is wonderful art
conception. It is just this intrusion of materialism in Wagner's
music dramas which constitutes their only weakness.

At this point I wish to insist upon the fact that in music it
is always through declamation that the public is addressed most
directly; not only that, but declamation is not necessarily tied
by any of the fetters of the spoken word; nor is it subservient
to any of the laws of articulate speech as we meet with them in
language. This being admitted, I have no hesitation in giving
my opinion that opera, or rather the music drama, is not the
highest or the most perfect form of our art. The music drama
as represented by Wagner (and he alone represents it) is the
most perfect union of painting, poetry, and music imaginable to
our nineteenth-century minds. But as regards representing the
highest development of music, I find it too much hampered by
the externals of art, necessary materialism in the production
of palpable acts, and its enforced subjection to the laws that
govern the spoken word.

Music is universal; Wagner's operas, by the inherent necessities
of speech, are necessarily and irrevocably Germanic. "Les
Maitres Chanteurs," "The Dwarfs of Niebelheim," "Elizabeta,"
are impossibilities, whereas, for instance, Beethoven's "Eroica"
labours under no such disadvantage. "Goodbye, My Dearest Swan,"
invests part of "Lohengrin" with a certain grotesque colour
that no one would ever dream of if there were no necessity for
the singer to be tied down to the exigencies of palpable and
certainly most materialistic language. The thought in itself
is beautiful, but the necessity for the words drags it into
the mud.

This certainly shows the difference between the language of
music and what is called articulate speech, the purely symbolic
and artificial character of the latter, and the direct,
unhampered utterance of the former. Music can invariably
heighten the poignancy of mere spoken words (which mean
nothing in themselves), but words can but rarely, in fact I
doubt whether they can ever, heighten the effect of musical
declamation. To my mind, listening to Wagner's operas may be
likened to watching a circus with three rings. That containing
the music should have our closest attention, for it offers
the most wonderful sounds ever imagined by any man. At the
same time it is impossible for any human being not to have his
attention often lured away to the other rings, in one of which
Fricke's r