He was not satisfied, we are told, with either the melody of the
Italians or the rhetorical excesses of the French. The music of
Beethoven was his ideal, and the dramas of Shakespeare, whose work, to
his mind, compared with the early Greek plays, was like a scene in
nature in comparison with a piece of architecture. Mme. de Stael
called beautiful architecture "frozen music." It was just this
architectural, frozen, congealed condition that Wagner wished to
overcome, without running into any frivolities. He was in every sense
a living, breathing _man_, and his work is pervaded by this virile,
life-like quality. In his first youthful attempt at drama, forty-two
persons perished in the development of the plot and most of them had
to be brought back as ghosts to enable him to complete the piece. Now,
however, one is haunted by the faithfulness to life of his creations,
not by the ghosts of his slaughtered victims, and an aspiring young
composer who adored him could not help imbibing some of his power.
Wagner thought that the musician should write his own lines in opera
or song, and conceived and mastered a new form, taking poetry into
music just as Sidney Lanier took music into poetry in his "Science of
English Verse.
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