cially
indebted to Beethoven, the most important come from the Mass in D. Here
the older master, by the very form in which the ideas are cast, had to
hold himself in. He was not able to give them the significance in the
Mass, which is perfectly proper in great music dramas; and this
enlarging and widening of the poetic conception,--this splendor in which
it is portrayed,--not only justifies the course of his follower in
adopting it, but also calls attention anew to the commanding genius to
whom such things are possible.

Some of Wagner's most entrancing effects have their origin in Beethoven.
His method of using the violins and flutes in the highest register in
prolonged notes, as in the Lohengrin Prelude, and in general when
portraying celestial music, are obtained from this source. The Mass in D
gives several instances where this idea is presented, not by harp (the
customary way), but as Wagner has done in Lohengrin, by the violins and
wood-winds in the highest register, beginning pianissimo, gradually
descending and augmenting in volume and sonority as the picturing merges
from spiritual to worldly concerns. Beethoven's work abounds in
intellectual subtleties of this kind. Wagner is sometimes credited with
having originated this method for the portrayal of celestial music. Mr.
Louis C. Elson says: "Wagner, alone, of all the great masters, does not
use the harp for celestial tone coloring, but violins and wood-winds, in
prolonged notes in the highest positions. Schumann, Berlioz,
Saint-Saens, in fact all the modern tone colorists who have given
celestial pictures, use the harp in them, purely because of the
association of ideas which come to us from the Scriptures, and this
association of the harp with heaven and the angels, only came about
because the instrument was the most developed possessed by man at the
time the sacred book was written. Wagner's tone coloring is
intrinsically the more ecstatic.... Wagner is the first who has broken
through this harp conventionality."

In the Wagner-Liszt correspondence, Wagner states that the Lohengrin
Prelude typifies choirs of angels bearing the Holy Grail to earth. This
idea and the method of its development can be found in the symphonic
thought which follows the Preludium to the Benedictus of the Beethoven
Mass.

It will be necessary to make a short digression and explain a portion of
the canon of the Mass to enable the reader to understand what follows.
During the offic