trombones, kettle-drums, etc., each family forming a quartette in
itself, and each having its own peculiar emotional quality. In
conducting an opera the Kapellmeister has to keep his eye and ear at
the same time on each of these groups, as well as on the vocal parts
and scenic effects. If this requires a talent rarely found among
musicians, how very much greater must be the mind which created this
complicated operatic score! No one who tries to realize what this
implies, and remembers that Wagner wrote several of his best music
dramas among the mountains of Switzerland, years before he could dream
of ever hearing the countless new harmonies and orchestral tone-colors
which he had discovered, can deny, I think, that I was right in
maintaining that the composing of an opera is the most wonderful
achievement of human genius.




III

SCHUMANN

AS MIRRORED IN HIS LETTERS


Clara Schumann, the most gifted woman that has ever chosen music as a
profession, and who, at the age of sixty-nine, still continues to be
among the most fascinating of pianists, placed the musical world under
additional obligations when she issued three years ago the collection
of private letters, written by Schumann between the ages of eighteen
and thirty (1827-40), partly to her, partly to his mother, and other