wonderfully hewn for himself in the virgin jungle of modern art, and
begged to resist the temptations of the music-drama.

Rentgen loathed the music of Wagner. Wagner had abused Meyerbeer for
doing what he did himself--writing operas stuffed with spectacular
effects. This man of the foot-lights destroyed all musical imagination
with his puppet shows, magic lanterns, Turkish bazaars, where, to the
booming of mystic bells, the listener was drugged into opium-fed
visions.

Under a tent, as at a fair, he assembled the mangled masterpieces of
Bach, Gluck, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and to a
gullible public sold the songs of these music-lords--songs that should
swim on high like great swan-clouds cleaving skies blue and
inaccessible. And his music was operatic, after all, grand opera
saccharine with commonplace melodies gorgeously attired--nothing more.
Wagner, declared the indignant critic, was not original. He popularized
the noble ideas of the masters, vulgarized and debased their dreams. He
never conceived a single new melody, but substituted instead, sadly
mauled and pinched thematic fragments of Liszt, Berlioz, and Beethoven,
combined with exaggerated fairy-tales, clothed in showy tinsel and
theatrical gauds, the illusion being aided by panoramic scenery; scenery
that acted in company with toads, dragons, horses, snakes, crazy
valkyrs, mermaids, half-mad humans, gods, demons, dwarfs, and giants.
What else is all this but old-fashioned Italian opera with a new name?
What else but an inartistic mixture of Scribe libretto and Northern
mythology? Music-drama--fudge! Making music that one can _see_ is a
death-blow to a lofty idealization of the art.

Puzzled by the richness of Rentgen's vocabulary, by his want of logic,