Such discussions are not within the scope of this little book. But as
the book is now finished (for really nothing more need be said about
The Ring), I am quite willing to add a few pages of ordinary musical
criticism, partly to please the amateurs who enjoy that sort of reading,
and partly for the guidance of those who wish to obtain some hints to
help them through such critical small talk about Wagner and Bayreuth as
may be forced upon them at the dinner table or between the acts.




THE OLD AND THE NEW MUSIC

In the old-fashioned opera every separate number involved the
composition of a fresh melody; but it is quite a mistake to suppose that
this creative-effort extended continuously throughout the number from
the first to the last bar. When a musician composes according to a set
metrical pattern, the selection of the pattern and the composition
of the first stave (a stave in music corresponds to a line in verse)
generally completes the creative effort. All the rest follows more
or less mechanically to fill up the pattern, an air being very like a
wall-paper design in this respect. Thus the second stave is usually a
perfectly obvious consequence of the first; and the third and fourth an
exact or very slightly varied repetition of the first and second. For
example, given the first line of Pop Goes the Weasel or Yankee Doodle,
any musical cobbler could supply the remaining three. There is very
little tune turning of this kind in The Ring; and it is noteworthy that
where it does occur, as in Siegmund's spring song and Mimmy's croon,
"Ein zullendes Kind," the effect of the symmetrical staves, recurring
as a mere matter of form, is perceptibly poor and platitudinous compared
with the free flow of melody which prevails elsewhere.

The other and harder way of composing is to take a strain of free
melody, and ring every variety of change of mood upon it as if it were
a thought that sometimes brought hope, sometimes melancholy, sometimes
exultation, sometimes raging despair and so on. To take several themes
of this kind, and weave them together into a rich musical fabric
passing panoramically before the ear with a continually varying flow of
sentiment, is the highest feat of the musician: it is in this way that
we get the fugue of Bach and the symphony of Beethoven. The admittedly
inferior musician is the one who, like Auber and Offenbach, not to
mention our purveyors of drawing-room ballads, can produce an unlimited
quantity of symmetrical tunes, but cannot weave themes symphonically.

When this is taken into account, it will be seen that the fact that
there is a great deal of repetition in The Ring does not distinguish it
from the old-fashioned operas. The real difference is that in them the
repetition was used for the mechanical completion of conventional
metric patterns, whereas in The Ring the recurrence of the theme is
an intelligent and interesting consequence of the recurrence of the
dramatic phenomenon which it denotes. It should be remembered also
that the substitution of symphonically treated themes for tunes with
symmetrical eight-bar staves and the like, has always been the rule in
the highest forms of music. To describe it, or be affected by it, as
an abandonment of melody, is to confess oneself an ignoramus conversant
only with dance tunes and ballads.

The sort of stuff a purely dramatic musician produces when he hampers
himself with metric patterns in composition is not unlike what might
have resulted in literature if Carlyle (for example) had been compelled
by convention to write his historical stories in rhymed stanzas. That
is to say, it limits his fertility to an occasional phrase, and three
quarters of the time exercises only his barren ingenuity in fitting
rhymes and measures to it. In literature the great masters of the art
have long emancipated themselves from metric patterns. Nobody claims
that the hierarchy of modern impassioned prose writers, from Bunyan
to Ruskin, should be placed below the writers of pretty lyrics, from
Herrick to Mr. Austin Dobson. Only in dramatic literature do we find the
devastating tradition of blank verse still lingering, giving factitious
prestige to the platitudes of dullards, and robbing the dramatic style
of the genuine poet of its full natural endowment of variety, force and
simplicity.

This state of things, as we have seen, finds its parallel in musical
art, since music can be written in prose themes or in versified tunes;
only here nobody dreams of disputing the greater difficulty of the prose
forms, and the comparative triviality of versification. Yet in dramatic
music, as in dramatic literature, the tradition of versification clings
with the same pernicious results; and the opera, like the tragedy, is
conventionally made like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to be
in all things the last refuge of the hankering after cheap prettiness in
art.

