ce became
a composer of the first rank, from whom great expressive melodies
sprang spontaneously. The noble passages in the _Dutchman_ were drawn
out of him, despite his conscious or unconscious imitation of what
were considered the best models of the day, by sheer force of feeling;
and I pointed out how, when the situation gave him a chance, he took
it. In _Tannhaeuser_ he has become a splendid artist whose brain
refused to shape the commonplace. Later on his style was to become
more individual, more purely his own; but so far he had now got--and
it was a very long way. The pilgrims' chorus melody, which first
appears in the overture, is, to my mind, very Weberesque. It is not
particularly strong--for Wagner--and hardly bears the weight of the
brass with which it is afterwards thundered out; but think of it and
of Rienzi's prayer! The second part, of course, is Wagner at a sublime
height, but of that presently. What I wish is to give examples of how
he has discarded all the involutions, convolutions, twiddles and
twaddles of melody, and gone back to the simplicity and directness of
Weber and Beethoven. His earlier manner and type of tune, the
operatic manner of his day, had, I make no doubt, its origin in the
advisability, not to say the necessity, of writing so as to please
singers who could sing in the Italian style and no other. Wagner had
now ceased to think of singers' whims. He had a matter to find
utterance for, and he went to work in the most direct way, considering
nothing but his artistic aim. We know he conceived _Tannhaeuser_ at a
white heat, and in a condition of white heat wrote the words; and
though he afterwards cooled down and had, he said, to "warm up" to his
work again, yet he warmed up so effectually that he composed at
furious speed, haunted by a terror lest he should not live to complete
the opera. This fervour alone might account for his artistic
development in the _Tannhaeuser_ period. It drove him to find the
secret of the one true mode of expression--the law of simplicity, the
unvarying rule that anything more than is needed for the expression of
the thing to be expressed is bad art, and, in the long run,
ineffective. With greater simplicity in the melody came the greatest
possible simplicity in the harmony. There is a kind of awkwardness to
be found in the music of all the pundits which almost defies analysis.
The progressions are correct enough, are good enough grammar, yet the
result is mor