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Composers generally left the composition of the overture till last as it were doing the thing only because an overture had to be written but Wagner knew the importance of his work and must have composed this one very early; for in 1862, five years earlier than the completion of the opera and six before the first representation, he directed a performance of it in the Gewandhaus at Leipzig.
Jessie L. Gaynor has won an enviable position for herself, chiefly as a composer of children's songs. Her work is marked by bright and pleasing rhythms, excellent discretion in the proper choice of harmony, and a fluent ease that makes her productions unusually singable. It is not given to many composers to be able to make any real appeal to younger hearers, but Mrs.
The overture had to be repeated to still the applause that followed its first performance, and when the curtain fell on the last scene, a new chapter in German art had been opened. "Richard Wagner's Prose Works," translated by William Ashton Ellis, Vol. VII, p. 169. "Famous Composers and their Works," Vol. I, p. 396.
Why be astonished at it? Let us face the matter plainly. In music we have not, so to speak, any masters of French style. All our greatest composers are foreigners.
Experience shows conclusively that the most powerful stimulant of the composer's brain is the possession of a really poetic and dramatic text. To take only one instance it surely cannot be a mere coincidence that the best works of four great composers Spohr, Berlioz, Gounod, and Schumann, are based on the story of "Faust."
In obedience to inexorable law he comes down the river, drawn by the swan; in obedience to the same inexorable law he is drawn away, as helplessly as a needle drawn by a magnet. The prelude opens with a series of chords, ascending, all on A. Handel might have done this: none of the Viennese composers could, or perhaps I should rather say, would, have done it.
Had Gounod written only "Faust," it should stamp him as one of the most highly gifted composers of his age. Noticeably in his other works, preeminently in this, he has shown a melodic freshness and fertility, a mastery of musical form, a power of orchestration, and a dramatic energy, which are combined to the same degree in no one of his rivals.
But it is especially by the manner in which they conceive the respective relationships of poetry and music to opera that the two composers differ. With Wagner, music is the kernel of the opera, the glowing focus, the centre of attraction; it absorbs everything, and it stands absolutely first. But that is not the French conception.
For although these composers retained the old convention of an opera composed of separate numbers, they nevertheless managed to unify their operas by creating a distinct style in each of them, and by securing an emotional development in the various arias and concerted numbers.
Her cantata, for soloists, chorus, and piano, won first prize in a recent Danish competition. Sweden can boast of several women composers, of whom at least two are really famous. Among those working in the smaller forms is Caia Aarup, now residing in America. She is the author of a number of pleasing songs and piano compositions.