Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/572

 CHAPTER XXXIV

WAGNER AND THE RECONSTRUCTED OPERA

206. The Situation Confronting Wagner.—The time at which Wagner appeared was one favorable to a great musical dramatist. Under the lead originally of the Viennese composers, orchestral music had become highly significant, disclosing in a new way the capacity of pure music (without words) through forms essentially its own to depict and symbolize complicated emotional experiences, and bringing an advanced type of art into intimate relation with the mental life of the age. To this orchestral evolution romanticism was adding a corresponding expansion of piano music, and notable enrichments in both solo and choral song. But the great field of dramatic music was as yet but imperfectly affected. It is true that Gluck a half-century before had opened the contention for dramatic sincerity, that Weber had lived long enough to start a fresh movement toward imaginative intensity, and that several composers were endeavoring to make the tragic opera what its common name implied—a really 'grand' or capital artistic type. But Gluck's efforts came before the forms of composition were fully ready to bear the strain demanded, and he was also entangled in the old academic notion about the subjects to be taken for operatic treatment. Weber's genius, real and fresh as it was, was exercised upon subjects without much moral grandeur, if, indeed, it was capable of attaining to them, and hence missed the greater inspirations, being animated more by fancy over the picturesque than by profound imagination. And Meyerbeer and other writers of grand opera, with perhaps a partial exception in Marschner, had not enough original force to construct more than a pretentious variant among the types of concert-opera that had long been prevalent. The technical resources of the opera had plainly been enriched, and the range of topic and plot broadened—on this side the French opéra comique having a useful influence. But the main current of opera-writing had