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Surely the brain of a Dumas could not have conceived a more romantic event than this sudden transformation of one who was a fugitive from debtor's prison into the favorite of a young and enthusiastic king. At last Wagner had an opportunity to bring forward his music-dramas. "Tristan and Isolde" was sung at the Munich Opera on June 10, 1865, with an excellent cast, and Hans von Bülow as conductor.
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.
Perhaps, after all, it is his greatest glory that he is the connecting link between Mozart and Wagner, between the greatest composer born into the eighteenth century and the greatest born into the nineteenth; for the musical-pictorial art which he evolved from Mozart's technique was used by Wagner with only the slightest modifications in the making of his music-dramas.
Wagner's music-dramas appeal powerfully to this need; the theatre, now as ever, fulfils a great function of the same kind, inherited from the ancient days when it was the ordered expression of a sexual festival.
Certain modern authors have developed a phase of emphasis by iteration which is similar to the employment of the leit-motiv in the music-dramas of Richard Wagner. In the Wagnerian operas a certain musical theme is devoted to each of the characters, and is woven into the score whenever the character appears.
So far, no ear but Ivan's had heard "Isabella"; no eye but his had beheld the pages of that score which, by the after-judgment of five nations, remains unsurpassed in the history of opera save by the music-dramas of one Richard of Bayreuth. Already, in his heart, Ivan knew the value of his work.
Fathers and mothers arrange that their older children as well as themselves shall attend the theatre all through the winter, and subscribe for seats as we would subscribe to a lending library. During the last year in Germany, the plays of Schiller were given 1,584 times, of Shakespeare 1,042 times, the music-dramas of Wagner 1,815 times, the plays of Goethe 700 times, and of Hauptmann 600 times.
Moreover, from the creative point of view, it was an actual advantage for him to be away from the opera-houses of the great capitals. In Switzerland, except for a short time when he was connected with the Zurich opera, he heard no operatic music except such as his own brain created. Undoubtedly this helps to account for the astounding originality of the music-dramas he wrote in Switzerland.
Despite the triviality of Da Ponte's book, the impetus of the music carries along the action at a tremendous speed; the moments of relief occur just when relief is necessary, and never retard the motion; the climaxes are piled up with incredible strength and mastery, and have an emotional effect as powerful as anything in "Fidelio" and equal to anything in Wagner's music-dramas; and most stupendous of all is the finale, with its tragic blending of the grotesque and the terrible.
They belong in the realm of modern music quite as much as Wagner's music-dramas and Liszt's symphonic poems. He was as boldly original as Schubert, and as great a magician in the art of arousing deep emotion by means of novel, unexpected modulations. As an originator of new harmonic progressions he has had only three equals, Bach, Schubert, and Wagner.
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