CHAPTER XXXIV
WAGNER AND THE RECONSTRUCTED OPERA
206. The Situation Confronting Wagner.—The time at which
Wagner appeared was one favorable to a great musical dramatist.
Under the lead originally of the Viennese composers, orchestral
music had become highly significant, disclosing in a new way
the capacity of pure music (without words) through forms essentially
its own to depict and symbolize complicated emotional
experiences, and bringing an advanced type of art into intimate
relation with the mental life of the age. To this orchestral
evolution romanticism was adding a corresponding expansion of
piano music, and notable enrichments in both solo and choral
song. But the great field of dramatic music was as yet but imperfectly
affected. It is true that Gluck a half-century before
had opened the contention for dramatic sincerity, that Weber
had lived long enough to start a fresh movement toward imaginative
intensity, and that several composers were endeavoring
to make the tragic opera what its common name implied—a
really 'grand' or capital artistic type. But Gluck's efforts
came before the forms of composition were fully ready to bear
the strain demanded, and he was also entangled in the old academic
notion about the subjects to be taken for operatic treatment.
Weber's genius, real and fresh as it was, was exercised
upon subjects without much moral grandeur, if, indeed, it was
capable of attaining to them, and hence missed the greater inspirations,
being animated more by fancy over the picturesque
than by profound imagination. And Meyerbeer and other
writers of grand opera, with perhaps a partial exception in
Marschner, had not enough original force to construct more
than a pretentious variant among the types of concert-opera that
had long been prevalent. The technical resources of the opera
had plainly been enriched, and the range of topic and plot
broadened—on this side the French opéra comique having a
useful influence. But the main current of opera-writing had