Unfortunately this confusion of the decorative with the dramatic element
in both literature and music is maintained by the example of great
masters in both arts. Very touching dramatic expression can be combined
with decorative symmetry of versification when the artist happens to
possess both the decorative and dramatic gifts, and to have cultivated
both hand in hand. Shakespeare and Shelley, for instance, far from being
hampered by the conventional obligation to write their dramas in verse,
found it much the easiest and cheapest way of producing them. But if
Shakespeare had been compelled by custom to write entirely in prose, all
his ordinary dialogue might have been as good as the first scene of As
You Like It; and all his lofty passages as fine as "What a piece of
work is Man!", thus sparing us a great deal of blank verse in which the
thought is commonplace, and the expression, though catchingly turned,
absurdly pompous. The Cent might either have been a serious drama or
might never have been written at all if Shelley had not been allowed to
carry off its unreality by Elizabethan versification. Still, both
poets have achieved many passages in which the decorative and dramatic
qualities are not only reconciled, but seem to enhance one another to a
pitch otherwise unattainable.

Just so in music. When we find, as in the case of Mozart, a prodigiously
gifted and arduously trained musician who is also, by a happy accident,
a dramatist comparable to Moliere, the obligation to compose operas in
versified numbers not only does not embarrass him, but actually saves
him trouble and thought. No matter what his dramatic mood may be, he
expresses it in exquisite musical verses more easily than a dramatist of
ordinary singleness of talent can express it in prose. Accordingly, he
too, like Shakespeare and Shelley, leaves versified airs, like Dalla sua
pace, or Gluck's Che fare senza Euridice, or Weber's Leise, leise, which
are as dramatic from the first note to the last as the untrammelled
themes of The Ring. In consequence, it used to be professorially
demanded that all dramatic music should present the same double aspect.
The demand was unreasonable, since symmetrical versification is no merit
in dramatic music: one might as well stipulate that a dinner fork should
be constructed so as to serve also as a tablecloth. It was an ignorant
demand too, because it is not true that the composers of these
exceptional examples were always, or even often, able to combine
dramatic expression with symmetrical versification. Side by side
with Dalla sua pace we have Il mio tesoro and Non mi dir, in which
exquisitely expressive opening phrases lead to decorative passages which
are as grotesque from the dramatic point of view as the music which
Alberic sings when he is slipping and sneezing in the Rhine mud is from
the decorative point of view. Further, there is to be considered the
mass of shapeless "dry recitative" which separates these symmetrical
numbers, and which might have been raised to considerable dramatic and
musical importance had it been incorporated into a continuous musical
fabric by thematic treatment. Finally, Mozart's most dramatic finales
and concerted numbers are more or less in sonata form, like symphonic
movements, and must therefore be classed as musical prose. And sonata
form dictates repetitions and recapitulations from which the perfectly
unconventional form adopted by Wagner is free. On the whole, there is
more scope for both repetition and convention in the old form than in
the new; and the poorer a composer's musical gift is, the surer he is to
resort to the eighteenth century patterns to eke out his invention.




THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

When Wagner was born in 1813, music had newly become the most
astonishing, the most fascinating, the most miraculous art in the world.
Mozart's Don Giovanni had made all musical Europe conscious of the
enchantments of the modern orchestra and of the perfect adaptability of
music to the subtlest needs of the dramatist. Beethoven had shown how
those inarticulate mood-poems which surge through men who have, like
himself, no exceptional command of words, can be written down in music
as symphonies. Not that Mozart and Beethoven invented these applications
of their art; but they were the first whose works made it clear that the
dramatic and subjective powers of sound were enthralling enough to stand
by themselves quite apart from the decorative musical structures of
which they had hitherto been a mere feature. After the finales in Figaro
and Don Giovanni, the possibility of the modern music drama lay bare.
After the symphonies of Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that
lies too deep for words does not lie too deep for music, and that
the vicissitudes of the soul, from the roughest fun to the loftiest
aspiration, can make symphonies without the aid of dance tunes. As much,
perhaps, will be claimed for the preludes and fugues of Bach; but
Bach's method was unattainable: his compositions were wonderful webs
of exquisitely beautiful Gothic traceries in sound, quite beyond all
ordinary human talent. Beethoven's far blunter craft was thoroughly
popular and practicable: not to save his soul could he have drawn one
long Gothic line in sound as Bach could, much less have woven several
of them together with so apt a harmony that even when the composer is
unmoved its progressions saturate themselves with the emotion which (as
modern critics are a little apt to forget) springs as warmly from our
delicately touched admiration as from our sympathies, and sometimes
makes us give a composer credit for pathetic intentions which he does
not entertain, just as a boy imagines a treasure of tenderness and noble
wisdom in the beauty of a woman. Besides, Bach set comic dialogue to
music exactly as he set the recitatives of the Passion, there being for
him, apparently, only one recitative possible, and that the musically
best. He reserved the expression of his merry mood for the regular
set numbers in which he could make one of his wonderful contrapuntal
traceries of pure ornament with the requisite gaiety of line and
movement. Beethoven bowed to no ideal of beauty: he only sought the
expression for his feeling. To him a joke was a joke; and if it sounded
funny in music he was satisfied. Until the old habit of judging all
music by its decorative symmetry had worn out, musicians were shocked by
his symphonies, and, misunderstanding his integrity, openly questioned
his sanity. But to those who were not looking for pretty new sound
patterns, but were longing for the expression of their moods in music,
he achieved revelation, because, being single in his aim to express his
own moods, he anticipated with revolutionary courage and frankness all
the moods of the rising generations of the nineteenth century.

