Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: October 25, 2025
His invention of the music-drama rested on his famous theory of music as the heightened medium of expression, glorified speech, which accordingly demands freedom to follow all the varying nuances of feeling and emotion.
Both of them were victims to a cause in which they earnestly believed an economic cause in the one case, an artistic cause in the other. Wagner's triumph came before his death, and the world has accepted his theory of the music-drama. The cause of Marx is far greater and more tremendous, because it strikes at the base of human life and social well-being.
There are among his manuscripts three movements of a symphony, two movements of a suite for string orchestra, a suite for violin and piano, some songs and piano pieces, and a large number of sketches. He had schemes for a music-drama on an Arthurian subject, and sketched a single act of it.
The old Italian opera form is laughed at to-day as an absurdity by Wagnerians, who see nothing absurd in a many-legged monster with a donkey's head uttering deep bass curses through a speaking-trumpet; and perhaps to-morrow the Wagnerian music-drama and the many-legged monsters will be laughed at by the apostles of a new and equally absurd convention.
Nancy was very quiet as we drove from the pier, and it was while I was dressing for dinner that she came into my room. "Elizabeth," she said, "I am not sure whether we have been to a Methodist revival or to a Wagner music-drama " "Neither," I told her. "There's nothing artificial about him. You asked me back there if he was real. I believe that he is utterly real, Nancy. It is not a pose.
During the first act the drama proceeded with charming, almost Mozartean, smoothness; and I was surprised to find that the smoother it went the more irresistibly the music reminded me of Weber, until I remembered that "Lohengrin" is Wagner's most Weberish opera, and that in his youth Wagner heard Weber sung, not as he is sung now that is, like an early Wagner music-drama but as Weber intended it to be sung, like a later Mozart opera.
On the other hand, poetic drama, in its endeavour to express pure feeling, could go no further than Goethe and Schiller without becoming mere gush a sort of music that was not music. Wherefore music must be added. But this combination of music and poetry was insufficient; we must have the thing in visible form before the eye the acted music-drama.
He took up one philosophical and political system after another, only to abandon them in turn; but they left a kind of sediment in his mind, and one never feels sure that the pellucid stream of his music-drama will not the next moment be gritty to the palate with some of this outworn stuff.
And in the highest kind of story, play, or music-drama, subject and treatment merge inseparably one in the other, substance and form are one; for the idea is all in all, and the complete idea cannot be perceived apart from the dress which makes it visible.
For if we are ever to have a national English opera, we shall get it by writing English music, not by producing elaborate exercises in the manner of Wagner, Verdi, Massenet, Strauss, or anybody else. Most great artistic enterprises spring from humble sources, and our young lions need not be ashamed of producing a mere comic opera or two before attacking a full-fledged music-drama.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking