y, is not a matter for the twentieth
century to worry about; but the twentieth century is bound to marvel
over the obtuseness of the middle nineteenth in not recognizing the
advent of the greatest power that had yet meddled with high and
serious opera. (I do not mean that Wagner's was a greater musical
power than Mozart's and Beethoven's. But Mozart never had a libretto
to compare with Wagner's; and _Fidelio_, though serious enough in all
conscience, is not an opera at all.) In three years, 1842-45, the
growth of Wagner's strength was astounding, incredible. One sees at
once how the old stage devices have departed from the libretto, and
with them the fragmentary and jerky style of music; the intermittent
inspiration of the _Dutchman_ is replaced by an unchecked torrent of
inspired music. All the little suggestions of Bellini and Donizetti
are clean gone; the amorphous melody of the _Dutchman_ is gone, or
metamorphosed by being charged with energy, colour and meaning; every
phrase has character, and communicates a very definite shade of
feeling; in every phrase we feel how intense has been the inner
thought and emotion, and with what terrible directness these are
communicated to us. I say terrible directness because it is in
_Tannhaeuser_ that we first find the godlike Wagner hurling his
thunderbolts. It was Spohr who spoke of the godlike or titanic energy
of the music, and this energy finds expression, not as it did in
_Rienzi_, in noisy orchestration, big ensembles and thumping rhythms,
but, in a far greater degree than in the _Dutchman_, in the stuff of
the music itself. We find no more lumpish harmonies and basses of
leaden immovability: the basses stalk about with arrogant
independence, and the harmonic progressions, even when most daring and
perilous, are superbly poised. The old awkwardnesses, due to the
endeavour to copy and to be original at the same time, have
disappeared. Wagner wrote _Tannhaeuser_ entirely to express and to
please himself: he had given up the notion of being original; he was
bent only on being himself.

He boasted that here, at last, was a sheer German opera. Well, that is
not in itself very much. Personally, I would rather be an Englishman
than a German; and few of us will be prepared to accept the view that
because a work of art, or so-called work of art, happens to be by a
German, it must therefore be a great work of art, or even a work of
art at all. Richard never lived down the tendency