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Appendix B: Operator Precedence and Associativity 1289

Quick References 1291

Index 1293

Credit 1311

Online The following appendices are available at www.pearsonhighered.com/gaddis.

Appendix C: Introduction to Flowcharting

Appendix D: Using UML in Class Design

Appendix E: Namespaces

Appendix F: Passing Command Line Arguments

Appendix G: Binary Numbers and Bitwise Operations

Appendix H: STL Algorithms

Appendix I: Multi-Source File Programs

Appendix J: Stream Member Functions for Formatting

Appendix K: Unions

Appendix L: Answers to Checkpoints

Appendix M: Answers to Odd Numbered Review Questions

Case Study 1: String Manipulation

Case Study 2: High Adventure Travel Agency—Part 1

Case Study 3: Loan Amortization

Case Study 4: Creating a String Class

Case Study 5: High Adventure Travel Agency—Part 2

Case Study 6: High Adventure Travel Agency—Part 3

Case Study 7: Intersection of Sets

Case Study 8: Sales Commission

Contents

Cover

Half Title

Title Page

Copyright

Brief Contents

Preface xxiii

Chapter 1 Introduction to Computers and Programming 1

1.1 Why Program? 1

1.2 Computer Systems: Hardware and Software 2

1.3 Programs and Programming Languages 8

1.4 What Is a Program Made of? 14

1.5 Input, Processing, and Output 17

1.6 The Programming Process 18

1.7 Procedural and Object-Oriented Programming 22

Review Questions and Exercises 24

Chapter 2 Introduction to C++ 27

2.1 The Parts of a C++ Program 27

2.2 The cout Object 31

2.3 The #include Directive 36

2.4 Variables, Literals, and Assignment Statements 38

2.5 Identifiers 42

2.6 Integer Data Types 43

2.7 The char Data Type 49

 2.8 The C++ string Class 53

2.9 Floating-Point Data Types 55

2.10 The bool Data Type 58

2.11 Determining the Size of a Data Type 59

2.12 More about Variable Assignments and Initialization 60

2.13 Scope 62

2.14 Arithmetic Operators 63

2.15 Comments 71

2.16 Named Constants 73

2.17 Programming Style 75

Review Questions and Exercises 77

Programming Challenges 81

Chapter 3 Expressions and Interactivity 85

3.1 The cin Object 85

3.2 Mathematical Expressions 91

3.3 When You Mix Apples and Oranges: Type Conversion 100

3.4 Overflow and Underflow 102

3.5 Type Casting 103

3.6 Multiple Assignment and Combined Assignment 106

3.7 Formatting Output 110

3.8 Working with Characters and string Objects 120

3.9 More Mathematical Library Functions 126

3.10 Focus on Debugging: Hand Tracing a Program 132

3.11 Focus on Problem Solving: A Case Study 134

Review Questions and Exercises 138

Programming Challenges 144

Chapter 4 Making Decisions 151
4.1 Relational Operators 151

4.2 The if Statement 156

4.3 Expanding the if Statement 164

4.4 The if/else Statement 168

4.5 Nested if Statements 171

4.6 The if/else if Statement 178

4.7 Flags 183

4.8 Logical Operators 184

4.9 Checking Numeric Ranges with Logical Operators 191

4.10 Menus 192

4.11 Focus on Software Engineering: Validating User Input 195

4.12 Comparing Characters and Strings 197

4.13 The Conditional Operator 201

4.14 The switch Statement 204

4.15 More about Blocks and Variable Scope 213

Review Questions and Exercises 216

Programming Challenges 222

Chapter 5 Loops and Files 231

5.1 The Increment and Decrement Operators 231

5.2 Introduction to Loops: The while Loop 236

5.3 Using the while Loop for Input Validation 243

5.4 Counters 245

5.5 The do-while Loop 246

5.6 The for Loop 251

5.7 Keeping a Running Total 261

 5.8 Sentinels 264

5.9 Focus on Software Engineering: Deciding Which Loop to Use 265

5.10 Nested Loops 266

5.11 Using Files for Data Storage 269

5.12 Optional Topics: Breaking and Continuing a Loop 288

Review Questions and Exercises 292

Programming Challenges 297

Chapter 6 Functions 305

6.1 Focus on Software Engineering: Modular Programming 305

6.2 Defining and Calling Functions 306

6.3 Function Prototypes 315

6.4 Sending Data into a Function 317

6.5 Passing Data by Value 322

6.6 Focus on Software Engineering: Using Functions in a Menu-Driven Program 324

6.7 The return Statement 328

6.8 Returning a Value from a Function 330

6.9 Returning a Boolean Value 338

6.10 Local and Global Variables 340

6.11 Static Local Variables 348

6.12 Default Arguments 351

6.13 Using Reference Variables as Parameters 354

6.14 Overloading Functions 360

6.15 The exit() Function 364

6.16 Stubs and Drivers 367

Review Questions and Exercises 369

Programming Challenges 372

Chapter 7 Arrays and Vectors 381
7.1 Arrays Hold Multiple Values 381

7.2 Accessing Array Elements 383

7.3 No Bounds Checking in C++ 395

7.4 The Range-Based for Loop 398

7.5 Processing Array Contents 402

7.6 Focus on Software Engineering: Using Parallel Arrays 410

7.7 Arrays as Function Arguments 413

7.8 Two-Dimensional Arrays 424

7.9 Arrays with Three or More Dimensions 431

7.10 Focus on Problem Solving and Program Design: A Case Study 433

7.11 Introduction to the STL vector 435

Review Questions and Exercises 449

Programming Challenges 454

Chapter 8 Searching and Sorting Arrays 463

8.1 Focus on Software Engineering: Introduction to Search Algorithms 463

8.2 Focus on Problem Solving and Program Design: A Case Study 469

8.3 Focus on Software Engineering: Introduction to Sorting Algorithms 476

8.4 Focus on Problem Solving and Program Design: A Case Study 486

8.5 Sorting and Searching vectors 495

Review Questions and Exercises 498

Programming Challenges 499

Chapter 9 Pointers 503

9.1 Getting the Address of a Variable 503

9.2 Pointer Variables 505

9.3 The Relationship between Arrays and Pointers 512

 9.4 Pointer Arithmetic 516

9.5 Initializing Pointers 518

9.6 Comparing Pointers 519

9.7 Pointers as Function Parameters 521

9.8 Dynamic Memory Allocation 530

9.9 Returning Pointers from Functions 534

9.10 Using Smart Pointers to Avoid Memory Leaks 541

9.11 Focus on Problem Solving and Program Design: A Case Study 544

Review Questions and Exercises 550

Programming Challenges 553

Chapter 10 Characters, C-Strings, and More about the string Class 557
10.1 Character Testing 557