The result was inevitable. In the nineteenth century it was no longer
necessary to be a born pattern designer in sound to be a composer.
One had but to be a dramatist or a poet completely susceptible to
the dramatic and descriptive powers of sound. A race of literary and
theatrical musicians appeared; and Meyerbeer, the first of them, made
an extraordinary impression. The frankly delirious description of his
Robert the Devil in Balzac's short story entitled Gambra, and Goethe's
astonishingly mistaken notion that he could have composed music for
Faust, show how completely the enchantments of the new dramatic music
upset the judgment of artists of eminent discernment. Meyerbeer was,
people said (old gentlemen still say so in Paris), the successor of
Beethoven: he was, if a less perfect musician than Mozart, a profounder
genius. Above all, he was original and daring. Wagner himself raved
about the duet in the fourth act of Les Huguenots as wildly as anyone.

Yet all this effect of originality and profundity was produced by a
quite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting certain
curious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and devising
suggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its decorative side, it was
the same phenomenon in music as the Baroque school in architecture: an
energetic struggle to enliven organic decay by mechanical oddities and
novelties. Meyerbeer was no symphonist. He could not apply the thematic
system to his striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric
patterns in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either,
he hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which
were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by certain
brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their singularity to
their senselessness. He could produce neither a thorough music drama
nor a charming opera. But with all this, and worse, Meyerbeer had some
genuine dramatic energy, and even passion; and sometimes rose to the
occasion in a manner which, whilst the imagination of his contemporaries
remained on fire with the novelties of dramatic music, led them to
overrate him with an extravagance which provoked Wagner to conduct a
long critical campaign against his leadership. Thirty years ago this
campaign was mentably ascribed to the professional jealousy of a
disappointed rival. Nowadays young people cannot understand how anyone
could ever have taken Meyerbeer's influence seriously. Those who
remember how his reputation stood half a century ago, and who realize
what a nothoroughfare the path he opened proved to be, even to himself,
know how inevitable and how impersonal Wagner's attack was.

Wagner was the literary musician par excellence. He could not, like
Mozart and Beethoven, produce decorative tone structures independently
of any dramatic or poetic subject matter, because, that craft being
no longer necessary for his purpose, he did not cultivate it. As
Shakespeare, compared with Tennyson, appears to have an exclusively
dramatic talent, so exactly does Wagner compared with Mendelssohn.
On the other hand, he had not to go to third rate literary hacks for
"librettos" to set to music: he produced his own dramatic poems, thus
giving dramatic integrity to opera, and making symphony articulate. A
Beethoven symphony (except the articulate part of the ninth) expresses
noble feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner added
thought and produced the music drama. Mozart's loftiest opera, his Ring,
so to speak, The Magic Flute, has a libretto which, though none the
worse for seeming, like The Rhine Gold, the merest Christmas tomfoolery
to shallow spectators, is the product of a talent immeasurably inferior
to Mozart's own. The libretto of Don Giovanni is coarse and trivial:
its transfiguration by Mozart's music may be a marvel; but nobody will
venture to contend that such transfigurations, however seductive, can
be as satisfactory as tone poetry or drama in which the musician and
the poet are at the same level. Here, then, we have the simple secret of
Wagner's preemminence as a dramatic musician. He wrote the poems as well
as composed the music of his "stage festival plays," as he called them.

