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Updated: May 5, 2025
The themes sing and the music takes its impulse and motion from them; the web is no longer made up of contrapuntal workings: counterpoint is never more than an accompaniment, a helpful device. What Wagner called the melos, the melody, or melodic outline, that begins at the beginning and ends only at the end this is the thing.
Technically there is no advance or change in Lohengrin: the counterpoint and interweaving of themes of Tristan and the Mastersingers were to come a few years later. Indeed, there is less of Wagner the contrapuntal virtuoso in Lohengrin than in Tannhäuser. In the music, as in the drama, the second act presents a total contrast to the first. The music of the first is throughout full of sunlight.
'Twas eleven o' the clock when the gay company again entered the saloon; gentlemen in fresh curled periwigs and marvels of laces and 'broiderings. They were gay with post-prandium cheer and flushed with wine. Lord Cedric clapped his hands and immediately from some curtained passage or gallery there was music; each instrument seeming to lead in contrapuntal skill.
Some of the Russian's contrapuntal objections to the "Heroic Symphony" are well answered; but, as we are satisfied with the poetic explanation of the work by neither, we must confess, that, after the crystalline clearness of Oulibichef, the muddy wordiness of Marx is not to edification.
There is always one important melody, and it is easier to find it studying the score, to trace it with eye and mind in its contrapuntal web, than by making voyages of discovery in actual playing. "Every player has his own qualities, every instrument its own advantages.
Like Spohr, with whom he had much in common, despite the difference between his mercurial temperament and the pedagogic gravity of the composer of "The Last Judgment," he set great store upon his learning, and was fond of trivial themes that admitted of obvious contrapuntal treatment.
An entirely opposite type of composer, Hugo Wolff, shows the real strength of modern German music in a lyric vein, sincere, direct and fervent. His longest work for instruments has throughout the charm of natural rhythm and melody, with subtle shading of the harmony. Though there is no want of contrapuntal design, the workmanship never obtrudes.
Let it be called the "Prayer Theme," for the melody is that of the prayer which the little ones utter before laying themselves down to sleep in the wood. When past bearing is our grief God, the Lord, will send relief. Humperdinck's splendid contrapuntal skill shows itself in a most varied use of this theme.
Before many bars have been played, Siegfried and the wakened Brynhild, newly become tenor and soprano, will sing a concerted cadenza; plunge on from that to a magnificent love duet; and end with a precipitous allegro a capella, driven headlong to its end by the impetuous semiquaver triplets of the famous finales to the first act of Don Giovanni or the coda to the Leonore overture, with a specifically contrapuntal theme, points d'orgue, and a high C for the soprano all complete.
Learned Germans might shake their heads and talk about shallowness and contrapuntal rubbish, his crescendo and stretto passages, his tameness and uniformity even in melody, his want of artistic finish; but, as Richard Wagner, his direct antipodes, frankly confesses in his "Oper und Drama," such objections were dispelled by Rossini's opera-airs as if they were mere delusions of the fancy.
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