10.2 Character Case Conversion 561

10.3 C-Strings 564

10.4 Library Functions for Working with C-Strings 568

10.5 String/Numeric Conversion Functions 579

10.6 Focus on Software Engineering: Writing Your Own C-String-Handling Functions 585

10.7 More about the C++ string Class 591

10.8 Focus on Problem Solving and Program Design: A Case Study 603

Review Questions and Exercises 604

Programming Challenges 607

Chapter 11 Structured Data 613

11.1 Abstract Data Types 613

11.2 Structures 615

11.3 Accessing Structure Members 618

11.4 Initializing a Structure 622

 11.5 Arrays of Structures 625

11.6 Focus on Software Engineering: Nested Structures 627

11.7 Structures as Function Arguments 631

11.8 Returning a Structure from a Function 634

11.9 Pointers to Structures 637

11.10 Focus on Software Engineering: When to Use., When to Use −> , and When to Use *
640

11.11 Enumerated Data Types 642

Review Questions and Exercises 653

Programming Challenges 659

Chapter 12 Advanced File Operations 665

12.1 File Operations 665

12.2 File Output Formatting 671

12.3 Passing File Stream Objects to Functions 673

12.4 More Detailed Error Testing 675

12.5 Member Functions for Reading and Writing Files 678

12.6 Focus on Software Engineering: Working with Multiple Files 686

12.7 Binary Files 688

12.8 Creating Records with Structures 693

12.9 Random-Access Files 697

12.10 Opening a File for Both Input and Output 705

Review Questions and Exercises 710

Programming Challenges 713

Chapter 13 Introduction to Classes 719

13.1 Procedural and Object-Oriented Programming 719

13.2 Introduction to Classes 726

13.3 Defining an Instance of a Class 731

 13.4 Why Have Private Members? 744

13.5 Focus on Software Engineering: Separating Class Specification from Implementation

745

13.6 Inline Member Functions 751

13.7 Constructors 754

13.8 Passing Arguments to Constructors 759

13.9 Destructors 767

13.10 Overloading Constructors 771

13.11 Private Member Functions 775

13.12 Arrays of Objects 777

13.13 Focus on Problem Solving and Program Design: An OOP Case Study 781

13.14 Focus on Object-Oriented Programming: Simulating Dice with Objects 788

13.15 Focus on Object-Oriented Design: The Unified Modeling Language (UML) 792

13.16 Focus on Object-Oriented Design: Finding the Classes and Their Responsibilities 794

Review Questions and Exercises 803

Programming Challenges 808

Chapter 14 More about Classes 817

14.1 Instance and Static Members 817

14.2 Friends of Classes 825

14.3 Memberwise Assignment 830

14.4 Copy Constructors 831

14.5 Operator Overloading 837

14.6 Object Conversion 864

14.7 Aggregation 866

14.8 Focus on Object-Oriented Design: Class Collaborations 871

14.9 Focus on Object-Oriented Programming: Simulating the Game of Cho-Han 876

14.10 Rvalue References and Move Semantics 886

 Review Questions and Exercises 895

Programming Challenges 900

Chapter 15 Inheritance, Polymorphism, and Virtual Functions 907

15.1 What Is Inheritance? 907

15.2 Protected Members and Class Access 916

15.3 Constructors and Destructors in Base and Derived Classes 922

15.4 Redefining Base Class Functions 936

15.5 Class Hierarchies 941

15.6 Polymorphism and Virtual Member Functions 947

15.7 Abstract Base Classes and Pure Virtual Functions 963

15.8 Multiple Inheritance 970

Review Questions and Exercises 977

Programming Challenges 981

Chapter 16 Exceptions and Templates 989

16.1 Exceptions 989

16.2 Function Templates 1008

16.3 Focus on Software Engineering: Where to Start When Defining Templates 1014

16.4 Class Templates 1014

Review Questions and Exercises 1024

Programming Challenges 1026

Chapter 17 The Standard Template Library 1029

17.1 Introduction to the Standard Template Library 1029

17.2 STL Container and Iterator Fundamentals 1029

17.3 The vector Class 1040

17.4 The map, multimap , and unordered_map Classes 1054

 17.5 The set, multiset , and unordered_set Classes 1079

17.6 Algorithms 1086

17.7 Introduction to Function Objects and Lambda Expressions 1107

Review Questions and Exercises 1114

Programming Challenges 1118

Chapter 18 Linked Lists 1123

18.1 Introduction to the Linked List ADT 1123

18.2 Linked List Operations 1125

18.3 A Linked List Template 1141

18.4 Variations of the Linked List 1153

18.5 The STL list and forward_list Containers 1154

Review Questions and Exercises 1158

Programming Challenges 1161

Chapter 19 Stacks and Queues 1165

19.1 Introduction to the Stack ADT 1165

19.2 Dynamic Stacks 1182

19.3 The STL stack Container 1193

19.4 Introduction to the Queue ADT 1195

19.5 Dynamic Queues 1207

19.6 The STL deque and queue Containers 1214

Review Questions and Exercises 1217

Programming Challenges 1219

Chapter 20 Recursion 1223

20.1 Introduction to Recursion 1223

20.2 Solving Problems with Recursion 1227

20.3 Focus on Problem Solving and Program Design: The Recursive gcd Function 1235
 20.4 Focus on Problem Solving and Program Design: Solving Recursively Defined Problems
1236

20.5 Focus on Problem Solving and Program Design: Recursive Linked List Operations 1237

20.6 Focus on Problem Solving and Program Design: A Recursive Binary Search Function
1241

20.7 The Towers of Hanoi 1243

20.8 Focus on Problem Solving and Program Design: The QuickSort Algorithm 1246

20.9 Exhaustive Algorithms 1250

20.10 Focus on Software Engineering: Recursion versus Iteration 1253

Review Questions and Exercises 1253

Programming Challenges 1255

Chapter 21 Binary Trees 1257

21.1 Definition and Applications of Binary Trees 1257

21.2 Binary Search Tree Operations 1260

21.3 Template Considerations for Binary Search Trees 1277

Review Questions and Exercises 1283

Programming Challenges 1284

Appendix A: The ASCII Character Set 1287

Appendix B: Operator Precedence and Associativity 1289

Quick References 1291

Index 1293

Credit 1311

Online The following appendices are available at www.pearsonhighered.com/gaddis.

Appendix C: Introduction to Flowcharting

Appendix D: Using UML in Class Design

Appendix E: Namespaces

Appendix F: Passing Command Line Arguments

Appendix G: Binary Numbers and Bitwise Operations

Appendix H: STL Algorithms

Appendix I: Multi-Source File Programs

Appendix J: Stream Member Functions for Formatting

Appendix K: Unions

Appendix L: Answers to Checkpoints

Appendix M: Answers to Odd Numbered Review Questions

Case Study 1: String Manipulation

Case Study 2: High Adventure Travel Agency—Part 1

Case Study 3: Loan Amortization

Case Study 4: Creating a String Class

Case Study 5: High Adventure Travel Agency—Part 2

Case Study 6: High Adventure Travel Agency—Part 3

Case Study 7: Intersection of Sets

Case Study 8: Sales Commission

Preface

Welcome to Starting Out with C++: From Control Structures through Objects, 9th edition. This book is
intended for use in a two-semester C++ programming sequence, or an accelerated one-semester
course. Students new to programming, as well as those with prior course work in other languages, will
find this text beneficial. The fundamentals of programming are covered for the novice, while the details,
pitfalls, and nuances of the C++ language are explored in depth for both the beginner and more
experienced student. The book is written with clear, easy-to-understand language, and it covers all the
necessary topics for an introductory programming course. This text is rich in example programs that are
concise, practical, and real-world oriented, ensuring that the student not only learns how to implement
the features and constructs of C++, but why and when to use them.

Changes in the Ninth Edition

This book’s pedagogy, organization, and clear writing style remain the same as in the previous edition.
Many improvements and updates have been made, which are summarized here:

The material on the Standard Template Library (STL) has been completely rewritten and expanded
into its own chapter. Previously, Chapter 16 covered exceptions, templates, and gave brief
coverage to the STL. In this edition, Chapter 16 covers exceptions and templates, and Chapter
17 is a new chapter dedicated to the STL. The new chapter covers the following topics:
The array and vector classes
The various types of iterators
Emplacement versus insertion
The map , multimap , and unordered_map Classes
The set , multiset , and unordered_set Classes
Sorting and searching algorithms
Permutation algorithms
Set algorithms
Using function pointers with STL algorithms
Function objects, or functors
Lambda expressions
Chapter 2 now includes a discussion of alternative forms of variable initialization, including
functional notation, and brace notation (also known as uniform initialization).
Chapter 3 now mentions the round function, introduced in C++ 11.
 Chapter 7 now introduces array initialization much earlier.
In Chapter 8 , the bubble sort algorithm has been rewritten and improved.
A new example of sorting and searching a vector of strings has been added to Chapter 8 .
In Chapter 9 , the section on smart pointers now gives an overview of shared_ptr s and
weak_ptr s, in addition to the existing coverage of unique_ptr s.
In Chapter 10 , a new In the Spotlight section on string tokenizing has been added.
Chapter 10 now covers the string -to-number conversion functions that were introduced in
C++ 11.
The material on unions that previously appeared in Chapter 11 has been moved to Appendix K,
available on the book’s companion Website.
Chapter 13 has new sections covering:
Member initialization lists.
In-place initialization.
Constructor delegation.
Several new topics were added to Chapter 14 , including:
Rvalue references and move semantics.
Checking for self-assignment when overloading the = operator.
Using member initialization lists in aggregate classes.
Chapter 15 includes a new section on constructor inheritance.
Several new programming problems have been added throughout the book.

Organization of the Text

This text teaches C++ in a step-by-step fashion. Each chapter covers a major set of topics and builds
knowledge as the student progresses through the book. Although the chapters can be easily taught in
their existing sequence, some flexibility is provided. The diagram shown in Figure P-1 suggests
possible sequences of instruction.

Figure P-1 Chapter dependency chart

Chapter 1 covers fundamental hardware, software, and programming concepts. You may choose to
skip this chapter if the class is already familiar with those topics. Chapters 2 through 7 cover
basic C++ syntax, data types, expressions, selection structures, repetition structures, functions, and
arrays. Each of these chapters builds on the previous chapter and should be covered in the order
presented.
After Chapter 7 has been covered, you may proceed to Chapter 8 , or jump to Chapter 9 .

After Chapter 9 has been covered, Chapter 10 , 11 12 or 13 may be covered. (If you
jump to Chapter 12 at this point, you will need to postpone Sections 12.8 , 12.9 , and 12.10
until Chapter 11 has been covered.) After Chapter 13 , you may cover Chapters 14 through
18 in sequence. Next, you can proceed to either Chapter 19 or Chapter 20 . Finally, Chapter
21 may be covered.

This text’s approach starts with a firm foundation in structured, procedural programming before delving
fully into object-oriented programming and advanced data structures.

Brief Overview of Each Chapter

Chapter 1: Introduction to Computers and Programming

This chapter provides an introduction to the field of computer science and covers the fundamentals of
programming, problem solving, and software design. The components of programs, such as key words,
variables, operators, and punctuation, are covered. The tools of the trade, such as pseudocode, flow
charts, and hierarchy charts, are also presented.

Chapter 2: Introduction to C++

This chapter gets the student started in C++ by introducing data types, identifiers, variable declarations,
constants, comments, program output, simple arithmetic operations, and C-strings. Programming style
conventions are introduced and good programming style is modeled here, as it is throughout the text.

Chapter 3: Expressions and Interactivity

In this chapter, the student learns to write programs that input and handle numeric, character, and string
data. The use of arithmetic operators and the creation of mathematical expressions are covered in
greater detail, with emphasis on operator precedence. Debugging is introduced, with a section on hand
tracing a program. Sections are also included on simple output formatting, on data type conversion and
type casting, and on using library functions that work with numbers.

Chapter 4: Making Decisions

Here, the student learns about relational operators, relational expressions, and how to control the flow of
a program with the if , if/else , and if/else if statements. The conditional operator and the
switch statement are also covered. Crucial applications of these constructs are covered, such as
menu-driven programs and the validation of input.

Chapter 5: Loops and Files

This chapter covers repetition control structures. The while loop, do - while loop, and for loop are
taught, along with common uses for these devices. Counters, accumulators, running totals, sentinels,
and other application-related topics are discussed. Sequential file I/O is also introduced. The student
learns to read and write text files, and use loops to process the data in a file.

