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 CONCLUSION

BRIEF SKETCH OF THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY

230. The Wagnerian Triumph.—In the last third of the century the supreme single event was the achievement of Wagner's lifelong ambition. The Bayreuth performances from 1876 onward made an epoch in musical art. They brought out Wagner's later dramas in accordance with all his ideas of apparatus and effect. They demonstrated his power to command popular enthusiasm and critical respect. They led at once to productions elsewhere on a somewhat parallel scale, at least with exceptional attention to the detail of representation. They forced the operatic world to adjust its thought to new ideals of technique on every side. They stimulated a profound remodeling of style on the part of dramatic and orchestral composers in all countries, tending more or less toward an imitation of the Wagnerian procedures, often extremely clever, but, as a rule, without creative energy to be compared with his. They thus introduced into the musical world a ferment whose working is still widely conspicuous.

The first consequence of all this was naturally a fresh attention to the opera as a consummate art-form, viewed now not from the restricted and manneristic angle of the earlier Italian writers, but as a genuine drama in music. Of course, the traditions of each country and school continued to make themselves felt, so that new types were never without evident connection with the past—as, for example, in the case of Verdi. But everywhere the details of treatment began to undergo extensive readjustments to fit them to compete before the critics and the public with the gigantic Wagnerian constructions. The two most striking instances of this process were the evolution of the French drame lyrique out of the opéra comique under a series of composers, and the setting up of a new type of Italian opera under the lead of Verdi. Equally important was the unfolding of the modern German opera, but in this case no such recon