In Rienzi Wagner would already have been Meyerbeer's rival, but that his sincerity, and his initial lack of that musical savoir faire which is prior to the individual handling of ideas, put him at a disadvantage. The step from Rienzi to Der fliegende Hol lander is without parallel in the history of music, and would be inexplicable if Rienzi contained nothing good and if Der fliegende Hollander did not contain many reminiscences of the decline of Italian opera; but it is noticeable that in this case the lapses into vulgar music have a distinct dramatic value.
Spohr's appreciation of Der fliegende Hollander is a remarkable point in musical history; and his criticism that Wagner's style (in Tannhauser) "lacked rounded periods" shows the best effect of that style on a well-disposed contemporary mind. Of course, from Wagner's mature point of view his early style is far too much cut up by periods and full closes ; and its prophetic traits are so incomparably more striking than its resemblance to any earlier art that we often feel that only the full closes stand between it and the true Wagner. With all its defects, Der fliegende Hollander is the most masterly and the least unequal of Wagner's early works. As drama it stood immeasurably above any opera since Cherubini's Medee. As a complete fusion between dramatic and musical movement, its very crudities point to its immense advance towards the solution of the problem, propounded chaoti cally at the beginning of the 17th century by Monteverde, and solved in a simple form by Gluck. And as the twofold musical and dramatic achievement of one mind, it already places Wagner beyond parallel in the history of art.
Tannhauser is on a grander scale, but its musical execution is disappointing. The weakest passages in Der fliegende Hollander are not so helpless as the original recitatives of Venus in the first act ; or Tannhauser's song, which was too far involved in the whole scheme to be ousted by the mature "New Venusberg music" with which Wagner fifteen years later got rid both of the end of the overture and what he called his "Palais-Royal" Venus.
It is really very difficult to understand Schumann's impression that the musical technique of Tannhduser shows a remarkable improvement. Not until the third act does the great Wagner arbitrate in the struggle between amateurishness and theatricality in the music, though at all points his epoch-making stagecraft asserts itself with a force that tempts us to treat the whole work as if it were on the Wagnerian plane of Tannhauser's account of his pilgrimage in the third act.
After even the finest things in Tannhiiuser, the Vorspie/ to Lohengrin comes as a revelation, with its quiet solemnity and breadth of design, its ethereal purity of tone-colour, and its complete emancipation from earlier operatic forms. The sus pense and climax in the first act is so intense, and the whole drama is so well designed, that we must have a very vivid idea of the later Wagner before we can see how far the quality of musical thought still falls short of his ideals. The elaborate
choral writing sometimes rises to almost Hellenic regions of dra matic art ; and there is no crudeness in the passages that carry on the story quietly in reaction from the climaxes—a test far too severe for Tannhauser and rather severe for even the mature works of Gluck and Weber.
The crowning complication in the effect of Der fliegende Hollander, Tannhauser and Lohengrin on the musical thought of the 19th century was that the unprecedented fusion of their musical with their dramatic contents revealed some of the meaning of serious music to ears that had been deaf to the classics. Wagnerism was henceforth proclaimed out of the mouths of babes and sucklings; learned musicians felt that it had an unfair advantage; and by the time Wagner's popularity began to thrive as a persecuted heresy he had left it in the lurch.
Wagner had hardly finished the score of Lohengrin before he was at work upon the poem of Der Ring des Nibelungen. And with this he suddenly became a mature artist. Wagner's choice of subjects had from the outset shown an imagination far above that of any earlier librettist ; yet he had begun with stories which could attract ordinary minds, as he dismally realized when the libretto of Der fliegende Hollander so pleased the Parisian wire-pullers that it was promptly set to music by one of their friends. But with Der Ring des Nibelungen Wagner devoted him self to a story which any ordinary dramatist would find as un wieldy as, for instance, most of Shakespeare's subjects; a story in which ordinary canons of taste and probability were violated as they are in real life and in great art. Wagner's first inspiration was for an opera (Siegfrieds Tod, projected in 1848) on the death of Germany's mythical hero ; but he found that the story needed a preliminary drama to convey its antecedents. This preliminary drama soon proved to need another to explain it, which again finally needed a short introductory drama. Thus the plan of the Ring was sketched in reverse order; and it has been remarked that Gotterdiimmerung shows traces of the fact that Wagner had begun his scheme in the days when French grand opera, with its ballets and pageantry, still influenced him. There is little doubt that some redundant narratives in the Ring were of earlier conception than the four complete dramas, and that their survival is due partly to Wagner's natural affection for work on which he had spent pains, and partly to a dim notion that (like Browning's method in The Ring and the Book) they might serve to reveal the story afresh in the light of each char acter. Be this as it may, we may confidently date the purification of Wagner's music at the moment when he set to work on a story which carried him finally away from that world of stereotyped operatic passions into which he had already breathed so much disturbing life.