Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/577

 means that did not give scope for vivid and powerful popular effect. Accordingly, from his twentieth year he settled upon the opera as his favorite and almost only form.

It would seem that in the opera his individuality found itself only by progressive experiments. His successive works exhibit a steady and remarkable development. Yet the adoption in some form of most of the technical methods by which he is distinguished, considering how novel and radical they were, was astonishingly speedy. At first he was strongly inclined to take up the ideals of the German romantic opera. But these did not meet his craving for realism in his materials or for ideal sublimity in general topic. Hence in Rienzi he turned frankly to the historical opera, acknowledging, however, that in musical treatment he was making a concession to current styles in order to gain a hearing. But this again did not meet his desire, except that it was popularly successful. He longed for subjects of extreme magnitude, in which there was room for rich imagination and symbolism. The purely romantic type lacked sublimity and tragic pathos. The purely historical opera lacked scope for pure imagination and ease of symbolic application. Hence he gradually evolved a new type, carrying to culmination tendencies that had been somewhat discernible for more than half a century, but handled in detail in a way wholly his own. The final success of this climacteric effort came from the fact that in Wagner as an artist of the first rank there was an organic combination of the power fully to assimilate the best in previous styles and the power to create for himself an original method of expression.

Wagner's theory of the opera rested on the view that it was properly a drama in music, as the Florentines and the earliest Venetians had conceived it, not a musical work dramatically arranged and presented. Its genesis must be from subject, plot and characters through text, action and setting to the detailed musical embodiment. Here he was fully at one with Gluck and Weber at their best, and in radical opposition to the Neapolitan concert-opera. But he outran all predecessors in his insistence upon heroic and ideal topics, drawn from sources so removed from common life as to rouse the imagination to full activity, and, like all great artists, he instinctively sought subjects that were rich in moral symbolism or implication. He found the sublimity that he needed mainly in the vast treasures of Teutonic mythology, thus securing a field of ideality analogous to that constantly employed by the Greek dramatists, but a field