lay. 'Tristan und
Isolde' is a case in point. Practically, its outward action
is summed up in each of its three acts by the same words:
Preparation for a meeting of the ill-starred lovers; the
meeting. What is outside of this is mere detail; yet the
effect of the tragedy upon a listener is that of a play
surcharged with pregnant occurrence. It is the subtle
alchemy of music that transmutes the psychological action of
the tragedy into dramatic incident."

[Sidenote: _Set forms not to be condemned._]

[Sidenote: _Wagner's influence._]

[Sidenote: _His orchestra._]

[Sidenote: _Vocal feats._]

For those who hold such a view with me it will be impossible to
condemn pieces of set forms in the lyric drama. Wagner still
represents his art-work alone, but in the influence which he exerted
upon contemporaneous composers in Italy and France, as well as
Germany, he is quite as significant a figure as he is as the creator
of the _Musikdrama_. The operas which are most popular in our Italian
and French repertories are those which benefited by the liberation
from formalism and the exaltation of the dramatic idea which he
preached and exemplified--such works as Gounod's "Faust," Verdi's
"Aida" and "Otello," and Bizet's "Carmen." With that emancipation
there came, as was inevitable, new conceptions of the province of
dramatic singing as well as new convictions touching the mission of
the orchestra. The instruments in Wagner's latter-day works are quite
as much as the singing actors the expositors of the dramatic idea, and
in the works of the other men whom I have mentioned they speak a
language which a century ago was known only to the orchestras of Gluck
and Mozart with their comparatively limited, yet eloquent, vocabulary.
Coupled with praise for the wonderful art of Mesdames Patti and Melba
(and I am glad to have lived in their generation, though they do not
represent my ideal in dramatic singing), we are accustomed to hear
lamentations over the decay of singing. I have intoned such jeremiads
myself, and I do not believe that music is suffering from a greater
want to-day than that of a more thorough training for singers. I
marvel when I read that Senesino sang cadences of fifty seconds'
duration; that Ferri with a single breath could trill upon each note
of two octaves, ascending and descending, and that La Bastardella's
art was equal to a perfect performance (perfect in the conception