is
an enormous leap from _Rienzi_. There brilliancy is attained by huge
choruses and vigorous orchestration and rhythms that continually verge
on the vulgar. In the _Dutchman_ it is the stuff and texture of the
music that make the effect. Play _Rienzi_ on a piano, and you have
nothing; play the _Dutchman_, and you have immediately the roar of the
sea, the Dutchman's loneliness and sadness, Senta's exaltation. I have
spoken of Wagner having finished his apprenticeship when he went to
Magdeburg, and in a sense he had; but perhaps in the fuller sense he
finished it only with the _Dutchman_. He made mistakes, and thanks
largely to them, so mastered his own personal art that he was prepared
to take another and a vaster leap--from the _Dutchman_ to
_Tannhaeuser_. He cast the slough of the old Italian opera form.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Some characteristics of his harmony and instrumentation will most
conveniently be considered later. For the present I wish to draw my
reader's attention rather to Wagner the musico-dramatist than to
Wagner the technical musician.

CHAPTER VII

DRESDEN

I

When Wagner left Paris on the proceeds of some work for Schlesinger
which still remained to be done, he had learnt three lessons. The
first, that it was foolish for an unknown man to go off into unknown
lands, proved useful for a time. That is, for a time he put up with
many vexations rather than undertake such adventures. No one likes to
be starved and to see his wife starving, Wagner least of all men; and
we shall see that, once settled in Dresden, he set his teeth and
grinned and bore up against lack of appreciation and against actual
insult, so determined was he that his Minna should, if possible, live
in comfort. This lesson had been emphasized by his experiences before
he received a permanent appointment. His creditors of the north,
learning of the success of _Rienzi_, and little dreaming his profits
to be L45, immediately began to worry him; and until he got the
conductorship of the Royal opera-house his plight was little, if any,
better than it was in the Paris days. The second lesson was, that
whatever might happen in the future, it was futile to raise his eyes
to Paris: Paris would not listen to him or to any sincere artist. The
third was that nothing was to be hoped at all from the modern opera.
That lesson he never forgot. Unfortunately its teaching clashed with
that of lesson number one, and for some ti