Up to a certain point in his career Wagner paid the penalty of
undertaking two arts instead of one. Mozart had his trade as a musician
at his fingers' ends when he was twenty, because he had served an
arduous apprenticeship to that trade and no other. Wagner was very far
from having attained equal mastery at thirty-five: indeed he himself has
told us that not until he had passed the age at which Mozart died did he
compose with that complete spontaneity of musical expression which can
only be attained by winning entire freedom from all preoccupation with
the difficulties of technical processes. But when that time came, he was
not only a consummate musician, like Mozart, but a dramatic poet and a
critical and philosophical essayist, exercising a considerable influence
on his century. The sign of this consummation was his ability at last to
play with his art, and thus to add to his already famous achievements in
sentimental drama that lighthearted art of comedy of which the greatest
masters, like Moliere and Mozart, are so much rarer than the tragedians
and sentimentalists. It was then that he composed the first two acts of
Siegfried, and later on The Mastersingers, a professedly comedic work,
and a quite Mozartian garden of melody, hardly credible as the work of
the straining artifices of Tanehauser. Only, as no man ever learns to do
one thing by doing something else, however closely allied the two things
may be, Wagner still produced no music independently of his poems. The
overture to The Mastersingers is delightful when you know what it is
all about; but only those to whom it came as a concert piece without any
such clue, and who judged its reckless counterpoint by the standard of
Bach and of Mozart's Magic Flute overture, can realize how atrocious
it used to sound to musicians of the old school. When I first heard it,
with the clear march of the polyphony in Bach's B minor Mass fresh in my
memory, I confess I thought that the parts had got dislocated, and that
some of the band were half a bar behind the others. Perhaps they were;
but now that I am familiar with the work, and with Wagner's harmony, I
can still quite understand certain passages producing that effect organ
admirer of Bach even when performed with perfect accuracy.




THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

The success of Wagner has been so prodigious that to his dazzled
disciples it seems that the age of what he called "absolute" music
must be at an end, and the musical future destined to be an exclusively
Wagnerian one inaugurated at Bayreuth. All great geniuses produce this
illusion. Wagner did not begin a movement: he consummated it. He was the
summit of the nineteenth century school of dramatic music in the same
sense as Mozart was the summit (the word is Gounod's) of the eighteenth
century school. And those who attempt to carry on his Bayreuth tradition
will assuredly share the fate of the forgotten purveyors of second-hand
Mozart a hundred years ago. As to the expected supersession of absolute
music, it is sufficient to point to the fact that Germany produced two
absolute musicians of the first class during Wagner's lifetime: one, the
greatly gifted Goetz, who died young; the other, Brahms, whose absolute
musical endowment was as extraordinary as his thought was commonplace.
Wagner had for him the contempt of the original thinker for the man of
second-hand ideas, and of the strenuously dramatic musician for mere
brute musical faculty; but though his contempt was perhaps deserved by
the Triumphlieds, and Schicksalslieds, and Elegies and Requiems in
which Brahms took his brains so seriously, nobody can listen to Brahms'
natural utterance of the richest absolute music, especially in his
chamber compositions, without rejoicing in his amazing gift. A reaction
to absolute music, starting partly from Brahms, and partly from such
revivals of medieval music as those of De Lange in Holland and Mr.
Arnold Dolmetsch in England, is both likely and promising; whereas there
is no more hope in attempts to out-Wagner Wagner in music drama than
there was in the old attempts--or for the matter of that, the new
ones--to make Handel the starting point of a great school of oratorio.




BAYREUTH

When the Bayreuth Festival Playhouse was at last completed, and opened
in 1876 with the first performance of The Ring, European society was
compelled to admit that Wagner was "a success." Royal personages,
detesting his music, sat out the performances in the row of boxes set
apart for princes. They all complimented him on the astonishing "push"
with which, in the teeth of all obstacles, he had turned a fabulous and
visionary project into a concrete commercial reality, patronized by
the public at a pound a head. It is as well to know that these
congratulations had no other effect upon Wagner than to open his eyes
to the fact that the Bayreuth experiment, as an attempt to evade the
ordinary social and commercial conditions of theatrical enterprise,
was a failure. His own account of it contrasts the reality with his
intentions in a vein which would be bitter if it were not so humorous.
The precautions taken to keep the seats out of the hands of the
frivolous public and in the hands of earnest disciples, banded together
in little Wagner Societies throughout Europe, had ended in their
forestalling by ticket speculators and their sale to just the sort of
idle globe-trotting tourists against whom the temple was to have been
strictly closed. The money, supposed to be contributed by the faithful,
was begged by energetic subscription-hunting ladies from people who must
have had the most grotesque misconceptions of the composer's aims--among
others, the Khedive of Egypt and the Sultan of Turkey!

