who had read the "Ring" poem, and who, Wagner says, "loved him ecstatically." "Through him," the composer wrote, "the male sex has completely rehabilitated itself in my eyes." The King gave Wagner a house and an order to finish the Tetralogy, and in the following year "Tristan," then eight years old, was produced at Munich with conspicuous success, which, however, led to little. "Tristan und Isolde," the first-fruit of Wagner's maturity, is once more an old story, common to Scandinavia, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and England, in differing versions. No love music ever written has surpassed the duet in the second act, and the tragic intensity of the third act is a revelation. This music drama has been well called a poem for poets and a score for musicians, marking a new epoch in the evolution of music, which in this opera varies with the meaning of every line in the poem. Wagner was willing to submit this work. to the severest test that could result from any theoretic assertion of his, and he said he had made a longer stride in "Tristan" from "Tannhäuser," than in "Tannhäuser" from the modern opera. Space will not permit of tracing Schopenhauer's influence in this work; an enemy declared that it was only the philosopher of decadence who enabled the artist of decadence to discover himself. The headings of the New York Times, à propos of the first night, are worth reproducing :

"A work not wanted outside of Germany, and not too often there." "Beginning of the end of the craze for symphonic music in the opera."

Meanwhile Wagner's enemies had not been idle-no man ever had more. He had the defects of his qualities, and we know that

With fame in just proportion envy grows,
The man that makes a character makes foes.

By malicious slanders they fanned popular feeling against him, so that to prevent insurrection the composer had to flee to Lucerne. Ludwig visited him there incognito, and, what is better, allowed him an annuity of £800. Wagner at Lucerne finished the "Meistersingers," and twenty-two years after the first sketches of it had been made it was produced with the greatest success at Munich, on June 21, 1868. The "Meistersingers" has been referred to as a comic opera-a satire would be a more correct term. One of the Guild of Master Singers has promised his daughter, Eva, to the singer who should win the prize at a festival. Walter, a knight who loves Eva, seeks entrance to the guild that he may compete. He is Wagner himself, or, at least, the embodiment of natural music untrammelled by pedantic and con

ventional rules.

Beckmesser, a rival, the typical critic, shows how Walter's trial song possesses of melody not a trace. Hans Sachs, the glorious cobbler and poet too, who befriends Walter and Eva, is enlightened public opinion. The opera ends with Beckmesser's discomfiture and Walter's success with the "Preislied," almost, if not quite, the loveliest melody Wagner wrote, and rivalled only in this opera by a quintet and the choruses. Yet, although it has operatic features, which once more show how Wagner could transcend others on their own ground, the whole scene is symphonic and connected. The scenes are a triumph of realism, and have even induced some to visit Nuremberg. Munich, however, would have none of the proposed Wagner theatre, so Bayreuth was chosen instead, and Wagner built himself the Villa Wahnfried there. The foundation-stone of the theatre was laid in 1872, on Wagner's fifty-ninth birthday; the composer insisting that the orchestra and, thank goodness, the conductor should be invisible, and that side seats and boxes should be abolished. Owing to that lack of pence which vexes public men, the "Ring" was not brought out at Bayreuth until 1876-twenty years ago, or twenty-two years after its composition had been begun.

It is quite impossible to give in a few words an adequate idea of the story about which whole volumes have been written. It is welded out of the old sagas-" the primeval heritage of the German people." In the "Rheingold" we find Alberech, the Nibelung, renouncing love for gold, and robbing the Rhine maidens of treasures, in particular the ring, which are to make him all-powerful. By cunning, Wotan, chief of the gods, wrests these treasures from him, and bestows the ring on two giants as a ransom for Freia, goddess of youth and beauty, their reward for building Walhalla. But fearful lest Alberech's curse on the ring should rest on the gods, Wotan, in union with a human woman, begets the Volsung twins, Siegmund and Sieglinda, in the hope that Siegmund, possessed of no selfish motive, may regain the ring and restore it to the Rhine maidens. The unhappy love and fate of the twins is told in the "Walküre." Brunnhilda, one of the Walküre, also offspring of Wotan, who carry the dead heroes to garrison Walhalla, saves Sieglinda at the cost of her divinity. Wotan throws Brunnhilda into a trance, and the mortal who awakens her therefrom is to have her as bride; and, that the rescuer of the sleeping beauty needs be fearless, Wotan surrounds her with fire. The third drama tells the story of Siegfried, the child of the twins, brought up in the forest by one of the Nibelungs, who wishes to get the treasure for himself. Siegfried slays his designing foster-father, and also the dragon who guards the treasure, of which he then possesses himself,

Fearless, he finds Brunnhilda, and claims her as bride. In "Götterdämmerung," or "The Dusk of the Gods," it is seen how the curse on the ring follows Siegfried, who is treacherously slain by Alberech's son, and Brunnhilda in passionate self-surrender immolates herself on the burning pyre; the Rhine rises, its maidens regain the ring, Walhalla is seen in flames, the reign of the gods is ended, and the new era of love is inaugurated. It is a stupendous story, this, full of symbolic significance and exquisite and majestic nature poetry. The scenery is the grandest ever conceived for the stage. Most typically, the music is a means to an end-that end the drama as a whole. The actors are few, their movements simple, there is practically no chorus, and not a tune, in the narrow sense, from beginning to end. It has its intervals of tediousness as performed in this country, but then the Tetralogy was never intended for the general stage, on which it makes too great demands, and to be fully appreciated it must be heard as a whole on successive nights. The first performance was "a moral victory," though i involved a loss of £7,500, and the critics, who on this cried havoc and let loose the dogs of war with a vengeance, prophesied that the theatre would on the morrow be a circus, a dancing hall, or a national shooting gallery. Wagner was forced to let the "Ring" be performed at ordinary theatres to pay the debt, which was just as well, or otherwise it would not have been heard outside of Bavaria.