Chapter 6: Functions

In this chapter, the student learns how and why to modularize programs, using both void and value
returning functions. Argument passing is covered, with emphasis on when arguments should be passed
by value versus when they need to be passed by reference. Scope of variables is covered, and sections
are provided on local versus global variables and on static local variables. Overloaded functions are also
introduced and demonstrated.

Chapter 7: Arrays and Vectors

In this chapter, the student learns to create and work with single and multi-dimensional arrays. Many
examples of array processing are provided including examples illustrating how to find the sum, average,
highest, and lowest values in an array, and how to sum the rows, columns, and all elements of a two-
dimensional array. Programming techniques using parallel arrays are also demonstrated, and the
student is shown how to use a data file as an input source to populate an array. STL vector s are
introduced and compared to arrays.

Chapter 8: Searching and Sorting Arrays

Here, the student learns the basics of sorting arrays and searching for data stored in them. The chapter
covers the Bubble Sort, Selection Sort, Linear Search, and Binary Search algorithms. There is also a
section on sorting and searching STL vector objects.

Chapter 9: Pointers

This chapter explains how to use pointers. Pointers are compared to and contrasted with reference
variables. Other topics include pointer arithmetic, initialization of pointers, relational comparison of
pointers, pointers and arrays, pointers and functions, dynamic memory allocation, and more.
Other documents randomly have
different content
[221] Kapp, Richard Wagner und die Frauen, p. 194.
[222] "Eine heftige Liebe." Mr. Ashton Ellis renders this "a sudden
love."
[223] Mein Leben, p. 777.
[224] Mein Leben, p. 816. This was in the summer of 1862, just a
year before the Marie episode.
[225] Mein Leben, pp. 858, 859.
[226] King Ludwig gave him 15,000 gulden with which to pay his
debts in Vienna. Röckl, Ludwig II und Richard Wagner, Erster Teil,
p. 33.
[227] Mein Leben, p. 861.
[228] Mein Leben, p. 863.
[229] In a letter to Peter Cornelius of the end of March 1864,
addressed from Frau Wille's house at Mariafeld, he says that that
lady, Frau Wesendonck and Frau von Bissing "love him equally:
only Frau von Bissing was lately so very jealous (I had a suspicion
of it!), that her behaviour towards me is only now, through that
discovery, intelligible to me." Peter Cornelius, Ausgewählte Briefe,
in Literarische Werke, i. 762.
[230] See his letter of 14th April 1865 to Dr. Gille, in Hans von
Bülow: Briefe, iv. 24.
[231] Kapp, Richard Wagner und die Frauen, p. 222.
[232] He behaved afterwards with the greatest nobility to
Wagner, raising by his concerts £2000 for the Bayreuth venture,
though his presence at the Festival was of course impossible.
[233] Letter of 23rd September 1863: Richard Wagner an
Mathilde Wesendonck, p. 355.
[234] He never had any objection to accepting money from Jews,
nor to calling on their assistance in the production of his operas.
The first performance of Parsifal was conducted by Hermann Levi.
[235] "If the assumption be correct that a flesh diet is
indispensable in Northern climates, what is to prevent us from
carrying out a rationally conducted emigration into such countries
of the globe as, by reason of their luxuriant fertility, are capable
of sustaining the present population of the whole world,—as has
been asserted of the South American peninsula itself?... The
unions we have in mind would have to devote their activities and
their care—perhaps not without success—to emigration; and
according to the latest experiences it seems not impossible that
these northern lands, in which a flesh food is said to be
absolutely indispensable, will soon be wholly abandoned to
hunters of boars and big game...." Religion und Kunst, in G.S., x.
243.
[236] See Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, in G.S., iv. 279,
and the letter to Roeckel of 23rd August 1856; also a general
discussion of the subject in Henri Lichtenberger's Wagner, Poète
et Penseur, pp. 109-16.
[237] See, for example, the very prejudiced and rather foolish
book of Emil Ludwig, Wagner, oder die Entzauberten (1913).
[238] Afterwards in book form as the Briefe Richard Wagners an
eine Putzmacherin. Vienna, 1906.
[239] We must always remember that his extremely sensitive and
irritable skin made coarse fabrics intolerable to him.
[240] Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, ii. pp. 4, 5.
[241] "Das Überschwängliche meiner Natur." In the English
version of the Correspondence this is rendered "the transcendent
part of my nature."
[242] "Bedenklich"—rendered in Hueffer's version "dangerous."
[243] Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, ii. 10.
[244] Ausgewählte Briefe, i. 748, 749.
[245] He had just returned from the meeting with Frau von
Bissing, at which she had undertaken to provide for him.
[246] Mein Leben, p. 862.
[247] The Putzmacherin letters extend into the Lucerne period of
1886-7.
[248] Röckl, Ludwig II und Richard Wagner, Erster Theil, p. 151.
[249] The relations between Wagner and the King's ministers
were already embittered at this time, and the King granted the
loan against their wish. The Court Treasurer objecting to sending
the money by a servant, Cosima had to call for it personally. He
gave her the whole of the sum in silver coins, which she had to
carry away in sacks, his object being to render the transport of it
as public as possible, and so arouse popular feeling against the
composer. The loan was repaid to the Munich Treasury by
Wagner's heirs. See Röckl, op. cit., p. 197.
[250] See Ludwig Nohl, Neues Skizzenbuch, p. 146.
[251] Röckl, op. cit., pp. 245, 246.
[252] Weissheimer, Erlebnisse mit Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt
und vielen anderen Zeitgenossen, 3rd ed., 1898, pp. 229, 230.
[253] Glasenapp, Das Leben Richard Wagners, vi. 154, 155.
[254] Mein Leben, p. 811.
[255] "Wagner has not the strength to make those around him
free and great," he writes in his diary. "Wagner is not loyal; he is,
on the contrary, suspicious and haughty." See Daniel Halévy, Life
of Friedrich Nietzsche (Eng. trans.), p. 130.
[256] Glasenapp, vi. 165.
[257] Briefwechsel, ii. 216, 217. This and several other passages
in the letter were suppressed in the first edition of the
correspondence. The Countess d'Agoult—the mother of Liszt's
daughter Cosima—was visiting Wagner at the same time as
Cosima and Hans. Apparently there had been some gossip as to
Wagner's behaviour with her; and in this letter he indignantly
protests against Liszt's "suspicions."
[258] Briefwechsel, ii. 222. The passage relating to the Countess
d'Agoult was at first suppressed.
[259] Briefwechsel, ii. 294. The first part of the sentence, as far
as "fell to my lot," was suppressed in the first edition of the
letters, as well as the succeeding sentences,—"The love of a
tender woman has made me happy: she can throw herself into a
sea of sorrows and torments in order to say to me 'I love you,'"
&c. &c. This was the lady with whom his relations were "merely
friendly." The first edition of the Wagner-Liszt correspondence
was systematically manipulated so as to keep from the reader all
knowledge of the Wesendonck affair.
[260] The English version (p. 687) makes nonsense of this
passage.
[261] Mein Leben, p. 674.
[262] Letter of 20th October 1859 (Paris), in Briefwechsel, ii. 275.
[263] Letter of 23rd November 1859, in Briefwechsel, ii. 276, 277.
[264] Glasenapp, vi. 139.
[265] See the poem Siegfried-Idyl, in the G.S., xii. 372.
[266] Seraphine Mauro. See p. 106.
[267] Cornelius, Ausgewählte Briefe, i. 640 ff.
[268] The gentle and honourable Cornelius—whom it obviously
pains to have to say a word in disparagement of Wagner—knew
that his only chance of developing his artistic nature along its own
lines was to avoid coming too much under the influence of the
much stronger personality of the older man; he should, he says,
"hatch only Wagnerian eggs."
[269] Letter of 31st May 1854, in Peter Cornelius' Ausgewählte
Briefe, i. 767.
[270] Ausgewählte Briefe, i. 770, 771.
[271] Ibid., i. 774.
[272] Ausgewählte Briefe, i. 784. At a later time Cornelius did
yield to Wagner's solicitations and take up his abode for a time in
Munich.
[273] All testimonies agree as to the extraordinary expressiveness
and dramatic vivacity of his reading—as indeed of his
conversation also. See Cornelius, Ausgewählte Briefe, i. 623,
Weissheimer, Erlebnisse, pp. 89, 90, and Liszt's letter to the
Princess Wittgenstein, in Briefe, iv. 145. His tumultuous
conversation used to give King Ludwig a headache.
[274] He writes thus to Cornelius from Paris, at the end of
January 1862: "Listen! On Wednesday evening, the 5th February,
I am to read the Meistersinger at Schott's house, in Mainz. You
have no idea what it is, what it means for me, and what it will be
to my friends! You must be there that evening! Get Standhartner
at once to give you, on my account, the necessary money for the
journey [from Vienna]. In Mainz I will reimburse you this, and
whatever may be necessary for the return journey." See the letter
in Cornelius' Ausgewählte Briefe, i. 643.
[275] Glasenapp, vi. 161.
[276] See p. 129.
[277] Edouard Schuré, Souvenirs sur Richard Wagner, p. 76.
[278] Röckl, op. cit., p. 133.
[279] Schuré, op. cit., pp. 54, 57.
[280] Liszt, Briefe, iv. 140, 145.
[281] Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben, ii. 11.
[282] Ibid., p. 12.
[283] Weissheimer, Erlebnisse, p. 128.
[284] Weissheimer, Erlebnisse, p. 392.
[285] Ecce Homo (Eng. trans.), pp. 41, 44, 122, 97.
[286] Liszt's reply of the 22nd runs thus:
"DEAR AND NOBLE FRIEND,—I am too deeply moved by your
letter to be able to thank you in words. But from the depths of
my heart I hope that every shadow of a circumstance that could
hold me fettered may disappear, and that soon we may see each
other again. Then shall you see in perfect clearness how
inseparable is my soul from you both, and how intimately I live
again in that 'second' and higher life of yours in which you are
able to accomplish what you could never have accomplished
alone. Herein is heaven's pardon for me: God's blessing on you
both, and all my love."
These are the first letters that appear in the correspondence
between the two since 7th July 1861. Briefwechsel, ii. 307-8. The
two letters are given in a slightly different form in Liszt's Briefe,
vi. 350.
[287] Aus meinem Leben, ii. 12.
[288] Weissheimer, Erlebnisse, p. 391.
 CHAPTER II
THE ARTIST IN THEORY

