originality of the play, but would have nothing
to do with the bold atrocity of the music. And
so, the book of the Flying Dutchman was
bought for the Grand Opera, to be reset by M.
Dietsch, then a chorus-master, of whom hopes
were entertained as a composer. The adventure
had no success; the Flying Dutchman and M.
Dietsch went to the bottom; but in Germany,
with Herr Wagner's original music, the opera
still floats; and one portion of it, the Spinning
Song of the heroine, with chorus, is beautiful.

It was by his Tannhaüser, however, that
Herr Wagner may be said to have crossed the
barricades, so far as the music of Germany is
concerned, and to have entered its opera world
as a conqueror. The story, though virtually the
old legend of the conflict of Spirits versus Sense,
Christianity against Paganism, of Roland breaking
loose from the enchantments of Armida,
and though marred by a tremendously tedious
monologue in the last act (a narration of
a penitent's journey to Rome, including all
that the Pope preached to the penitent), has
vigour, pathos, and a certain chivalric elegance,
as put into words by Herr Wagner. The
legend, with its scenery, and the partisanship,
for better for worse, attracted to its author, not
merely saved the unlovely music, but, by its
enchantment, intoxicated a large section of a
great people, to rate the opera, as Herr Wagner
rates it.

Flushed with the success of Tannhaüser, out
strode Herr Wagner, resolute to demolish all
stage music previously existing, and he put
forth a self-glorification, in the form of an essay,
which is quite amazing. His book, Oper und
Drama, in its tone of shallow disparagement of
the great men of the past, even exceeded the
talk of Crabbe's Learned Boy, when he laid
down the law as under:

                                   I, myself, began
    To feel disturb'd, and to my Bible ran,
    I now am wiser—yet agree in this,
    The book has things that are not much amiss;
    It is a line old work, and I protest
    I hate to hear it treated as a jest.

Yet Herr Wagner's insolent book, and the
music, in which he illustrated his theory
by his practice, for a time, cowed honest
Germany; imposed on timid Germany; and
encouraged ignorant Germany. The opera by
him which followed Tannhaüser, his Lohengrin,
produced some fifteen years ago, was thought
by many—is thought by a few—to have set him
still more firmly in his seat as a discoverer.
But such hold as Herr Wagner's two operas
have got in Germany, is largely to be ascribed
to Dr. Liszt; the most brilliantly gifted, the
most universally accomplished, the most nobly
endowed, of pianists, " all and sundry;" a man
who must have made his way into any world of
action, or of art, if even he had not been gifted
with a memory which nothing can shake, with
a technical power such as no rival can
approach; a man, withal, whose compositions
prove him to be poor, not in determination, not
in science, but in idea. The excuse for poverty
in musical imagination lay ready at hand, in Herr
Wagner's pretensions. Of this, Dr. Liszt, as
the advocate of a persecuted musician, availed
himself, and accordingly for a time Germany was
flooded with tales of the popularity of Herr
Wagner as the continuer—what do I say?—
as the extinguisher of Beethoven; as the
prophet (not to give him the higher title which
our neighbours rather recklessly fling about) of
music in Germany.

Let us hope that the mischief done by the
movement hastily outlined, will, fifty years hence,
seem like a fever dream past and gone. Yet
the extent to which taste and reverence have
been demoralised in a country once so rich and
great, is to be seen in the career of the generation
of young artists of promise, whether creative
or executive, who have been seduced by
the false doctrines so easy to preach and to
recommend, and so specious in the noise they
make. The one or two who are not incurably
spoiled (judging them by their writings) are
so seriously warped, that as adults who have
cut some figure in the revolution, they must
needs go to school under the old teachers of
form and order, if they would really prosper.
However, since the production of Lohengrin,
some of the warmest disciples of Herr Wagner
have slunk out of his church, others have openly
recanted, and those who remain have no
coherent fellowship in any fixed principle of art
or action, save in ridiculous mutual praise. A
wondrous proof of this was given, a few weeks
ago, at Carlsruhe, where a Festival, avowedly
to produce music of the Future and no other
Music, was held.

A stranger meeting cannot be imagined. In
the first place, the disorder of all the
preliminary proceedings was as great as if the
scene had been a midland county in England,
and the committee one convened to do honour
to an immortal poet. Preliminary advertisement
there was none; by the aid of a heavy
correspondence, an inquisitive Londoner could just
worm out the date at which the apostles of the
Future were to strike terror into all and sundry
believers in the Past—but nothing more.
When he arrived close to the scene of action,
discovery became yet more difficult. At Baden-
Baden, a town in daily and near communication
(both courtly and popular) with Carlsruhe, no
one could tell him anything, save that the game
of Sixes and Sevens was in active rehearsal:
every one having quarrelled with every one else.
The tree at the end of the Lichtenthal Alley
(every one knows that post for play and concert
bills, which used to proclaim to the Baden idlers
what were to be the entertainments of the day
in both towns) was mysteriously dumb. When,
the day arrived, a visit to this strangely mute
and undemonstrative Festival, reminded one
whimsically of a lost adventure from the life
of the Sleeping Beauty, supposing that charming
and charmed princess to have slumbered in the
palace which forms the centre of that fan-shaped
town—the rivet, so to say, from which all its
streets radiate.