In 1877 six concerts were given at the Albert Hall, Wagner conducting, in order to meet the deficiency. Wagner went to Windsor, made a host of friends, including George Eliot, had his portrait painted by Mr. Herkomer, and read the story of "Parsifal"-conceived, like all his dramatic poems except "Tristan," before his thirty-fifth year -to a select party at his rooms, 12 Orme Square, Bayswater. It was at Palermo, that beautiful city once seen never forgotten, where Wagner had located his first ambitious effort- the "Love Veto," or "Novice of Palermo," it was at the Sicilian capital in 1882 that the score of "Parsifal" was finished, and later in the year sixteen successive performances of it were given with entire success at Bayreuth. "Parsifal is Wagner's one sacred music drama. While one critic vowed "Parsifal" would remain externally unrivalled as an attempt to retell an old legend of the Holy Grail with due reverence for its traditional form and full sympathy with the modern spirit, another the madman Nietsche-declared he despised every one who does not regard "Parsifal" as an outrage on morals. It is really a passion play. The two great religious systems, Christianity and Buddhism, find place in it side by side with Schopenhauerism. Alas! that its wealth

of choral and orchestral splendours, its unequalled pageantry, should have to remain unknown to those who cannot go to Bayreuth.

In the autumn Wagner went to Venice, and on February 13, 1883, he died, and was buried at the place he had made famous to all time. All Venice mourned him, and when, some years later, I was there, my gondolier was more excited in pointing out the Palace Vendramini, where Wagner died, than in indicating any other sight of the city.

After the production of "Tannhäuser," Wagner, who had a great admiration for his fellow reformer, quoted Luther's famous words, "Here am I. God help me. I cannot be otherwise." He felt the single possibility before him was to induce the public to understand and participate in his aims as an artist. What were those aims? He asked himself, "Can the theatre be in this century what it was in the palmy days of Athens?" His answer was, "Yes, by means of the music drama." He thought that individually the arts could go no further. In Beethoven, for instance, music pure and simple had reached its climax. In the music drama, music, poetry, and scenery must be equally important, each giving way to the other. In the score the musician should find full scope, in the words the poet, in the scenery the painter and architect, and in the poses and movements of the actor should be realised the aspirations of the sculptor. Wagner's music must not be heard, therefore, in the concert room, but in the theatre, where, according to the German " philosopher," Nietsche, now under restraint, "one becomes mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, voting animal, patron, idiot-Wagnerian !" Nor can the pianoforte represent the master who was at first opposed to his operas being arranged for that most useful of instruments. Wagner's scenery suggests that had he persevered he would have become a great painter, and, as everybody knows, he wrote his own words. Curiously enough, in Bayreuth, in the very year that Wagner was born, Jean Paul had written: "Hitherto Apollo has always distributed the poetic gift with his right hand, the musical with his left, to two persons so widely apart that up to this hour we are still waiting for the man who will create a genuine opera by writing both its text and its music." Wagner was attracted to mythical subjects because the emotions suggested by them are more elemental, lending themselves best to broad effects. He held that in dealing with ordinary history one had either to distort facts or be conventional. His skill as a poet, not necessarily, of course, as a rhymer, is now owned by all. For instance, he was at great pains to avoid the hoarse gutturals with

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which the German language abounds. He chose chiefly alliterative verse, which is itself vocally melodious. The poet provides emotional and rhythmic verse-the musician does the rest. In his skill in retelling an old story, Wagner has been likened by enthusiasts to Shakespeare, in the simplicity of his style to Eschylus, in his mysticism to Goethe. Small wonder that, having made dry bones live, this modern Pygmalion fell in love with his Galatea.

As musician, Wagner killed old-fashioned opera-his influence is felt in all modern works of importance-he killed the opera with its ludicrous libretto, inartistic acting, "the aria introduced to enable the singer to display the agility of his vocal chords," the scales, arpeggios, and trills, the tiresome recitatives, the chorus of conspirators shouting out details of a plot in the market-place and dragged in with absurd inappropriateness at the end of every act; and he rescued the orchestra from playing the part of a mere accompanist. Great deliverer that he was, he banished the old-fashioned prima donna with her capricious jealousy, and the tenor who stood as a type-and it is no compliment to women-of effeminate vanity. In the third act of "Parsifal," Kundry remains on the stage the whole time acting, and only sings one word twice. All great Wagner interpreters sink their identity in the characters they assume; they do not come to the footlights or suffer the movement to be suspended to take encores. In the third act of "Tristan," Mr. John de Reszke's greatest achievement, we do not think of a somewhat stout, middle-aged, highly-respectable Pole, or even of the possessor of the most glorious voice in the world; we do not stay to think how beautiful the music is here or there. It is something more than music-articulate love, boundless and eternal, and tragedy unspeak

able. Wagner raised the orchestra from the level of "a monstrous guitar" to the dignity of "an artistic conscience"-in his own words, "dissolving the hard immobile ground of the actual scene into a fluent, elastic, impressionable ether, whose unsounded bottom is the sea of emotion itself." The orchestra plays the part of the Attic chorus (and this is important, as Wagner seldom interrupts the movement to explain it to the audience), and to it is often relegated the melody, leaving the singers freed from the bonds of tune, as tune is vulgarly understood, to give all their attention to the expression of passion.

This suggests the subject of leading motives. A leading motive, a recurring theme, has been defined as "a passage of music which guides the mind to the person, object, or idea that is represented in its competition and employment." Wagner's leading motives are