I
For a great revolutionary, Wagner was curiously long in coming to
consciousness of himself. The record of his youth and early manhood
is one of constant fluctuation between one ideal or influence and
another. The most remarkable feature of him in these days, indeed,
is his mental malleability. In his later years he is the centre of a solar
system of his own; everything else in his orbit is a mere planet that
must revolve around him or be cast out. In his younger days, on the
contrary, he is extraordinarily sensitive to the changing currents of
men and circumstances. One of the earliest writers to influence him
was E. T. A. Hoffmann, under whose sway he fell apparently as early
as 1827. It was about the same time that he first heard, at a
Gewandhaus concert, some of Beethoven's music. During the early
'thirties he was deeply absorbed in Beethoven, especially in the
Ninth Symphony—a work which, he tells us, was at that time
regarded in Leipzig as the raving of a semi-madman. Wagner's
knowledge of it was at first derived solely from copying the score; it
was without having heard a performance of the work that he made
in 1830 the two-hands pianoforte arrangement of it which he vainly
tried to induce Schott to publish. His own Overture in D minor
(1831), his King Enzio Overture and his Symphony in C major (1832)
were, as he admits, all inspired by Beethoven, the first of them
being more particularly influenced by the Coriolan Overture. He
heard the Ninth Symphony for the first time at a Gewandhaus
concert in the winter of 1831-2; the performance, under Pohlenz,
seems to have been a very unintelligent one, and it left Wagner in
considerable doubt as to the value of the work. "There arose in me,"
he says, "the mortifying doubt whether I had really understood this
strange piece of music[289] or not. For a long time I gave up racking
my brains about it, and unaffectedly turned my attention to a clearer
and less disturbing sort of music."[290]
Weber's Freischütz had also powerfully affected the boy's
imagination; no doubt Weber struck him even then as a musician
peculiarly German. In his own Die Feen (1833), he tells us, he tried
to write "in German style."[291] Nevertheless, in spite of all these
influences, he turned for a while against German music, which he
criticises with some frankness in an article on Die deutsche Oper,
[292] published anonymously in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt in
June 1834. The Germans have no German opera, he says, for the
same reason that they have no national drama. "We are too
intellectual and much too learned to be able to create warm human
figures." Mozart could do this in the Italian melodic style; but with
their contempt for that style the modern Germans have got further
from the path that Mozart opened out for dramatic music. "Weber
did not understand how to handle song; Spohr is hardly any better";
yet it is through Song that a man expresses himself musically. Here
the Italians have the advantage over the Germans. It is true that the
Italians have abused the organ of late—"yet I shall never forget the
impression that a Bellini opera lately made on me, after I had
become heartily sick of the eternally allegorising orchestral bustle,
and a simple and noble Song made its appearance again." Weber
was too purely lyrical, and Spohr is too elegiac, for the drama.
Weber's best work is consequently the romantic Der Freischütz; as
for Euryanthe, "what paltry refinements of declamation, what a
finiking use of this instrument or that for bringing out the expression
of some word or other!" His style is not broad enough; it dissipates
itself in mincing details. His ensembles are almost without life. And
as the audience do not understand a note of it, they console
themselves by calling it amazingly learned, and respecting it
accordingly. "O this fatal learnedness," he cries, "this source of all
the evils that afflict us Germans!" In Bach's time music was regarded
only from the learned side. The forms were then limited, but the
composers full of learning. Now the forms are freer, but the
composers have less learning, though they make a pretence of it.
The public also wants to appear learned, affects to despise the
simple, and is ashamed to admit that it enjoys a lively French opera.
We must not be hypocritical, but must admit there is a good deal
that is good in both French and Italian opera; we must throw over a
lot of our affected science, and become natural men. No real
German opera composer has appeared for some time, because no
one has known how to "gain the voice of the people"—no one has
grasped life in its real truth and warmth. We must find a form suited
to the needs of our own days. "We must seize upon the epoch, and
honestly try to perfect its new forms; and he will be the master who
writes neither Italian nor French—nor even German."
The youthful essayist repeats a good deal of this, with additions, in
an article entitled Pasticcio, published in the Neue Zeitschrift für
Musik in November of the same year, under the pseudonym of
"Canto Spianato."[293] He is greatly concerned at the deplorable fact
that there are hardly a couple of dozen well-trained singers in
Germany. "Nowadays one hardly ever hears a really beautiful and
technically perfect trillo; very rarely flawless mordents; very seldom
a rounded coloratura, a genuine unaffected, soul-moving
portamento, a perfect equalisation of the registers, and absolute
maintenance of the intonation through all the various nuances of
crescendo and diminuendo. Most singers, as soon as they attempt
the noble art of portamento, get out of tune; and the public,
accustomed to imperfect execution, overlooks the defects of the
singer if only he is a capable actor and knows the routine of the
stage."
Nor do our German composers know how to write for the voice; they
are like bunglers who presume to orchestrate without having studied
the peculiarities of the clarinet, say, as distinct from those of the
pianoforte. "Most of our modern German vocal composers appear to
regard the voice as merely a part of the instrumental mass, and
misapprehend the true nature of Song. Our worthy opera-
composers," in fact, "must take lessons in the good Italian cantabile
style, taking care to steer clear of its modern excrescences, and,
with their superior artistic capacity, give us something good in a
good style. Then will vocal art bloom anew; then some day will a
man come who in this good style shall re-establish on the stage the
broken unity of Poetry and Song." He argues with portentous
seriousness for ornate as well as simple Song; and ends with a claim
that poetry is the only basis of opera,—poetry, of which words and
tones are merely the expression. "The majority of our operas are
merely a string of musical numbers without any psychological
connection; our singers have been degraded into musical-boxes, set
to a certain number of tunes, brought on to the stage, and started
by a wave of the conductor's baton." Once more he lays it down that
"he will be the master who writes neither Italian nor French—nor
even German," and concludes thus: "But would you inspire, purify,
and train yourselves by models, would you create living shapes in
music, then combine, for example, Gluck's masterly declamation and
dramatic power with Mozart's varied art of melody, ensemble and
orchestration, and you will produce dramatic works that will satisfy
the strictest criticism."[294]
This enthusiasm for the Italian style was largely due to the
overwhelming impression made on Wagner by the great singer and
actress Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, whom he heard as Romeo in
Bellini's Montecchi e Capuleti in March 1834.[295] Her performance,
however, magical as it must have been, would not have affected him
so deeply had he not already been brought by other influences to a
turning in the road. What these influences were he has himself told
us in Mein Leben. Heinse's Ardinghello and Laube's Young Europe
had inflamed the imagination of most of the young men of the day.
Wagner was caught up by and carried along in a current of generous
enthusiasm for a supposedly new spirit in art and literature; the
older men were mercilessly ridiculed as pedants, and a newer and
more sprightly art was to hustle the ponderous old one off the stage.
Wagner's boyish life had been, in spite of an occasional wildness,
one of almost morbid seriousness, culminating in what he calls
"pathetic mysticism." The truth seems to have been that he was
moving about in intellectual worlds too subtle for his spirit then to
realise; he was mysteriously drawn to the greatest things in
Beethoven and Weber, but when brought into actual contact with
them he had to admit that they spoke a language he could hardly
understand. The magnetic personality of Schröder-Devrient
dissipated the clouds that had formed around him. He could hardly
have been so much his own dupe as his confessions would lead us
to believe. He knew that the performance of Weber's Euryanthe he
had recently heard was as superlatively bad as the performance of
Bellini's opera was superlatively good; and he would have been a
much worse reasoner than we know him to have been, had he not
been able to see that from these facts no valid conclusion could be
drawn as to the worth of the two works. We may reasonably assume
that his volatile nature was ripe for another change of front—there
were plenty more of a similar kind even in his mature life—and that
these outer experiences only marked the moment of the turning. He
as good as admits this, indeed, in Mein Leben. He was disposed, he
says, to take as lightly as possible the problem[296] that had arisen
before him, and to show his determination to get rid of all prejudice
by writing the article on Euryanthe in which he "simply jeered" at
that work. "Just as I had passed in my student-time through my
'Flegeljahr,' I now boldly entered upon a similar development in my
artistic taste."[297]

