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Updated: May 12, 2025
Mozart himself would have been hard pressed to do it; and, for want of the only method that might have enabled Gounod to do it, the Wagnerian method of continuous development of typical themes, the unfolding of the drama hangs fire in every scene, not a scene ends at a higher pitch of feeling than it began.
Of course, they were very ignorant about art, and especially about foreign art: but they all pretended more or less to some knowledge of it: and often they really loved it. There were Councils which were very like the coterie of some little Review. One of them would be a playwright: another would scrape on the violin; another would be a besotted Wagnerian.
A great Wagnerian Kapellmeister, a friend of Hecht's, who had settled in England, was enthusiastic about it: he had given it at several of his concerts with considerable success, which, with the Kapellmeister's enthusiasm, had carried it over to Germany, where also the David had been played.
Would you mind turning round a minute? Ah, 'Wagnerian Crank! I am afraid we should not get on together. I prefer the Italian school." Or, "How delightful. I see you don't believe in vaccination. May I take you into supper?" Those, on the other hand, fond of argument would choose a suitable opponent.
Caius with the single exclamation, "Falstaff," and the latter's reply, "Ho! there," which are emblematic of the declamatory character of the whole opera; for although many delightful bits of melody are scattered through it, the instrumentation really tells the story, as in the Wagner music-drama, though in this latest work of the veteran composer there is less of the Wagnerian idea than in his "Aida."
I forget exactly how and when they became engaged, but it was certainly before Dick said humbly, "Darling, I don't think I am that sort of man; really, I'm awfully and frightfully ordinary," because, with all Pauline's kindness to sinners, there was none hardened enough to address her as "darling" without being first engaged to her; so by that I know they were engaged that evening at the opera, because it was in a Wagnerian pause that Dick said those words, in a loud voice from the back of the box.
If no one could write successfully in Wagner's manner, was there a future for the lyric drama outside of a return to the style which he had striven to overthrow? If there was no such future, was the fact not proof of the failure of the Wagnerian movement as a creative force?
But when, at last, an artist who had just come to town, with a drink-sodden countenance, extremely long hair, and a bit of glass under his puckered brow, seated himself at the piano, and bringing down his hands on the keys and his feet on the pedals, with a flourish, began to bang out a fantasia by Liszt on a Wagnerian theme, Arátoff could stand it no longer, and slipped away, bearing in his soul a confused and oppressive impression, athwart which, nevertheless, there pierced something which he did not understand, but which was significant and even agitating.
Wagnerian ends and means are of one piece: to perceive this, all that is required is honesty in art matters, and it would be dishonest to adopt his means in order to apply them to other and less significant ends.
His talks with Francoise had brought him back to his idea, sketched out long ago with Corinne, of a form of musical drama, somewhere between recitative opera and the spoken drama, the art of the free word united with free music, an art of which hardly any artist of to-day has a glimmering, an art also which the routine critics, imbued with the Wagnerian tradition, deny, as they deny every really new work: for it is not a matter of following in the footsteps of Beethoven, Weber, Schumann, Bizet, although they used the melodramatic form with genius: it is not a matter of yoking any sort of speaking voice to any sort of music, and producing, at all costs, with absurd tremolos, coarse effects upon coarse audiences: it is a matter of creating a new form, in which musical voices will be wedded to instruments attuned to those voices, discreetly mingling with their harmonious periods the echo of dreams and the plaintive murmur of music.
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