wagner of '39. He had unshakable tenacity
of purpose and perfect faith in his own genius; he was absolutely sure
he could accomplish the impossible; he took the wildest risks. As a
creative artist his development had just begun; but the qualities
which were in after years to enable him to force his creations on an
indifferent world were all there, ripe and strong.

The problem of getting away from Russia was by no mean