n_, a growth. Much of the music does not
rise above the level of Spontini or Marschner; there are wearisome
pages, there are heavy chords repeated again and again with violin
figurations on top, there are lines of the verse repeated to fit in
with the conventional melodies in four-bar lengths. It was only a few
years before that Wagner, at Riga, had written enthusiastically about
Bellini and his melody, a type of melody he felt to be fresh and
expressive compared with the dry-as-dust mixture of Viennese melody
(_i.e._ the Haydn and Mozart type) and stodgy German counterpoint
which formed the bulk of Marschner's and Spontini's music; and here we
see him in the very deed of trying his hand at it. Very often the
result, it must be admitted, is lamentable. There was no Italian
suppleness and grace in Wagner's nature: when he was in deadly
earnest, and striving to express himself without thinking of models,
he wrote gorgeous stuff; when the inspiration waned, or when he
deluded himself with the belief that what he supposed to be
Bellini-like tunes really expressed the feeling of the moment, then he
gave us pages as dry and dreary as Spontini and Marschner at their
worst. Besides those I have already mentioned there are in the love
duet--if it can be called a love duet--mere figurations over bar on
bar on leaden-footed, heavy chords; and these figurations are not true
melody. These tunes in regular four-bar lengths are melody of an
amorphous sort; only when they were tightened up, made truer, more
pregnant--in a word, when they were so shaped as to stand really and
truly for the thought and feeling in the composer--did they become the
beautiful things we find in _Lohengrin_, foretelling the sublime
things we find in _Tristan_. Eric's tunes are as colourless as
Donizetti's. All this we may joyfully admit, knowing how much there is
to be said on the other side, and seeing in the _Dutchman_ only a
foretaste of Wagner's greatest work. A really great work it assuredly
is. We have the magnificent sea-music, and, in spite of outer
incoherences, the smell and atmosphere of the sea maintained to the
last bar of the opera. In his music at least Vanderdecken is a deeply
tragic figure. There is the ballad, by very far the finest in music;
there is Senta's declaration of faith. Whenever it was possible for
the composer to be inspired he instantly responded. Had he not lived
to write another note his memory would live by the _Dutchman_. It