in truth,
Wagner was simply endeavoring to put himself into an atmosphere most
favorable for dramatic creation. We all know how much clothes help to
make a man, in more than one sense; and any one who has ever taken
part in private theatricals will remember how much the costume helped
him to get into the proper frame of mind for interpreting his role.
This was all that Wagner aimed at in wearing his mediaeval costumes;
and the wonderful realism and vividness of his dramatic conceptions
certainly more than justify the unusual methods he pursued to attain
them.

After elaborating the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic details of his
scores, Wagner considered his main task done, and the orchestration
was completed down-stairs in his music room. In his earliest operas
Wagner did not write his scenes in their regular order, but took those
first which specially proffered themselves. Of the "Flying Dutchman,"
for instance, he wrote the spinning chorus first, and he was delighted
to find on this occasion, as he himself says, that he could still
compose after a long interruption. He used a piano but rather to
stimulate and correct than to invent. In his later works the piano is
absolutely out of the question. He wrote the music, scene after scene,
following the text; and the conception of the whole score is so
absolutely orchestral that the piano cannot even give as faint a
notion of it as a photograph can give of the splendors of a Titian.
Wagner, as he himself tells us, was unable to play his scores on the
piano, but always tried to get Liszt to do that for him.

It is possible that some of my readers have never seen a full
orchestral score of "Siegfried" or "Tristan." If so, I advise them to
go to a music store and look at one as a matter of curiosity. They
will find a large quarto volume, every page of which represents only
one line of music. There are separate staves for the violins, violas,
cellos, double basses, flutes, bassoons, clarinets, horns, tubas,
trombones, kettle-drums, etc., each family forming a quartette in
itself, and each having its own peculiar emotional quality. In
conducting an opera the Kapellmeister has to keep his eye and ear at
the same time on each of these groups, as well as on the vocal parts
and scenic effects. If this requires a talent rarely found among
musicians, how very much greater must be the mind which created this
complicated operatic score! No one who tries to realize what this
implies,