Euryanthe, Oberon, or Meyerbeer's Robert.
But any paradox is easier to fanatical believers
than to admit the fact, that if Herr Wagner's
operas deserve the name of music, those by
the masters referred to, do not; than to
confess that the case is one not of principles in art
carried out, but of the same utterly annulled:
not of progress, but of destruction.

The progress of destruction has rarely, if
ever, been more signally exemplified than in
the history of Das Rheingold, the last work by
Herr Wagner prepared at Munich, not
produced in a hurry, or a fit of desperation, but
deliberately as an experiment, to be followed
by other similar freaks. For festival purposes,
to delight a monarch willing to believe in and
to uphold a favourite who has only thriven by
favour of court notice, Herr Wagner has
devised a trilogy of operas based on the
Nibelungen Lied. To these Das Rheingold is a
preface, and the four operas, or instalments,
are intended to be performed on four successive
evenings. It is not too much to assert that a
year of preparation, were the entire resources
of a court theatre placed at the disposal of the
composer, would be entirely insufficient to
insure the result of which Herr Wagner dreamed:
even supposing the same to be worth insuring.
Eight months or more have been habitually
devoted at the Grand Opera of Paris to the
production of Meyerbeer's operas, yet these
are child's play compared with Herr Wagner's
visions.

His choice of subject, it must be owned,
was a singularly perilous one for even a German
among Germans. It may be boldly asserted
that a large portion of opera-goers have never
read the Nibelungen Lied, and that the dim
beliefs and superstitions of Eld, shadowed
forth in that legend, with a rude yet poetic
grandeur, appeal but distantly to the
sympathies of the most open-minded. It may be
doubted whether the frescoes of Schnorr and
Cornelius, by which the poem was illustrated
in the new palace at Munich, at the instance
of the late King of Bavaria, have yet come
home to the people as works of art should,
though almost half a century has elapsed since
they were painted; and though everything
that the encouragement and instruction of
comment could do, has been done, to make
them understood, if not enjoyed. It is, further,
hardly needful to point out that a picture on a
wall, and a picture on the stage, run chances
of acceptance entirely different, the one from
the other. Audiences will not willingly
frequent representations which are mystical,
indistinct, and wanting in beauty. It is true
that the absurdity of the stories of Idomeneo
and Die Zauberflöte have not prevented those
operas from holding the stage; but the magic
was Mozart's, who lavished over every tale he
touched melodies so exquisite in fascination
and fancy, that the will and the power to find
fault with the librettist, must surrender
themselves to the charm of the musician. Nothing
analogous is to be found in Herr Wagner's
productions. The music is to be subservient
to the story and the scenery: the three
combining to produce a whole. And this will be
felt at every attempt which could be made to
separate his music from the stage business and
the scenery. Whereas Mozart's opera music has
been the delight of every concert-goer, since
the day when it was written—and this
irrespective of the scenes to which it belongs, Herr
Wagner's vocal phrases, detached from the
pictures they illustrate, can only strike the ear
as so much cacophonous jargon, in which every
principle of nature and grace has been
outraged, partly owing to poverty of invention,
and absence of all feeling for the beautiful,
partly owing to the arrogant tyranny of a false
and forced theory.

Nor are the dramatic and scenic portions of
Das Rheingold, if considered apart from the
music, in any way successful. The giants and
water nymphs, and "the human mortals," whose
weal and woe they influence, are manœuvred
with a reckless clumsiness and disdain of contrast
and stage effect which are wearifully dreary,
save in a few places where their sublime
sayings and doings are perilously ridiculous. The
stage is more than once peopled by mute
persons without any intelligible purpose. The
author-musician has not allowed himself,
throughout a work which lasts a couple of
hours, a single piece of concerted music; the
trio of the swimming Rhine nymphs excepted.
There is no chorus. The words at least correspond
to the story in their inflated eccentricity.
Euphuistic alliteration and neologisms have of
necessity neither "state nor ancientry," and
could be only defended were the writer's object
to raise stumbling-blocks or dig pitfalls in the
way of the sayers and singers who have to unfold
his wondrous tale. The result of the combination
may be conceived by all who, not having
"eaten nightshade," are still in possession of
their sane senses. Even the most credulous of
Herr Wagner's partisans become tepid, vague,
apologetic, and scarcely intelligible, if they are
called on to defend or explain Herr Wagner's
text.

The above remarks and characteristics, not
put forward without the best consideration in
the power of their writer, are less tedious than
would be the narration, scene by scene, of the
dull absurdities of Das Rheingold. The scenery
they accompany (for the success of the work
is held by the congregation of the faithful to
depend on its scenery) has necessary peculiarities
no less remarkable. The "mystery"
opens in a scene beneath the Rhine, where the
nymphs who guard the treasure swim and
sing; and, inasmuch as they must have resting
places while they do their spiriting, are
provided with huge substantial peaks of rock,
while the stage, almost up to the "sky border,"
is filled with what is meant to represent the
swiftly-flowing river. There is a final grand
effect of a rainbow, not greatly larger than a
canal bridge, which keeps close to the earth
for the convenience of the dramatis personæ,
who are intended to mount upwards on it to
"the empyreal halls of celestial glory," as the