II
That the articles praising the Italians at the expense of the Germans
were the products of more than the mere impression of Schröder-
Devrient's singing and acting—that they came from the depths of a
real change in his intellectual and emotional nature—is shown by the
length of time he remained at the same standpoint.
The text of Das Liebesverbot was written in a mood of fiery youthful
protest against what he held to be the cramping puritanism of the
moralists. He deliberately transforms Shakespeare's Measure for
Measure. "Young Europe and Ardinghello, helped by the strange
antipathy I had conceived towards classical operatic music, gave me
the keynote for my conception, which was especially directed against
puritanical hypocrisy, and consequently led to the bold glorification
of unfettered sensualism (freien Sinnlichkeit). I took care to
understand the serious Shakespearean subject only in this sense; I
saw only the gloomy strait-laced viceroy, himself burning with love
for the beautiful novice, who, while she implores him to pardon her
brother condemned to death for illicit love, kindles a ruinous fire in
the rigid Puritan's breast by the lovely warmth of her own human
emotion. The fact that these powerful motives are so richly
developed by Shakespeare only in order that in the end they may be
all the more seriously weighed in the scales of justice, did not
concern me in the least; all I had in mind was to expose the
sinfulness of hypocrisy and the unnaturalness of harsh moral
judgments."[298] He adds that he was probably influenced by
Auber's Masaniello and the Sicilian Vespers.
The composition of Das Liebesverbot carries us from 1834 to the
spring of 1836, and still the Southern fever has not abated. In 1837
he carries the same enthusiasm about with him in Königsberg and
Riga; we can imagine that the more serious side of him had some
difficulty in developing in such an environment as a fourth-rate
operatic and theatrical troupe. While in Magdeburg he writes a short
article on "Dramatic Song," in which he returns to the thesis of three
years before, though with more wisdom. "Why," he asks, "cannot we
Germans see that we are not the possessors of everything; why
cannot we openly and freely admit that the Italian is superior to the
German in Song, and the Frenchman superior to him in the light and
animated treatment of operatic music? Can he not oppose to these
his deeper science, his more thorough culture, and above all the
happy faculty that makes it possible for him easily to make the
advantages of the Italians and the French his own, whereas they will
never be able to acquire ours? The Italians are singers by nature.
The less richly-endowed German can hope to emulate the Italian
only by hard study." Wagner rightly points out that no artist can
hope to achieve full expression of himself without a technique that
has become second nature to him. It was the acquirement by Mozart
of this technique in his childhood that gave his mature music its
incomparable ease and finish, while there was always a certain
awkwardness about Weber, owing to his having begun late and
learned his technique during the years when he was actually
practising his art. Without perfect vocal technique, the highest kind
of dramatic expression is impossible. The great Schröder-Devrient,
the finest operatic artist in Germany, was at one time within an ace
of giving up her career as a singer, so great was the strain on her
voice through a faulty production; but she studied hard on the right
Italian lines, with the result that she can now sing the most trying
parts without the slightest fatigue.[299] All this is sensible enough—
so sensible, indeed, that Wagner could repeat it thirty years later in
his "Report upon a proposed German School of Music for Munich."
But that the nimble and relatively superficial Italian music still
exercised something of its old fascination upon him is shown by
another article of the same year on Bellini. Here, while admitting
that a good deal of Italian music is poor stuff, and that the forms
and tricks of the Bellinian opera are things only too easy to imitate,
he yet lauds Bellini's melody at the expense of that of the Germans,
and his simplicity at the expense of their clumsy erudition. "The
German connoisseur of music," he says, "listens to one of Bellini's
operas with the spectacles off his tired-out eyes," giving himself
wholly up for once to "delight in lovely Song";[300] he evidently feels
"a deep and ardent longing for a full deep breath, to win ease of
being at one stroke, to get rid of all the stew of prejudice and
pedantry that has so long compelled him to be a German
connoisseur of music—to become instead a man at last, glad, free,
and endowed with every glorious organ for perceiving beauty of
every kind, no matter in what form it reveals itself." He has been
enchanted by "the limpid melody, the simple, noble, lovely Song of
Bellini. It is surely no sin to confess this and to believe in it; perhaps
even it would not be a sin if before we went to sleep we were to
pray Heaven that some day German composers might achieve such
melodies and such an art of handling song. Song, Song, and yet
again Song, ye Germans!"
We see again his temporary lack of sympathy with the richer
German style in a passage like the following, which reads like one of
the less intelligent criticisms of his own later music:
"When we consider the boundless disorder, the medley of forms,
periods and modulations of so many of the new German opera
composers, by which we are prevented from enjoying many an
isolated piece of beauty, we often might wish to see this ravelled
skein put in order by means of that stable Italian form.[301] As a
matter of fact, the instantaneous clear apprehension of a whole
dramatic passion is made much easier when, along with all its
connected feelings and emotions, it is cast into one lucid intelligent
melody at a single stroke, than when it is muddled up with a
hundred little commentaries, with this and that harmonic nuance,
this and that instrumental interpolation, till in the end it is subtilised
out of existence."[302]
It was his "zeal and fervour for modern Italian and French opera," in
fact, that procured for him the conductorship at Riga, where the
Director, Holtei, was all for the lighter and more frivolous music.[303]
At Riga Wagner met his old Leipzig mentor, Heinrich Dorn, who was,
he says, surprised to see his former pupil, "the eccentric Beethoven
worshipper, transformed into a partisan of Bellini and Adam."[304]
The reaction, however, was coming fast. At Riga he seems to have
passed through one of those spiritual crises that are not uncommon
with artists of his many-sided temperament. The loneliness of Riga,
he says, gave him an anxious feeling of homelessness, which
developed into a passionate longing to escape from the turbid whirl
of theatrical life. "The levity with which in Magdeburg I had both let
my musical taste degenerate and had allowed myself to take
pleasure in the most frivolous theatrical society, gradually faded
away under the influence of this longing."[305] A bass aria which he
interpolated into Winter's Schweizerfamilie was "of a devotional
character," and "bore witness to the great transformation that was
taking place in my musical development."[306] In the winter of 1838
he derived much benefit from the study of Méhul's Joseph in Egypt
for the theatre. "Its noble and simple style, along with the moving
effect of the music, contributed not a little to the favourable turn in
my taste, which had been sadly debauched by my theatrical work."
[307] At the same time he grew weary of the Bohemianism that had
attracted him so strongly at Magdeburg, and consequently he got
more and more out of touch with the actors and the management.
His weariness of it all culminated in a secret resolve to be quit of this
kind of life as soon as possible. The deliverance was to be effected
by his new opera, Rienzi.[308] He deliberately planned the opera on
a scale so large that he would necessarily have to seek a better
stage than that of Riga for its production. Everything conspired at
the time to deepen his sense of the seriousness of things, and to
make him loathe himself for having so long worshipped false gods
both in art and in life. Matrimonial troubles crowded thick and fast
upon him, and he lost his favourite sister, Rosalie, by death. In
March 1839 he was dismissed from his post at the Riga theatre.
Penniless as he was, he welcomed the discharge as the first step
towards his redemption. To Paris he would go, and in Paris make his
fortune: of that he had no doubt.

III
The miseries of his two years and a half in Paris are known to every
reader of his life. Penury, deceptions, degradations, however, could
not break him either intellectually or morally. A temperament so
elastic as his could never be crushed, and least of all when it was
young. He himself has told us of the amazement his associates
expressed at the toughness and resilience of his spirit. But the fire
he passed through in those dreadful days purified him as an artist. It
was not alone the failure to get Rienzi accepted at the Paris Opéra
that caused him to turn away in disgust from the hollow world of
make-believe around him; visions were coming to him of shining
deeds to be done, of untried possibilities in music. As usual with
him, an external event brought all his faculties and desires swiftly
into the one focus. In the winter of 1839 he heard a number of
rehearsals and a performance of the Ninth Symphony at the
Conservatoire, under Habeneck. The interpretation, he says, was so
perfect that "in a stroke the picture I had had of the wonderful work
in the days of my youthful enthusiasm, and that had been effaced by
the murderous performance of it given by the Leipzig Orchestra
under the worthy Pohlenz, now rose up again before me in such
clearness that it seemed as if I could grasp it with my hands. Where
formerly I had seen nothing but mystic constellations and soundless
magical shapes, there was now poured out, as from innumerable
springs, a stream of inexhaustible and heart-compelling melody. The
whole period of the degradation of my taste, which really began with
my confusion as to the expression in Beethoven's later works, and
had been so aggravated by my numbing association with the
dreadful theatre, now fell away from me as into an abyss of shame
and remorse. If this inner change had been preparing in me for
some years—more particularly as a consequence of my painful
experiences—it was the inexpressible effect of the Ninth Symphony,
performed in a way I had hitherto had no notion of, that gave real
life to my new-won old spirit; and so I compare this—for me—
important event with the similarly decisive impression made on me,
when I was a boy of sixteen, by the Fidelio of Schröder Devrient."
[309]
The Autobiographical Sketch which he wrote for Laube's Zeitung für
die elegante Welt in 1842, after his settling in Dresden, ends with
these words: "As regards Paris itself I was now without prospects
there for some years: so I left it in the spring of 1842. For the first
time I saw the Rhine: with great tears in his eyes the poor artist
swore eternal fidelity to his German fatherland." It was indeed the
prodigal's return: the service that Paris did him was to make him a
better German and so a better artist. Seen from a distance, Paris
had once glittered before his dazzled eyes as a symbol of liberalism
and freedom. Seen at too close quarters, Germany had laid itself
bare to him in all its littlenesses, its stuffy provinciality. Now he saw
them both from another angle. Paris was about him in all the cold
brutality it can show to the stranger, the helpless, the penniless: its
heart seemed to the eager young musician as hard as the stones of
its streets. And he saw his native country as all exiles see theirs,
with its asperities toned down, its little parochialisms hidden from
view, and a certain kindly haze of idealism over all. It is with German
affairs that he occupies himself as far as he can in the articles he
writes at this time to keep the domestic pot boiling. The essay On
German Music (1840) is very touching in its wistful little visions of
tiny, cosy German towns, each with its circle of humble musicians
roughly but lovingly wooing their art in their own simple, honest
way. The lonely and homesick German artist has his quiet revenge
upon Paris in the delightfully humorous and satirical article upon the
ludicrous French perversion of Der Freischütz at the Opéra.[310]
Beethoven is much in his mind: he begins the attempt to fathom the
secret of Beethoven's power, to grasp the profoundly logical
workings of his music, and to take his own bearings with regard to
sundry æsthetic questions, such as "painting" in music, the reading
of poetical ideas into purely instrumental works, the relations
between vocal and instrumental music, and so on. His views upon
Beethoven were far ahead of those of his contemporaries, to whom,
indeed, they must have been in large part unintelligible. He was
beginning to realise dimly that out of the Beethovenian melody he
could himself beget a new art-work. In A Pilgrimage to Beethoven he
puts his own views of opera into the mouth of his predecessor. He
has apparently already conceived the idea that instrumental music
had come to the end of its resources with Beethoven, that music
could in the future renew its vitality only by being "fertilised by
poetry," and that the ideal music drama will be continuous in tissue.
"Were I to make an opera after my own heart," he makes Beethoven
say, "people would run away from it: for it would have no arias,
duets, trios, or any of the other stuff with which operas are patched
up to-day: and what I would put in the place of these no singer
would sing and no audience would listen to. They all know nothing
but glittering lies, brilliant nonsense and sugared tedium. Anyone
who should write a real music drama would be taken for a fool." And
the old composer proceeds to outline the theory of the relation
between words and music that is made so familiar to us in Wagner's
later writings. "The instruments represent the primal organs of
Creation and Nature: what they express can never be clearly defined
and settled, for they reproduce the primal feelings themselves as
they emerged from the chaos of the first creation, when probably
there was not one human being to take them up into his heart. It is
quite otherwise with the genius of the human voice: this represents
man's heart and its definite (abgeschlossen) individual emotion. Its
character is therefore restricted, but definite and clear. Now bring
these two elements together, unite them! Set against the wild-
wandering, illimitable primal feeling, represented by the instruments,
the clear definite emotion of the human heart, represented by the
voice. The incoming of this second element will smooth and soothe
the conflict of the primal feelings, will turn their flood into a definite,
united course: while the human heart itself, taking up into itself
those primal feelings, will be infinitely strengthened and expanded,
and capable of feeling clearly its earlier indefinite presage of the
Highest now transformed into god-like consciousness." [311]