The only change that has occurred since then is that subscriptions are
no longer needed; for the Festival Playhouse apparently pays its own way
now, and is commercially on the same footing as any other theatre. The
only qualification required from the visitor is money. A Londoner spends
twenty pounds on a visit: a native Bayreuther spends one pound. In
either case "the Folk," on whose behalf Wagner turned out in 1849,
are effectually excluded; and the Festival Playhouse must therefore be
classed as infinitely less Wagnerian in its character than Hampton Court
Palace. Nobody knew this better than Wagner; and nothing can be further
off the mark than to chatter about Bayreuth as if it had succeeded in
escaping from the conditions of our modern civilization any more than
the Grand Opera in Paris or London.

Within these conditions, however, it effected a new departure in that
excellent German institution, the summer theatre. Unlike our opera
houses, which are constructed so that the audience may present a
splendid pageant to the delighted manager, it is designed to secure
an uninterrupted view of the stage, and an undisturbed hearing of the
music, to the audience. The dramatic purpose of the performances is
taken with entire and elaborate seriousness as the sole purpose of
them; and the management is jealous for the reputation of Wagner. The
commercial success which has followed this policy shows that the public
wants summer theatres of the highest class. There is no reason why the
experiment should not be tried in England. If our enthusiasm for Handel
can support Handel Festivals, laughably dull, stupid and anti-Handelian
as these choral monstrosities are, as well as annual provincial
festivals on the same model, there is no likelihood of a Wagner Festival
failing. Suppose, for instance, a Wagner theatre were built at Hampton
Court or on Richmond Hill, not to say Margate pier, so that we could
have a delightful summer evening holiday, Bayreuth fashion, passing the
hours between the acts in the park or on the river before sunset, is
it seriously contended that there would be any lack of visitors? If a
little of the money that is wasted on grand stands, Eiffel towers, and
dismal Halls by the Sea, all as much tied to brief annual seasons as
Bayreuth, were applied in this way, the profit would be far more certain
and the social utility prodigiously greater. Any English enthusiasm for
Bayreuth that does not take the form of clamor for a Festival Playhouse
in England may be set aside as mere pilgrimage mania.

Those who go to Bayreuth never repent it, although the performances
there are often far from delectable. The singing is sometimes tolerable,
and sometimes abominable. Some of the singers are mere animated beer
casks, too lazy and conceited to practise the self-control and physical
training that is expected as a matter of course from an acrobat, a
jockey or a pugilist. The women's dresses are prudish and absurd. It
is true that Kundry no longer wears an early Victorian ball dress with
"ruchings," and that Fresh has been provided with a quaintly modish copy
of the flowered gown of Spring in Botticelli's famous picture; but the
mailclad Brynhild still climbs the mountains with her legs carefully
hidden in a long white skirt, and looks so exactly like Mrs. Leo Hunter
as Minerva that it is quite impossible to feel a ray of illusion whilst
looking at her. The ideal of womanly beauty aimed at reminds Englishmen
of the barmaids of the seventies, when the craze for golden hair was
at its worst. Further, whilst Wagner's stage directions are sometimes
disregarded as unintelligently as at Covent Garden, an intolerably
old-fashioned tradition of half rhetorical, half historical-pictorial
attitude and gesture prevails. The most striking moments of the drama
are conceived as tableaux vivants with posed models, instead of as
passages of action, motion and life.

I need hardly add that the supernatural powers of control attributed
by credulous pilgrims to Madame Wagner do not exist. Prima donnas and
tenors are as unmanageable at Bayreuth as anywhere else. Casts are
capriciously changed; stage business is insufficiently rehearsed; the
public are compelled to listen to a Brynhild or Siegfried of fifty when
they have carefully arranged to see one of twenty-five, much as in
any ordinary opera house. Even the conductors upset the arrangements
occasionally. On the other hand, if we leave the vagaries of the stars
out of account, we may safely expect always that in thoroughness of
preparation of the chief work of the season, in strenuous artistic
pretentiousness, in pious conviction that the work is of such enormous
importance as to be worth doing well at all costs, the Bayreuth
performances will deserve their reputation. The band is placed out of
sight of the audience, with the more formidable instruments beneath
the stage, so that the singers have not to sing THROUGH the brass. The
effect is quite perfect.




