ion)
Wagner's melodies were necessary to sketch the characters, to
incarnate their thoughts and to express their apparent or secret
motives. He knew that their ingenious and persistent returns were
understood only by the auditors who followed the subject from the
beginning and gradually beheld the characters in relief, in a setting
from which they could not be removed without dying, like branches torn
from a tree.

That was why he felt that, among the vulgar herd of melomaniacs
enthusing each Sunday on benches, scarcely any knew the score that was
being massacred, when the ushers consented to be silent and permit the
orchestra to be heard.

Granted also that intelligent patriotism forbade a French theatre to
give a Wagnerian opera, the only thing left to the curious who know
nothing of musical arcana and either cannot or will not betake
themselves to Bayreuth, is to remain at home. And that was precisely
the course of conduct he had pursued.

The more public and facile music and the independent pieces of the old
operas hardly interested him; the wretched trills of Auber and
Boieldieu, of Adam and Flotow and the rhetorical commonplaces of
Ambroise Thomas and the Bazins disgusted him as did the superannuated
affectations and vulgar graces of Italians. That was why he had
resolutely broken with musical art, and during the years of his
abstention, he pleasurably recalled only certain programs of chamber
music when he had heard Beethoven, and especially Schumann and
Schubert which had affected his nerves in the same manner as had the
more intimate and troubling poems of Edgar Allen Poe.

Some of Schubert's parts for violoncello had positively left him
panting, in the grip of hysteria. But it was particularly Schubert's
lieders that had immeasurably excited him, causing him to experience
similar sensations as after a waste of nervous fluid, or a mystic
dissipation of the soul.

This music penetrated and drove back an infinity of forgotten
sufferings and spleen in his heart. He was astonished at being able to
contain so many dim miseries and vague griefs. This desolate music,
crying from the inmost depths, terrified while charming him. Never
could he repeat the "Young Girl's Lament" without a welling of tears
in his eyes, for in this plaint resided something beyond a mere
broken-hearted state; something in it clutched him, something like a
romance ending in a gloomy landscape.

And always, when these exquisite, sad pl