Wagner himself never wished to be regarded as a composer pure and simple. He protested with some justice that his achievement covered many fields, and that any estimate of it must be based on a general survey and not merely on the music that constituted but one element in the complex whole. Even the modern opera-goer (and the opera-singer, too) is far too apt to forget all other considerations in his anxiety to appreciate to the full the music that the composer puts before him; and if this tendency is common today, it was almost universal when Wagner lived and wrote. For though the obvious truth that an opera is a combination of music and drama has never been entirely forgotten since it was first stated by the group of Florentines among whom this form of art originated, yet the ideal blend of the two has not proved easy to discover. Music has always had a way of asserting her pre-eminence at the expense of the plays with which she has been associated, in spite of all the efforts of theorists and reformers to keep her within legitimate bounds. Even the redoubtable Gluck himself could not always resist her imperious demand for freedom to develop unrestrained along her own lines, and during the seventy-five years or so that elapsed between Iphigenia in Tauris and The Rhinegold she succeeded in reducing the sister art to a condition of almost complete subjection. Mozart and Beethoven, it is true, never failed to give due consideration to the significance of the scene they were setting, but the bent of their minds towards purely instrumental compositions made them ill-fitted to continue the work of Gluck, even if the sheer splendour of their genius had not been such as to overwhelm by its very magnificence the dramas to which it lent its lustre. Their deep sense of artistic fitness did, indeed, lead to the creation of an operatic tradition that was to develop through Weber till at last it bore rich fruit in the work of Wagner himself. But before this consummation could be reached a period had to be traversed during which the original ideals of dramatic music seemed to be obliterated in a flood of lyric eloquence and vocal virtuosity. This is not the place for an estimate of the operas of Spontini, Meyerbeer, Auber, Donizetti, Bellini, and a host of others, all famous in their day and not by any means forgotten even now ; but it will be generally conceded that in their work it was the music and the singers that mattered. The very inanity of so many of their libretti is sufficient evidence of the small store they set on dramatic considerations.

Such being the operas to which audiences were accustomed when Wagner appeared upon the scene, it is not surprising that he should have decided that his theories required some explanation if they were to prove acceptable to the operatic public. His hearers, he felt, must be made to see that his mature work, however novel it might appear, contained nothing that was not perfectly logical and easily intelligible once the standpoint from which he regarded the artistic problem was properly appreciated, and consequently we find him in his writings insisting again and again on the essential unity of the true "Music-Drama", in which literature, acting, and stagecraft should all play their part with the music in achieving the desired dramatic result.

These views, so contrary to current conventions, were regarded by the older school of composers and critics at first with indifference, and later, as -Wagner's genius became more and more widely recognised, with growing anger and alarm. Not only was a resuscitation of the inconvenient ideals of Gluck likely to interfere with the style of opera to which they had grown accustomed, but it soon became clear that Wagner intended to push his ease further than Gluck had ever dreamed of. He possessed, moreover, a power of clear reasoning, a quick eye for his opponent's weaknesses, and a trenchant pen that rendered him a formidable adversary, and, above all, he was liable at any moment to produce a masterpiece of his own more compelling than a thousand arguments. Finally, he wove into his operas a mass of philosophic doctrine and questionable sociology that was enough in itself to raise in arms against him all but the most progressive elements in contemporary thought.

This was the origin of the great Wagnerian controversy, the echoes of which have not even now quite died away. Besides the difficult problems of opera it included, as has been shown, many things whose only connexion with the principal issue was that they had been dragged into the arena by Wagner himself, and it was further complicated by the discussion that arose concerning the relative merits of "absolute music" and "programme music", the supporters of poetic music (as "programme music" has sometimes been called) enrolling themselves under the standard of Wagner and Liszt, while the purists found a somewhat reluctant and self-effacing champion in Brahms. There was, as will be seen, plenty to write about if all these large questions were to be thoroughly threshed out, and if any one of the controversialists found himself temporarily at a loss for weapons, Wagner's private life furnished a fresh and almost inexhaustible arsenal. No wonder the fight was bitter! No wonder the Wagnerian literature is voluminous!

