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Updated: July 25, 2025
In the immortal songs of Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Franz, and the symphonies of the first four, the vitality of the reformatory idea is richly illustrated. In the music-drama of Wagner, it is claimed by his disciples, is found the full flower and development of the art-work.
And, finally, he came to the conclusion that in his music-drama he could effect a synthesis of all the arts. Music and acting were the basis; there had to be scenery, and the scenery must form pictures, with the figures always properly placed, according to what I suppose painters would call, or refuse to call, the laws of composition.
Third, the wealth of invention, the constructive power, and the command of technical devices, place Wagner in the first rank of sheer musicians. True, he could not write a symphony such as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven wrote; but neither could they have written a music-drama; the music-drama was his form, the symphony theirs. In the next scene we have music of a different sort.
He chose the national myth and hero tradition as the basis of his music-drama because of the universality of their content and application, and because he believed they reflected the German world-view. Himself he regarded as the Siegfried whose mission it was to slay the dragon of sordid materialism and awaken the slumbering bride of German art.
When the Wagner battle was raging in the seventies and eighties, the sages pointed to the necessity of understanding the drama for the purpose of understanding the music as a defect of the Wagner music-drama, and a proof of Wagner's inferiority as a composer. But one would like to ask the sages how many songs are there which do not afford a finer artistic enjoyment when the words are understood?
For sixteen years the successful composer maintained absolute silence in opera, when whispers of a great music-drama roused the expectation of musical Europe to an extraordinary pitch; nor were the highest expectations disappointed when "Otello" was produced at Milan in 1887.
I am in a state of perfect preparedness to see beauty in a picture, even if the subject is to me repulsive. But in the case of a picture it is possible to say, "Yes, very pretty," and pass on. In the case of a story, a play, or a music-drama, you cannot.
He might well avow that when he came to compose Tristan he discovered he had gone far beyond his theories. The justification for the quintet is its beauty and the fact that it finds expression for the feeling of the moment. All the same, I have heard it encored more than once; and an encore in the middle of the act of a Wagner music-drama, or even music-comedy, is almost inconceivable.
Night has come on, and Isolda falls on Tristan's body and dies, fulfilling the promise she had made that where he went she would follow. And so ends the greatest music-drama ever written, and the greatest likely to be written for centuries to come. We must pass on now to The Mastersingers, an old idea of Wagner's. The music was completed at Triebschen.
All the essays on music and on drama and on the music-drama are as much an expression of himself as his music-dramas. I have in earlier chapters gone so far as even to labour the point that he could not get on in music without the aid of drama; and as he could never look beyond himself nor imagine that what he could not do i.e. compose pure music some one else e.g.
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