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Updated: May 20, 2025
In using the word theatrical I do not mean there is any return to, for instance, the Rienzi style: the music is theatrical in Wagner's own later way: it seems to fit the situation, but the appearance is an appearance only: the stuff is superficial: the feeling of the moment is not expressed the music, in a word, is essentially the same as that of many inferior but clever opera composers, only, of course, the Wagner idiom is always there.
The act is intolerably long; even were every moment crowded with Wagner's most glorious music the strain on our attention would be terrific. But the music is by no means uniformly of Wagner's best; for pages on pages his sheer craftsmanship fairly gallops away with him. The Norn scene is as purely theatrical as anything he wrote; the atmosphere is, so to speak, artificially weird.
Yet it is but just that we should pay at least a passing salute to this woman who was the love of Wagner's youth and the drudge of his middle life, and who, from the distance of her lonely separation, saw him basking in the favor of the king, who, too late for her, had become his munificent patron. What a contrast between her fate and Cosima's!
The contrary holds true: if you have seen and felt Wagner's operas, you may understand what he is talking about in his articles and pamphlets; but to read these first is merely to bewilder yourself utterly when you go to see the operas. I will dismiss, therefore, much of the prose with very brief notice, and some of it without any notice at all. Ernest Newman's valuable Study of Wagner.
More than you will make with all your operas if you live a century. Fifteen thousand a year. Why, you could have all your works performed at your own expense, and for your own sole pleasure if you chose, as the King of Bavaria listened to Wagner's operas. You could devote your life to the highest art nay, is it not a duty you owe to the world?
It needed the cruel disillusionment of the Paris days, it needed also the time needful for Wagner's normal growth, before he was driven to see that the music-drama, or something that ultimately evolved itself into the music-drama, was the form that he needed for his deepest utterances. Rienzi is old-fashioned opera, barefaced, blatant and unashamed.
Perhaps only the latter, for it is Wagner's gift to reach by his creations those who have little technical knowledge of music. At any rate, she was absorbed, and so perfectly was the progress of the drama repeated in her face that Philip, always with the help of the orchestra, could trace it there. But presently something more was evident to this sympathetic student of her face.
F. C. Burnand, who took the idea from the last scene of the first act only, and does not seem to have known how many connections the Grail legend had with mediaeval Freemasonry or Templarism. There are more elements associated with the old Knights Templars and their rites in Wagner's drama than I am able to discuss.
If Chicago does n't cut a wider swath in history than the seventeenth century has, we shall be very much ashamed of her. There is a strange fascination about Herr Wagner's musical drama of "Die Walküre."
It contains five scenes: The Peasants Going to Chapel; The Flower Girls; The Vagabonds; The Tryst; The Sabot Dance; and the Entrance of the Mayor, which is a pompous march. On the occasion of a performance of this, Louis Arthur Russell wrote: "His orchestra is surely French, and as modern as you please. The idiom is Berlioz's rather than Wagner's." John Knowles Paine.
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