IV
It has often been pointed out that the subjects of all Wagner's
dramas were conceived by him before his fortieth year. It is equally
true that virtually the whole of the æsthetic theories of his later life
were immanent in him from the days of his Parisian sojourn, and
needed only to be brought into clearer outline by the thought and
the practice of the 'forties and 'fifties. In the essay on Beethoven
(1870) he insists that it is the human character of the voice, rather
than the mere sentiment the voice is used to express, that gives the
choral ending of the Ninth Symphony its tremendous significance.
"Thus," he says, "with even what we have just called the ordaining
will that led him to this melody" (i.e. the great melody of the final
movement) "we see the master steadily remaining in music,—the
idea of the world:[312] for in truth it is not the meaning of the Word
that engages us at this entry of the human voice, but the character
of the voice itself. Nor is it the thought expressed in Schiller's verses
that henceforth occupies us, but the intimate timbre of the choral
song, in which we feel ourselves invited to join, and so take part as
a kind of congregation in an ideal divine service, as was the case at
the entry of the chorale in the 'Passions' of Bach. It is quite evident,
especially with regard to the main melody, that Schiller's words have
been tacked on arbitrarily (nothdürftig) and with little skill: for this
melody had first of all unfolded itself in all its breadth before us as a
thing in itself, given to the instruments alone, and there had filled us
with a nameless feeling of joy in a paradise regained."[313]
The same idea is seen in embryo in A Pilgrimage to Beethoven. "If
men are to sing, they must have words. Yet who is capable of
expressing in words the poetry that should form the basis of such a
union of all the elements? The poem must of necessity be something
inferior (zurückstehen), for words are too weak an organ for such a
task.—You will soon meet with a new composition of mine, which will
remind you of what I have just been descanting upon. It is a
symphony with choruses. I ask you to observe how difficult it was
for me to get over the inadequacy of the poetical art that I had
called in to my aid. I have fully resolved to make use of our Schiller's
beautiful hymn 'To Joy'; it is in any case a noble and uplifting poem,
even if far from giving voice to what, in sooth, in this connection, no
verses in the world could say."[314]
Here we light upon one of the fundamental principles of the
Wagnerian æsthetic. Wagner did not set words to music: the words
were merely the projection of an already conceived musical emotion
into the sphere of speech.[315] There is in most musicians a certain
amount of correspondence and interplay between the poetic and
musical factors. With some composers the musical thought, having
begun and completed itself along its own lines and according to its
own laws, turns half appealingly, half condescendingly, to words for
a title or an elucidation, as was often the case with Schumann. With
others, as with Bach and Hugo Wolf and Strauss, the word, written
or implied, is the generator of the musical idea. It would be the very
midsummer madness of æsthetics to attempt to decide which is the
more purely "musical" of these two types of mind. Neither of them is
"the" musical mind, any more than Shakespeare's or Milton's or
Browning's or Blake's or Pope's or Swinburne's is "the" poetical mind.
It is only the most superficial of psychologists and æstheticians who
can regard any human faculty as wholly cut off from the rest. Our
perceptions of sight, of taste, of touch, of hearing, are inextricably
inter-blended, as is shown by our constantly expressing one set of
sensations in terms of another, as when we speak of the colour of
music, the height, or depth, or thickness, or clarity, or muddiness of
musical tone. In every poet there is something of the painter and
the musician: in every musician, something of the poet and painter:
in every painter, something of the musician and poet.[316] The
character of the man's work will depend upon the strength or
weakness of the tinge that is given to his own special art by the
relative strength or weakness of the infusion of one or more of the
other arts. In composers like Bach, Wagner, Berlioz, Schubert, Wolf,
and Strauss the eye is constantly transmitting very definite
impression to the brain, with the result that their music readily leans
to realistic suggestion: on a composer like Brahms the actualities of
the visible, mobile world make comparatively little impression.[317]
No one of these types is per se any better than the rest, or has any
more right than his fellows to arrogate to himself the title of "pure"
musician. We must just accept them all as branches of the one great
tree.
It is no paradox to say that though Wagner was irresistibly impelled
to express himself in the form of opera he was by nature an
instrumental composer of the line of Bach and Beethoven. It is the
orchestra that always bears the main burden of expression in his
later works. His ideal was a stream of endless melody in the
orchestra, to the moods of which the words give a definiteness
unattainable by music alone. And so, just as he did not "set words to
music" in the ordinary way, so he did not set poetic ideas to music in
the ordinary way. No man was ever more prompt to interpret great
musical works in terms of poetry or life, as anyone may see by
reading his elucidations of the Beethoven symphonies or the great C
sharp minor quartet. But it is important to remember, if we are not
to misunderstand him utterly, that he never supposed that the music
was developed consciously out of any such poetic scheme as our
fantasy may read into it. The music grew out of the spirit of music,
and only rouses a poetic vision in us because it is the generalised
expression of many particular visions of the kind. This conception of
music was rooted in him from his earliest days of maturity, as we
may see from the article A Happy Evening, which he wrote in Paris in
1841. The narrator of the story is discussing with a friend—evidently
intended for Wagner himself—a concert at which they have just
heard performances of Mozart's Symphony in E flat and Beethoven's
in A. The question arises as to what it is that Beethoven has
expressed. The friend, who is designated R., objects energetically to
an arbitrary romance being foisted upon the symphony:
"It is unfortunate that so many people give themselves useless
trouble to confuse musical speech with poetical speech, and to make
one of them supplement or replace the other where, in their limited
view, this is incomplete. It remains true once for all that music
begins where speech leaves off. Nothing is more intolerable than the
preposterous pictures and stories that people imagine to be at the
basis of those instrumental works. What quality of mind and feeling
is displayed when the hearer of a Beethoven symphony can only
keep his interest in it alive by imagining that the musical flood is the
reproduction of the plot of some romance? These people in
consequence often grumble at the great master when some
unexpected stroke disturbs the even tenour of the little tale they
have foisted on the work: they reproach the composer with
unclearness and disconnectedness, and lament his lack of coherency.
Oh the ninnies!"
R. is afterwards careful to explain that he has no objection to each
hearer associating the music, as he hears it, with any moods or
episodes he likes out of his own experience. All he objects to is the
audience having the terms of the poetic association dictated to them
by the musical journalists. "I should like to tear the hair from their
silly heads when they stuff this stupid nonsense into honest people,
and so rob them of all the ingenuousness with which they would
have otherwise have given themselves up to hearing Beethoven's
symphony. Instead of abandoning themselves to their natural
feelings, the poor deluded people of full heart but feeble head think
themselves obliged to follow the course of some village wedding, a
thing of which they probably know nothing at first hand, and in
place of which they would certainly have been much more likely to
imagine something quite different, something from the circle of their
own experience.... I hold that no one stereotyped interpretation is
admissible. Definitely as the purely musical edifice stands complete
and rounded in the artistic proportions of a Beethoven symphony,
perfect and indivisible as it appears to the higher sense, just so is it
impossible to reduce the effects of the work on the human heart to
one authoritative symbol. This is more or less the case with the
creations of the other arts: how diversely will one and the same
picture, one and the same drama, affect diverse individuals, and
even the same individual at different times! And yet how much more
definitely and positively the painter or the poet must draw his figures
than the instrumental composer, who is not bound, like them, to
model his form by the appearances of the everyday world, but who
has at his disposal an immeasurable realm in a super-terrestrial
kingdom, and to whose hand is given the most spiritual of
substances—tone! But it is degrading to this high office of the
musician to force him to make him fit his inspiration to the
appearances of the everyday world; and still more would the
instrumental composer deny his mission, or expose his own
weakness, who should try to carry the restricted proportions of
merely worldly things into the realm of his own art."[318]
"In instrumental music," he said in later life, "I am a Réactionnaire, a
conservative. I dislike everything that requires a verbal explanation
beyond the actual sounds."[319] In the light of this declaration, and
of the æsthetic doctrines he expounds in the article On Franz Liszt's
Symphonic Poems and elsewhere, it is interesting to see him setting
forth the same doctrine of music as early as 1840. In A Happy
Evening R. lays it down that he rejects all tone-painting, except
when it is used in jest or to reproduce purely musical phenomena.
[320] He further dissents from his friend's theory that whereas
Mozart's symphonies came from nothing but a purely inward musical
source, Beethoven may have "first of all conceived and worked out
the plan of a symphony according to a certain philosophical idea,
before he left it to his imagination to invent the musical themes."
The friend adduces the Eroica Symphony in support of this
contention. "You know that it was at first intended that this
symphony should bear the title 'Bonaparte.' Can you deny, then, that
Beethoven was inspired to this gigantic work, and the plan of it
decided, by an idea outside the realm of music?"
R. sweeps his friend off his feet with the vehemence of his reply. The
Eroica Symphony, he contends, is not a translation into music of the
petty details of Napoleon's first Italian campaign. Nowhere does the
work suggest that the composer has had his eye on any special
episode in the general's career. No realistic explanation of this kind
can be made to square with the Funeral March, the Scherzo with the
hunting horns, or the Finale with its soft, emotional Andante. "Where
is the bridge of Lodi, where the battle of Arcola, where the march to
Leoben, where the victory under the Pyramids, where the 18th
Brumaire? Are these not incidents which no composer of our day
would have passed by had he been writing a biographical symphony
on Bonaparte?" Then R. gives his own theory of the genesis of such
a work as the Eroica. What stimulates the musician to composition in
the first place is a purely musical mood: it may have come from
either an inner or an outer experience, but it is wholly musical in
essence and in its manner of expression. "But the grand passions
and enduring emotions that dominate the current of our feelings and
ideas for months or for half a year, it is these that urge the musician
to those ampler, more comprehensive concepts to which we owe,
among others, the origin of a Sinfonia eroica. These great moods, as
deep suffering of soul or mighty exaltation, may derive from outer
events, for we are human beings and our fate is ruled by external
circumstances: but when they impel the musician to production
these great moods have already turned to music within him, so that
in the moment of creative inspiration it is no longer the outer events
that guide and govern the composition, but the musical emotion that
this event has generated." We may imagine that the republican
Beethoven's emotional nature had been fired by the career and
character of Napoleon. "He was no general,—he was a musician:
and in his own domain he saw the spirit in which he could
accomplish the equivalent of what Bonaparte had accomplished on
the plains of Italy." The product of this passionate yearning for self-
realisation was the Eroica Symphony, "and as he knew well to whom
he owed the impulse to this gigantic work, he inscribed the name of
Bonaparte on the title-page. Yet not a single feature of the
development of the symphony can be said to have an immediate
outer connection with the fate of the hero."[321]