Over these weighty matters the dispute among the critics still rages. But meanwhile the much-enduring public has quietly made up its mind. Wagner's reforms may indeed mark a turning-point in operatic history, his libretti may be less silly (though more tedious) than those of most opera-writers, but the public cares little for all this. One thing, however, it has seen and felt for itself, the supreme greatness of Wagner's music, and having established this to its own satisfaction it leaves the critics to their own concerns and goes on filling Covent Garden and the Queen's Hall whenever it has a chance of hearing this music performed. When it can it plays over the scores of the operas for itself at home, and when it can't it buys gramophone records. This last point clinches the argument: every element of Wagner's work is lost on the record except the music – even the words are seldom clear – and yet the companies have found it worth while to issue more of the work of Wagner than of any other serious composer whatever. The public may be wrong, though I am not at all prepared to admit that it is, but it has delivered a definite verdict which it would be mere folly for us to ignore.

One of the curious results of the present situation is that while it is in Wagner's music that most of us are interested, yet it is far from easy to gather information about this vital aspect of his work from the mass of the Wagner literature. The best writers have been so engrossed in controversy that their dealings with the music itself have been too often confined to a few desultory references, brought in where they may serve to further the general argument. What we need is a book in English that will be mainly concerned with Wagner the composer, showing us wherein his greatness lies and what is the relationship between his work and that of other nineteenth century writers. It should not be impossible to produce a readable little volume on these lines, which would :appeal to the ordinary music lover by steering safely between the Scylla of msthetic theorising and the Charybdis of excessive technicality.

Meanwhile, in the absence of more adequate information, perhaps these stray remarks may be of interest. They lay no claim to originality and there must be many readers of THE GRAMOPHONE to whom everything I have to say has long been familiar. But it is not to them that I address myself so much as to those others who, having felt the spell of this mighty music, would be glad to learn the sources of its inspiration and what use its creator made of them. No one need fear that such an enquiry will destroy the magic of Tristan or The Mastersingers. Every critic knows that there is an inmost shrine of genius to which he can never penetrate; it is outside this that his business lies, and he is content to stop short upon the threshold, leaving the ultimate secrets still "wrapt in mystery".

The outstanding feature of all Wagner's later works, and in a lesser degree of his earlier ones, is the importance of the orchestra. From being merely a suitable background against which the brilliance of the "star" singer may shine more brightly the sound of the instruments has become a bottomless ocean of music in which singer and audience alike must swim or, on occasions, sink. The large force of players that he employs is, of course, partly responsible for this result, but other composers might have used the means without achieving the effect, whereas Wagner can obtain all his characteristic richness even with the diminutive band of the Siegfried Idyll. The real secret of his orchestration is his unique appreciation of the possibilities for colour inherent in the instruments at his disposal, and it was this that guided him both in his selection of new recruits for the orchestral family and in his treatment of its established members. The well-known division of that family into strings, woodwind, and brass, with percussion as required, he inherited from the great classical symphonists such changes as he made were in the direction of splitting up these groups still further. Everyone remembers the famous passage at the beginning of the prelude to Lohengrin, where the ethereal quality of the music is due to its being played on violins only, these being divided up into four, five, or even eight parts instead of the customary two. This elaborate writing for the strings is no isolated instance (the music accompanying the wood-bird's song, Hei! Siegfried erschlug nun der schlimmen Zwerg! from the forest scene in Siegfried supplies another example) but is typical of Wagner's methods.

When, however, he came to the wood-wind, where each part in the score is played by a single instrument instead of a group, he found it impossible to proceed in the same way without adding to the number of players; for the two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, and two bassoons, with which Beethoven was usually content were clearly insufficient to produce the subtle shades of eolour that he loved. So we see him adding a third flute (or a piccolo) to the flute group, a third oboe (or a tenor oboe, coy anglais) to the oboes, a third clarinet (or bass clarinet), and a third bassoon (or double bassoon). This enabled him to obtain three-part harmony in any of the four principal wood-wind timbres and is in a large measure responsible for the rich sonority of his passages for full orchestra, besides accounting for the mellow smoothness that charactedses his writing for wood-wind alone.

