and disgrace, to immortality.  In spite of the acknowledged success of ‘Rienzi,’ Wagner’s enemies were never tired of repeating that, like Monteverde, he had invented a new system because he could not manipulate the old.  It seems hardly possible to us that musicians could ever have been found to deny that the composer of ’Die Meistersinger’ was a consummate master of counterpoint.  Fortunately the discovery of his Symphony in C finally put an end to all doubts relative to the thoroughness of Wagner’s musical education.  In this work, which was written at the age of eighteen, the composer showed a mastery of the symphonic form which many of his detractors might have envied.  The fact is, that Wagner was a man of a singularly flexible habit of mind.  He was a careful student of both ancient and modern music, and a study of his works shows us that, so far from despising what had been done by his predecessors, he greedily assimilated all that was best in their productions, only rejecting the narrow conventions in which so many of them had contentedly acquiesced.  His music is the logical development of that of Gluck and Weber, purified by a closer study of the principles of declamation, and enriched by a command of orchestral resource of which they had never dreamed.

Wagner’s first opera, ‘Die Feen,’ was written in 1833, when the composer was twenty years old.  Wagner always wrote his own libretti, even in those days.  The story of ‘Die Feen’ was taken from one of Gozzi’s fairy-tales, ‘La Donna Serpente.’  Wagner himself, in his ‘Communication to my Friends,’ written in 1851, has given us a resume of the plot:  ’A fairy, who renounces immortality for the sake of a human lover, can only become a mortal through the fulfilment of certain hard conditions, the non-compliance wherewith on the part of her earthly swain threatens her with the direst penalties; her lover fails in the test, which consists in this, that, however evil and repulsive she may appear to him (in the metamorphosis which she has to undergo), he shall not reject her in his unbelief.  In Gozzi’s tale the fairy is changed into a snake; the remorseful lover frees her from the spell by kissing the snake, and thus wins her for his wife.  I altered this denouement by changing the fairy into a stone, and then releasing her from the spell by her lover’s passionate song; while the lover, instead of being allowed to carry off his bride into his own country, is himself admitted by the fairy king to the immortal bliss of fairyland, together with his fairy wife.’

When Wagner wrote ‘Die Feen’ he was under the spell of Weber, whose influence is perceptible in every page of the score.  Marschner, too, whose ‘Vampyr’ and ‘Templer und Juedin’ had been recently produced at Leipzig, which was then Wagner’s headquarters, also appealed very strongly to the young musician’s plastic temperament.  ‘Die Feen’ consequently has little claim to originality, but the work is nevertheless interesting