(3) For who can nurse less hopes of the success of his reforming efforts, than he who acts therein with greatest honesty ?-R. WAGNER.
(4) The slap at Meyerbeer's Huguenots, Prophète, etc, is obvious. -TR.
(5) " Verdichtete" = "condensed"; but the mere English equivalent will not convey the hidden allusion-worked out later on-to "Dichtkunst" (Poetry), which is thus shown to be the condensation into spoken words of the nebulous ideas of fancy .-TR.
(6) "Reinmenschliche," lit. "purely human. "-TR.
(7) It must be distinctly understood that by "Dance" Wagner does not refer to the Ballet, or anything approaching it; it is the grace of gesture and of motion which he sums up in this terse and comprehensive term.-TR.
The verb "unterscheiden" is here used in so many different shades of its meaning that it is impossible to do justice in a translation to the philosophical play of words. Literally it means: "to cleave asunder," and hence, "to separate, to distinguish, to discern, to discriminate, to differentiate." There being no one English word that will embrace the varying sense in which the term is here employed, I have been forced to replace it by varying expressions.-TR.
(9) Compare Carlyle On Heroes:-"King, Könning, which means Can-ning , Able-man. . .. Find me the true Könning, King, or Able-man, and he has a divine right over me."-TR
(10) The German equivalent for "compact" is "dicht"; the term seems to have been purposely chosen by the author, in order to bring out the true meaning of "Dichtkunst," "The art of Poetry," as a crystallisation-so to say-of ideas and emotions only vaguely felt before.-TR.
(11) Compare Tristan u. Isolde, Act 3, "Sehnen! Sehnen-im Sterben mich zu sehnen, vor Sehnsucht nicht zu sterben ! "-a passage which has more than any other been ascribed to Schopenhauer's influence, but which is almost a literal reproduction of the words used in the present instance.-TR.
(12) See Wagner's Letters to Uhlig (Letter 67,-July, 1852). "E. D. defends music against me. Is not that delicious? He appeals to 'harmonies of the spheres,' and 'groanings and sighings of the soul !' Well, I have got a pretty millstone hung about my neck ! "-TR.
(13) Amid the solemn-striding rhythm of the second section, a secondary theme uplifts its wailing, yearning song; to that rhythm, which shows its firm-set tread throughout the entire piece, without a pause, this longing melody clings like the ivy to the oak, which without its clasping of the mighty bole would trail its crumpled, straggling wreaths upon the soil, in forlorn rankness; but now, while weaving a rich trapping for the rough oak-rind, it gains for itself a sure and undishevelled outline from the stalwart figure of the tree. How brainlessly has this deeply significant device of Beethoven been exploited by our modern instrumental-composers, with their eternal "subsidiary themes "-R. WAGNER.
(14) Whosoever may undertake to write the special history of instrumental music since Beethoven, will undoubtedly have to take account of isolated phenomena which are of such a nature as to merit a particular and close attention. He who regards the history of Art, however, from so wide-reaching a point of view as here was necessary, can only keep to its decisive moments; he must leave unconsidered whatever lies aside from these 'moments,' or is merely their derivative. But the more undeniably is great ability evinced by such detached phenomena, so much the more strikingly do they themselves prove, by the barrenness of all their art-endeavour, that in their peculiar art-province somewhat may have yet been left to discover in respect of technical treatment, but nothing in respect of the living spirit, now that that has once been spoken which Beethoven spoke through Music. In the great universal Art-work of the Future there will ever be fresh regions to discover; but not in the separate branch of art, when once the latter-as Music, by Beethoven. has already been led to universalism but yet would linger in her solitary round.-R. WAGNER.
(15) The original sentence is somewhat too forcible for English notions "nachdem er geholfen hat, drei vorangehende Instrumentalsätze so geschickt wie möglich zu Stande zu bringen." The reference is, of course, to Mendelssohn's "Lobgesang." -TR.
(16) However lengthily I have here expressed myself upon the nature of Music, in comparison with what I have said upon the other branches of Art (my reasons lying in both the highly individual character of Music and its special and eventful evolutionary course, proceeding from this individuality), yet I am well aware of the countless gaps in my recital. But it would need not one book but an entire library, to lay hare the whole unseemliness, the flabbiness and ignominy of the bonds uniting our modern music with our modern life ; to penetrate the piteous, over-sentimental idiosyncracy of our art of Tone, which makes her the object of the speculation of our educational "Folk-improvers," who would trickle drops of Music's honey upon the acid sweat of ill-used factory.hands as the only possible alleviation of their sufferings (very much as our sages of the State and Bourse are all agog to stuff their pliant patches of religion between the gaping rents of the police-officials' tender care of men); and finally to explain the mournful psychological phenomenon, that a man may be not only base and bad, but also dull-without these qualities hindering him from being a quite respectable musician.-R. WAGNER.
(17) Stabreim and Alliteration.-A fuller explanation of this form of 'rhyme' will be found in "Opera and Drama" (Part II., chap. vi. and Part III., chap. ii.), which work will form the second volume of this series of translations. Meanwhile a few words of elucidation may not be found amiss, -The English equivalent, "Alliteration," does not convey the full force of this method of versification, as may be seen at once by the oft-quoted specimen from Churchill, "with apt alliteration's artful aid," for therein one of the fundamental rules is violated in such a manner as to show how little the true principle of this 'rhyme' is now understood in England; the rule in question being, that if vowels are employed for this artifice, they must be of different sound; as in Wagner's own lines "Unheilig | acht' ich den Eid" (the stabreim being here reduplicated in the immediately following line: "der U nliebende ei nt"). The simple rule, as given in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is that this rhyme is "indifferent as to the number of syllables in a couplet; but imperative as to the number of accented syllables, of which there must be four (two in each half), the first three beginning with the same letter" (in the case of consonants), the writer adducing the lines from Piers the Ploughman: "I was weary of wandering I and went me to rest" &c. In Brockhaus' Conversations-lexikon, however, it is stated that the original rule was: that in a couplet the first half should contain one or two rhyming initials, the second only one-in each case the rhyme being borne by the strongly accented syllable; but that this rule was extended to allow of the use of two rhymes also in the second half, but never more. This authority cites a couplet from the 9th Century Saxon poem "Hêliand," which runs thus: "so l erda he tho thea L iudi | l iot hon wordon"; and adds that the word "Stabreim" is an abbreviation from "Buchstabenreim" (lit. = "spelling-rhyme"); that the first verse-half of the couplet ("Langzeile" or "Liedstäbe") was called "Stollen," the second: "Hauptstab," or principal rhyme. -a circumstance emphasised by Wagner above. In his great tetralogy, the Ring des Nibelungen, the poet-composer has made almost exclusive use of this form of versification, amplifying its rules much in the same way as he amplified those of Music, from that plastic power of genius which melts all rules into new moulds. But the great characteristic of the Stabreim proper, he has almost invariably preserved, viz.:-the marking thereby of the accented, i.e. the root word, and the commencing of the line by a strong (or 'long') syllable. As a perfect specimen may he instanced: "L achend muss ich dich lieben; | lachend will ich erblinden" (Siegfried,- last Scene) ; while a rich example of doubled and re-doubled Stabreim is found at the end of the Götterdämmerung: "N icht Gut, nicht Gold, | noch Göttliche Pracht; | nicht Haus, nicht Hof, | noch herrischer Prunk: "-These specimens, taken at ramdom from the Ring, must suffice for the present purpose.-TR.