BAYREUTH IN ENGLAND

I purposely dwell on the faults of Bayreuth in order to show that there
is no reason in the world why as good and better performances of The
Ring should not be given in England. Wagner's scores are now before the
world; and neither his widow nor his son can pretend to handle them with
greater authority than any artist who feels the impulse to interpret
them. Nobody will ever know what Wagner himself thought of the artists
who established the Bayreuth tradition: he was obviously not in a
position to criticize them. For instance, had Rubini survived to create
Siegmund, it is quite certain that we should not have had from Wagner's
pen so amusing and vivid a description as we have of his Ottavio in the
old Paris days. Wagner was under great obligations to the heroes and
heroines of 1876; and he naturally said nothing to disparage their
triumphs; but there is no reason to believe that all or indeed any of
them satisfied him as Schnorr of Carolsfeld satisfied him as Tristan, or
Schroder Devrient as Fidelio. It is just as likely as not that the
next Schnorr or Schroder may arise in England. If that should actually
happen, neither of them will need any further authority than their own
genius and Wagner's scores for their guidance. Certainly the less their
spontaneous impulses are sophisticated by the very stagey traditions
which Bayreuth is handing down from the age of Crummles, the better.




WAGNERIAN SINGERS

No nation need have much difficulty in producing a race of Wagnerian
singers. With the single exception of Handel, no composer has written
music so well calculated to make its singers vocal athletes as Wagner.
Abominably as the Germans sing, it is astonishing how they thrive
physically on his leading parts. His secret is the Handelian secret.
Instead of specializing his vocal parts after the manner of Verdi and
Gounod for high sopranos, screaming tenors, and high baritones with
an effective compass of about a fifth at the extreme tiptop of their
ranges, and for contraltos with chest registers forced all over their
compass in the manner of music hall singers, he employs the entire range
of the human voice freely, demanding from everybody very nearly two
effective octaves, so that the voice is well exercised all over, and
one part of it relieves the other healthily and continually. He uses
extremely high notes very sparingly, and is especially considerate in
the matter of instrumental accompaniment. Even when the singer appears
to have all the thunders of the full orchestra raging against him, a
glance at the score will show that he is well heard, not because of any
exceptionally stentorian power in his voice, but because Wagner meant
him to be heard and took the greatest care not to overwhelm him. Such
brutal opacities of accompaniment as we find in Rossini's Stabat or
Verdi's Trovatore, where the strings play a rum-tum accompaniment
whilst the entire wind band blares away, fortissimo, in unison with the
unfortunate singer, are never to be found in Wagner's work. Even in an
ordinary opera house, with the orchestra ranged directly between the
singers and the audience, his instrumentation is more transparent to
the human voice than that of any other composer since Mozart. At the
Bayreuth Buhnenfestspielhaus, with the brass under the stage, it is
perfectly so.

On every point, then, a Wagner theatre and Wagner festivals are much
more generally practicable than the older and more artificial forms
of dramatic music. A presentable performance of The Ring is a big
undertaking only in the sense in which the construction of a railway
is a big undertaking: that is, it requires plenty of work and plenty of
professional skill; but it does not, like the old operas and oratorios,
require those extraordinary vocal gifts which only a few individuals
scattered here and there throughout Europe are born with. Singers who
could never execute the roulades of Semiramis, Assur, and Arsaces in
Rossini's Semiramide, could sing the parts of Brynhild, Wotan and
Erda without missing a note. Any Englishman can understand this if he
considers for a moment the difference between a Cathedral service and
an Italian opera at Covent Garden. The service is a much more serious
matter than the opera. Yet provincial talent is sufficient for it, if
the requisite industry and devotion are forthcoming. Let us admit that
geniuses of European celebrity are indispensable at the Opera (though
I know better, having seen lusty troopers and porters, without art or
manners, accepted by fashion as principal tenors at that institution
during the long interval between Mario and Jean de Reszke); but let us
remember that Bayreuth has recruited its Parsifals from the peasantry,
and that the artisans of a village in the Bavarian Alps are capable of a
famous and elaborate Passion Play, and then consider whether England is
so poor in talent that its amateurs must journey to the centre of Europe
to witness a Wagner Festival.

The truth is, there is nothing wrong with England except the wealth
which attracts teachers of singing to her shores in sufficient numbers
to extinguish the voices of all natives who have any talent as singers.
Our salvation must come from the class that is too poor to have lessons.