V
Of even more importance than the article A Happy Evening in the
story of Wagner's development is the essay on The Overture that
appeared in the Gazette Musicale in January 1841,—that is to say, a
couple of months after the completion of Rienzi, and nearly six
months before the commencement of the Flying Dutchman. Here he
anticipates some of the æsthetic he was afterwards to expound so
eloquently and so convincingly in the great article on Beethoven and
elsewhere. He begins with a survey of the early history of the
Overture. There had always been, apparently, a reluctance to
plunging the spectator forthwith into the opera, just as in earlier
times a prologue had always preceded the play. The prologue,
however, had this at any rate to be said for it, that it summarised the
action of the coming play, and in this and other ways prepared the
spectator to listen more intelligently. The early Overture, however,
could not do this, for at that time the psychological powers of music
were not sufficiently developed to permit of the summarising in a
few minutes of the actions and the motives of an opera. It became a
conventional, not a characteristic prelude. Later on a regular
"Overture form" was elaborated, but even this was psychologically
impotent. What connection has the overture to the Messiah, for
example, with the oratorio itself? Would it not serve equally well as
prelude to a hundred others of the old oratorios or operas?
Practically the only method of musical development these composers
had at their service was the fugal: it was impossible for them to
work out an extended musical piece by means of ever-widening
circles of pure feeling.
Next came a tripartite form of overture,—an opening and closing
movement in quicker time, with an intermediate section in slower
time and of softer character. This gave a certain amount of
opportunity for the presentation of one or two of the main moods or
episodes or characters of the opera: and in the "Symphony" that
introduces the Seraglio, Mozart has given us a little masterpiece in
this genre. But there was a certain helplessness in the division of the
"Symphony" into three sections, and in the predetermined nature of
their contents: and in course of time there was evolved the operatic
overture proper,—a continuous musical piece, making a sort of
dramatic play with the main motives of the opera. This was the form
with which Gluck and Mozart worked such wonders. Gluck's
masterpiece is the overture to Iphigenia in Aulis: Mozart's, those to
the Magic Flute, Figaro, and Titus. According to Wagner, Mozart's
merit was that he did not attempt to express in his overture all the
details of the plot, but "fastened with his poet's eye on the leading
idea of the drama, divested it of all its inessentials and material
accidentiæ, and set it forth as a musically transfigured creation, a
passion personified in tones, and presented it to the main idea as
the justificatory counterpart of this,—a something through which the
idea, and even the dramatic action itself, became intelligible to the
spectator's feeling." At the same time the overture became a self-
contained tone-piece,—this being true even of an overture like that
to Don Giovanni, which runs without any formal close into the first
scene of the opera. This form of overture became the property of
Cherubini and Beethoven. The former remained mostly faithful to the
transmitted type, which Beethoven also used in the E major overture
to Fidelio. But Beethoven in time broke through the cramping
limitations of this form. His "prodigious dramatic instinct," having
never found the opera into which it could pour the whole of itself,
turned for an outlet to instrumental music pure and simple,—to the
field in which he could "shape in his own way the drama of his
desire out of pure tone-images," a drama "set free from the petty
trimmings of the timorous playwright." The result of this effort was
the great Leonora overture, which, "far from giving us a musical
introduction to the drama, really sets that drama before us more
completely and more affectingly than the ensuing broken action
does. This work is no longer an overture, but itself the mightiest of
dramas."[322]
Weber too is commended for making his overtures dramatic "without
losing and wasting himself in a painful depiction of insignificant
accessories of the plot." Even when his rich fantasy led him to
incorporate more subsidiary musical motives than the form
transmitted to him could conveniently carry, he always managed to
preserve the dramatic unity of his conception. He invented a new
form, that of the "dramatic fantasia," of which the Oberon overture
is one of the finest examples. "Nevertheless," says Wagner,—and
here again we see his rooted antipathy to anything in the nature of
excessive detail-painting in music[323]—"it is not to be denied that
the independence of purely musical production must suffer by
subordination to a dramatic thought, if this thought is not seized in
one broad trait consistent with the spirit of music,—for the composer
who tries to depict the details of the action itself cannot develop his
dramatic theme without breaking his musical work to fragments."
The inevitable ending of this style of overture is the pot-pourri,—a
form of which Spontini's overture to the Vestale may be said to have
been the beginning. The public liked this kind of thing because it
dished up for them again the most effective snatches of melody from
the operas.
The summing up is that the ideal form and ideal achievement are
those of the Don Giovanni and Leonora overtures. In the former no
attempt is made to reproduce the course of the drama itself step by
step: the drama is freshly conceived as the contest between two
broad principles—the arrogance of Don Giovanni and the anger of a
higher power—and "the invention, as well as the conduct," of these
symbolic motives "belongs quite unmistakably to no other province
than that of music." Beethoven's method in the Leonora overture, on
the other hand, is "to concentrate in all its noble unity the one
sublime action which, in the drama itself, is weakened and impeded
by the necessity of padding it out with trivial details,—to show this
action in its ideal new motion, nourished only by its inner impulses."
This "ideal action" is, of course, the loving self-sacrifice of Leonora.
But by reason of its very greatness and its intense dramatic quality,
the Leonora overture ceases to be an overture in the proper sense of
the word. It anticipates too fully the completed drama: if it is not
understood by the hearer, because of his lack of knowledge of the
opera, it conveys only a fragment of its real message to him: if it is
wholly understood, it weakens his subsequent enjoyment of the
drama itself.
Wagner therefore returns to the overture to Don Giovanni as the
ideal, because here "the leading thought of the drama is worked out
in a purely musical, not a dramatic, form." In this way the musician
"most surely attains the general artistic aim of the overture, which is
simply an ideal prologue, transporting us into that higher sphere in
which to prepare our mind for the drama." The musical conception
of the main idea of the drama can still be distinctly worked out and
brought to a definite close; in fact "the overture should form a
musical art-work complete in itself." No better model could be had
than Gluck's overture to Iphigenia in Aulis. In a word, though the
overture must not attempt to reproduce stage by stage all the
episodes of the story, it can suggest in its own way the dramatic
contest of two main principles by a contest between two symbolic
musical ideas: only the working-out of these musical ideas must
follow from the nature of the themes themselves. But it must be
always borne in mind—and the frequency with which Wagner returns
to this point shows the importance he attached to it—that "the
working-out must always take its rise from the purely musical
significance of the themes: never should it take account of the
course of events in the drama itself, for this would at once destroy
the sole effective character of a piece of music."
As I have already pointed out, this and one or two of the other
articles of the Paris time are interesting because they show us the
mature æsthetics of the 'sixties and 'seventies trying to find
expression in the young Wagner of 1840. To most of the principles
here laid down he remained faithful, as we shall see, to the end of
his days. But it is interesting also to note that though theoretically
he always remained constant to the guiding principles he here lays
down for the overture, his practice by no means always conformed
to them. His ideal overture, as we have just seen, was one of the
type of that to Don Giovanni or that to Iphigenia in Aulis—i.e. one
that either made no use at all of thematic material from the opera
itself, or the minimum use of it, the dramatic conflict of the stage
action being fought out ideally, as it were, in the overture, in the
persons of two symbolic musical themes. "In this conception of the
overture," he says, "the highest task would be to reproduce the
characteristic idea of the drama by means pure and simple (mit den
eigentlichen Mitteln) of self-subsistent (selbstständigen) music, and
to conduct it to a conclusion which should correspond, by
anticipation, with the solution of the problem in the scenic play."
It is difficult to square his practice in some of his own overtures with
the theoretical principles he here lays down. Not one of his overtures
corresponds with the form he so greatly admired in the overtures to
Don Giovanni and Iphigenia in Aulis,—a re-presentation of the
coming dramatic conflict in terms of a musical piece that made no
drafts at all, or practically none, upon the thematic material of the
opera itself. The brief Prelude to Lohengrin comes under no
suspicion of being a pot-pourri of motives from the opera; but then it
achieves its concision and its singular air of detachment from
anything in the nature of mere story-telling in music by failing to do
just what Mozart and Gluck are commended for doing—summing up
