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Updated: May 20, 2025
Here is my answer Without verging on gush, it affords expression to the deepest and most intense feeling. But we may cheerfully concede that genuine drama ought to be acted. It cannot be a picture; it can only be an imitation of a picture. At every point Wagner's reasoning goes to the ground. His basic facts are no facts, and his reasoning is absurd.
It was not Krupps who plunged the Central Empires into the pit, Paul, but Bernhardi, Nietzsche and What's-his-name. Wagner's music has done more to form the German character than Bismarck's diplomacy. Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth means more to England than Magna Charta." "I agree."
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.
The fascination of Wagner's music for youth has often troubled people; they think it poisons the thoughts and dulls the activities. But the generation that was then intoxicated by Wagner does not seem to have shown signs of demoralisation since. Why do not people understand that if we had need of that music it was not because it was death to us, but life.
Seidl was a Wagner conductor of the older type, and with some of the faults of that type; he knew little or nothing of the improvements in the manner of interpreting Wagner's music effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature Siegfried Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic reaction against Italian ways of misdoing things; and he was, if anything, a little too strongly inclined to go a little too far in the opposite direction to the touch-and-go conductors.
I tried to get him to subpoena Ferdinand and Isabella and Euripides and Hawley Hicks in my behalf, and all he'd do was to sit there and shake his head at me. Then I suggested going up to the Metropolitan Opera-house some fearful night as the clock struck twelve, and try to serve papers on Wagner's spook all of which he treated as unworthy of a moment's consideration.
Gounod has, in part, applied this principle in "Faust." All opera-goers will remember the intense dramatic effect arising from the recurrence of the same exquisite lyric outburst from the lips of Marguerite. The peculiar character of Wagner's word-drama next arouses critical interest and attention. The composer is his own poet, and his creative genius shines no less here than in the world of tone.
It had long been Wagner's desire to have a theater built, in which his creations could be properly given under his direction. Bayreuth had been chosen, as a quiet spot where music lovers could come for the sole purpose of hearing the music. He went to live there with his family in April, 1872. Two years later they moved into Villa Wahnfried, which had been built according to the composer's ideas.
For those who have ears, eyes and understanding Tristan and Isolda is Wagner's most perfect work, is the finest opera in the world.
This opera, indeed, may also be called the direct precursor of Wagner's music-dramas. It contains eight "leading motives," which recur thirty times in course of the opera; and the dramatic recitatives are sometimes quite in the "Wagnerian" manner. But the most remarkable thing is that Weber uses language which practically sums up Wagner's idea of the music-drama.
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