But it is in the brass that we notice the most conspicuous advance. Not only does Wagner pursue the same plan here as in the wood-wind, using four (or more) horns regularly, three trumpets, and reinforcing the three trombones with a bass tuba, but he is able, owing to improvements in the mechanism of some of these instruments, to treat them with far greater freedom than had been possible hitherto. Mozart, Beethoven, and even Weber, when writing for horns or trumpets, had been compelled to confine themselves to a mere handful of notes since the "natural horns" and "natural trumpets" that their players used were only capable of producing the series of sounds that we call, for obvious reasons, the "bugle notes," and a very few others. This cruel limitation prevented their allotting any but the simplest themes to these instruments (and it must be remembered that Mozart and Beethoven seldom used the more versatile trombones), it forced them if they wished to carry their music into some remote key to "leave their horns and trumpets behind them," and generally it relegated the brass to a subordinate position in the background that was quite unworthy of its dignity, besides occasioning some clumsy writing that a later generation unaware of the difficulty has sometimes been too ready to condemn. During the nineteenth century, however, instrument makers set themselves to remove this reproach to their profession, and they succeeded in evolving the valve horn and valve trumpet on which it was possible to produce almost any note that was within the instrument's compass.t Wagner was, perhaps, the first to realise the full potentialities of this invention, and his free and effective use of it sounded the death-knell of the older instruments. For the Wagnerian brass no key is impossible, no note inaccessible, and the group takes its rightful place as an equal beside the wood-wind and the strings.

Certain other obvious peculiarities of Wagner's orchestration are of less importance. In Rienvi we find him writing a part for the serpent, an old wooden instrument that will remind some of us of Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree. "It is now happily obsolete," as Mr Corder observes. In the score of The Ring, again, various strange and forbidding brass instruments are to be met with, a bass trumpet, a double bass trombone and the like; I am told that HMV have used the full complement of these for their splendid Ring series of records, but I cannot claim much acquaintance with them in the opera-house or the concert-hall, where their parts are taken as a rule by the ordinary trombones and tuba. For the tuba, by the way, Wagner shows a marked partiality, and in The Ring he employs four of these instruments, often using them antiphonally with his trombones. The effect is a fine one, but I have not come across any convincing illustrations of it on the gramophone.

Very different from these brazen-throated monsters is the harp, for which Wagner writes regularly though by no means always well. Perhaps the most famous example of its use is in the "rainbow bridge" music from The Rhinegold, where the diverse and simultaneous arpeggi of six harps, and divided strings are employed with the happiest, result. This, however, is exceptional, and on the whole harpists have a right to reproach Wagner for his lack. of consideration for them. There is, for instance, in the Liebestod, a full and elaborate part for the instrument which is most of it inaudible, the weak sound of the harp being submerged beneath the orchestral flood – it must be heart-breaking work for the player ! But even so he will probably prefer it to that apparently simple and effective passage in the Fire-music from The Valkyrie where thedescending chromatic arpeggi are so appallingly awkward that no one to this day has ever been able to render them quite satisfactorily.

But the harp is a solitary exception ; for all theother instruments Wagner shows an imaginative sympathy that has seldom if ever been equalled. Needless to say he makes unheard of demands on all his orchestral players – there are things for the strings in Tristan that tax to the uttermost even the largest and most accomplished body of violinists – but most great composers have found themselves transcending the technical limitations of their executant brethren at one point or another, and unless the feats required of them have been utterly unreasonable the executants have made it their business to find a way of translating the written notes into tone. Richard Wagner was certainly not the man to be more considerate than others in this; respect, and his scores would have been beyond the reach of the orchestras that sufficed for Beethoven, and even Weber, as much by the difficulty and complexity of the individual parts and the subtlety of the relations between them as by the prodigious number of players that was required to perform them. The only proper place to discuss fully this aspect of the subject would be on a book on orchestration, but no technical knowledge is needed to appreciate the general truth of what I have just said or the splendid way in which orchestras and their conductors have strained every nerve that their presentation of Wagner's music may come as close as possible to his original conception of it. All honour to them!

And all honour to the recording companies, who have had their own problem to solve – a problem of which Wagner can never have dreamed. I am very ignorant of the history of the gramophone and its rude parent, the early phonograph, and it would be interesting to know whether the master could possibly have heard any instrument of this kind before he died, in February, 1883. But be that as it may, he can never have anticipated the enormous vogue his music would one day acquire by such unexpected means, and he certainly made no allowances for the difficulties of reproduction. Considering the enormously complex nature of the work that had to be done by the recording companies, the results already achieved are nothing less than astounding; and – most satisfactory of all – they show no signs of resting upon their laurels!