ed that he has expressed so much
with common words, to which he gives new meaning; and so when I hear
Wagner, I exclaim: Is it possible that all this is done with common
air?

In Wagner's music there is a touch of chaos that suggests the infinite.
The melodies seem strange and changing forms, like summer clouds, and
weird harmonies come like sounds from the sea brought by fitful winds,
and others moan like waves on desolate shores, and mingled with these,
are shouts of joy, with sighs and sobs and ripples of laughter, and the
wondrous voices of eternal love.

Wagner is the Shakespeare of Music.

The funeral march for Siegfried is the funeral music for all the dead.
Should all the gods die, this music would be perfectly appropriate. It
is elemental, universal, eternal.

The love-music in Tristan and Isolde is, like Romeo and Juliet an
expression of the human heart for all time. So the love-duet in "The
Flying Dutchman" has in it the consecration, the infinite self-denial,
of love. The whole heart is given; every note has wings, and rises and
poises like an eagle in the heaven of sound.

When I listen to the music of Wagner, I see pictures, forms, glimpses of
the perfect, the swell of a hip, the wave of a breast, the glance of an
eye. I am in the midst of great galleries. Before me are passing the
endless panoramas. I see vast landscapes with valleys of verdure and
vine with soaring crags, snow-crowned. I am on the wide seas, where
countless billows burst into the whitecaps of joy. I am in the depths of
caverns roofed with mighty crags, while through some rent I see the
eternal stars. In a moment the music becomes a river of melody, flowing
through some wondrous land; suddenly it falls in strange chasms, and the
mighty cataract is changed to seven-hued foam.

Great music is always sad, because it tells us of the perfect; and such
is the difference between what we are and that which music suggests,
that even in the vase of joy we find some tears.

The music of Wagner has color, and when I hear the violins, the morning
seems to slowly come. A horn puts a star above the horizon. The night,
in the purple hum of the bass, wanders away like some enormous bee
across wide fields of dead clover. The light grows whiter as the violins
increase. Colors come from other instruments, and then the full
orchestra floods the world with day.

Wagner seems not only to have given us new tones, new combinations, but
the moment the or