_ or _Wotan_? All honor,
therefore, to the versatility of German singers, who, like Lilli
Lehmann, for instance, can sing _Norma_ and _Isolde_ equally well.

And still more honor to the German composers who have restored the
true function of song. Everybody knows that in the popular songs, or
folk songs, of _all_ nations, including the Italian, the words are
quite as important as the melody. It was only in the artificial songs
of the Netherland school and the Italian opera composers that the
voice was degraded to the function of a mere inarticulate instrument;
and it remained for Wagner, following the precedence of Gluck, to
restore it to its rank as the inseparable companion of poetry. And
what led him to do this was not abstract reflection but artistic
instinct and experience. He does not even claim the honor of having
originated the true vocal style, but confesses with pride that it was
a _woman_, Frau Schroeder-Devrient, who first revealed to him the
highest possibilities of dramatic singing, and he boasts that he was
the only one that learned this lesson of the great German singer, and
developed the hints regarding the correct vocal style unconsciously
given by her.

It must not be forgotten, however, that side by side with the
music-drama and partly preceding it, another form of vocal music grew
up in Germany, which in a very similar manner restored the voice to
its true sphere as the wedded wife of poetry. I refer, of course, to
the _Lied_, or parlor song, to which, indeed, I might have devoted
this whole essay, quite as well as to the music-drama, if there were
anything in Italian music that might have been compared to the songs
of Schubert, Schumann, Franz, Brahms, Liszt, Rubinstein, etc.

As Sir George Grove poetically puts it, in Schubert's songs "the music
changes with the words as a landscape does when the sun and clouds
pass over it. And in this Schubert has anticipated Wagner, since the
words in which he writes are as much the absolute basis of his songs
as Wagner's librettos are of his operas." Liszt, too, notes somewhere
that Schubert doubtless exerted an indirect influence on the
development of the opera by means of the dramatic realism which
characterizes the melody and accompaniment of his parlor songs (such
as the "Erl King," the "Doppelgaenger," etc.)--a realism which becomes
still more pronounced in Schumann, Franz, and Liszt, in whose songs
every word of the poem colors its bar of music with i