the ensuing dramatic conflict by the opposition of two main musical
moods and their final resolution. The Lohengrin Prelude tells us
nothing of any dramatic contest,—not even that which rages in the
heart of Elsa. It shows us only Lohengrin, the representative of the
Grail, coming to earth and leaving it again. There is no hint of the
reason for his return to Monsalvat: there is no hint even that his stay
on earth has been in any degree troubled by enemies or evil.
Beautiful as it is, therefore, and eloquently as it sings of Lohengrin
himself, the Prelude is not in the full sense of the word a real
prelude to the drama. On the other hand, when Wagner does make
his overture a genuine introduction to, and instrumental summary of,
the opera, he inevitably approaches the pot-pourri. It is true that his
fine sense of form mostly saves him from attempting to reproduce in
the overture all the dramatic or thematic motives of the opera. In
the Flying Dutchman overture, for example, there is no reference to
Erik: so far as the overture itself is concerned, no such person might
have ever come into the lives of Senta and the Dutchman. There is
no mention of Daland, and no reference to the spinning scene—the
latter a musical motive that, it is safe to say, none of the French or
Italian writers of overtures, or perhaps even Weber himself, would
have had the heart to set aside. On the whole the Flying Dutchman
overture is concerned simply with the Dutchman, his curse and his
grief, with Senta, and with the sea that forms the imaginative
background to their drama: [324] and though of course the overture
is entirely built up of thematic material derived from the opera, this
is all so freshly and imaginatively treated, and made into so coherent
and organic a piece of instrumental music, that, though the overture
is by no means of the type of those to Don Giovanni and Iphigenia in
Aulis, which Wagner praised as models, nothing could be further
removed from the old-style pot-pourri. The overtures to Tannhäuser
and the Meistersinger, however, must frankly be called pot-pourris,—
though pot-pourris of genius. In the Tannhäuser overture we are
given not merely an instrumental symbol of the drama, but the
drama itself compressed into a sort of feuilleton. The ground
covered is so vast, and the expression so intense, that at the end of
the overture we are inclined to ask ourselves whether it has not, like
the great Leonora overture, made a good deal of the ensuing drama
almost superfluous, a mere padding out or watering down of the
emotions and the spiritual oppositions set before us with such
drastic power in the overture itself. One is inclined to say that an
overture lasting nearly a quarter of an hour is not so much the door
to a mansion as a cottage in itself. A work like the Tannhäuser
overture has its justification as a kind of symphonic poem for the
concert room; it has little justification as a prelude to a drama in the
theatre.
In any case a piece of prolonged story-telling of this kind is not what
Wagner had in his mind when he wrote the article on The Overture:
it is not too much to say, indeed, that it is the very type of musical
introduction he expressly wished to bar. It is true that he advises the
composer who wishes to make his overture "reproduce the
characteristic idea of the drama by means pure and simple of self-
subsistent music, and to conduct it to a conclusion which shall
correspond, by anticipation, with the solution of the problem in the
scenic play," to give the introductory instrumental piece some
thematic connection with the opera. But not, be it observed, by
utilising long stretches of this material, as is done in the Tannhäuser
overture. Wagner's advice to the composer is "to introduce into the
characteristic motives of his overture certain melismic or rhythmic
features that are of importance in the dramatic action itself—not
features, however, strewn accidentally among the action, but such as
play a decisively weighty part in it, characteristics that determine, as
it were, the orientation of a human action on a specific terrain, and
so give an individual stamp to the overture. These features must of
course be purely musical in their nature, i.e. such motives from the
world of tone as have a relation to human life. I would cite as
excellent examples the trombone blasts of the Priests in the Magic
Flute, the trumpet signal in the Leonora, and the call of the magic
horn in Oberon. These musical motives from the opera, employed in
advance in the overture, serve, when introduced there at the
decisive moment, as veritable points of contact of the dramatic with
the musical motion, and effect a happy individualisation of the tone-
piece, which is intended to be a mood-defining introduction to a
particular dramatic subject."[325] The ideal overture that Wagner had
in his mind at this time was evidently something very different from
the one he subsequently wrote for Tannhäuser: but the discrepancy
between his theory and his practice is still more strikingly shown by
a sentence that appears in the French version of the article but not
in the German. In the French, the passage quoted above,
commencing with the words "these features must of course be
purely musical in their nature," was prefaced by the following: "But
one should never forget that they [i.e. "the melismic or rhythmical
features" from the opera that were to be interwoven into the tissue
of the overture] should be entirely musical in their source, and not
borrow their significance from the words that accompany them in
the opera. The composer would in this case commit the error of
sacrificing both himself and the independence of his art to the
intervention of an alien art. These elements, I say, must be in their
nature purely musical, and I would cite as examples," &c.
It is at once evident that this bars out whole passages such as the
Pilgrims' Chorus, The Sirens' Chorus, and Tannhäuser's Hymn to
Venus, and, in the Meistersinger overture, such passages as Sachs's
final address, the phrases in which the populace jeer at Beckmesser,
&c. Strictly speaking, indeed, neither of these overtures can be
made to square with Wagner's theoretical principles. The question of
the overture was one of those on which he never attained to
complete consistency. In Tristan, as in Lohengrin, he devotes himself
simply to working out in a broad form one great emotional motive of
the drama. The overtures to Tannhäuser and the Meistersinger, and,
in a lesser degree, that to the Flying Dutchman, are a mixture of the
pot-pourri and the symphonic poem. The Prelude to Parsifal is again
a sort of pot-pourri, though here, of course, there is no attempt at
story-telling in detail, the Prelude setting before us, as Wagner
himself said, the three motives of "Love, Faith and Hope," and
showing, as it were, the emotional outcome of them. To the
Rhinegold there is no overture, or even a Prelude in the formal sense
of that word: the long-drawn chord of E flat is merely the oral
counterpart of the visible sensation given the spectator by the Rhine.
Similarly the preludial bars to the Valkyrie only paint the storm in
which Siegmund is flying from his enemies.
Even the greatest men and the boldest revolutionaries are fettered
in their thinking by the age in which they live. Only in this way can
we account for Wagner's failure to see that the true solution of the
problem of the overture was to abolish the overture. It had never
any real æsthetic justification. As he himself points out, it had its
origin simply in the fact that at one stage of the development of
opera the composer saw the necessity of keeping the audience
occupied in some way for a few minutes before it would be safe to
raise the curtain on the play. It is one more of the many illustrations
that may be cited of what may be called the dead hand in art,—the
survival in a new art of some method of procedure that had its origin
under quite other conditions. Pottery, for instance, continued for
long to be decorated with lines that were merely imitations in clay—
unnecessary imitations—of the designs and colours of the interlaced
osiers out of which the primitive vessel was made. The symphony
developed out of the custom of stringing certain dance movements
into a suite: and in spite of the clearly recognised fact that there is
no logical justification either in art or in life for casting the modern
symphony into this arbitrary four-movement form, composers still
weakly adhere to it. Wagner was fond of pointing out, again, how
Beethoven's congenital inability to break away from the sonata form
of his day led to a clash between this form and the purely dramatic,
onward-urging impulse of the great Leonora overture. It is little
wonder, therefore, that Wagner was so far the slave of his epoch
that it never occurred to him, and least of all in 1841, to question
the necessity of having any overture at all. The freer thought of the
present day has been able either to reduce the overture to a few
bars of prelude, simply attuning the mind of the spectator to the
coming scene, as in Debussy's Pelleas and Melisande, or to dispense
altogether with an instrumental introduction, as in Salome and
Elektra.

VI
After the Paris articles of 1841 Wagner wrote little or nothing upon
the æsthetics of his art for some ten years. For a time, indeed, he
wrote practically no prose of any kind. He left Paris for Dresden in
April 1842. At the end of that year he wrote his Autobiographical
Sketch for Laube's Zeitung für die elegante Welt. His pen was then
silent until 1844, in which year we have the Account of the bringing
home of Weber's remains from London to Dresden, and the Speech
at Weber's Grave. To 1846 belongs the programme he wrote for the
performance of Beethoven's choral symphony on Palm Sunday at
Dresden.[326] No doubt his duties at the Dresden Opera, which he
seems to have fulfilled with great thoroughness and
conscientiousness, left him little time for anything else but these and
the composition of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. When he at length
took up the pen again it was not to expound a system of musical