advantage; it can be trimmed to suit the local exigencies of
performance. With the new drama this was impossible. Wagner's
insistent refusal to permit any mutilation of his work always appeared
to Intendants and Impresarii who were anxious to meet him halfway like
monstrous egotism. What Rossini and Meyerbeer had always consented to
without the smallest hesitation might, they thought, content a Richard
Wagner. The reports of the Intendants to their respective Governments,
of Luettichau in the forties, of Royer in Paris in 1861, show how far
the authorities were from understanding the nature either of the work
which they were undertaking or of the man with whom they had to deal.
Rossini and Meyerbeer had never had any other aim than their own
personal success; with Wagner the integrity of his art was far above
all personal considerations. On this point no concession on the
composer's side was possible. You may take five shillings out of a
sovereign and there still remain fifteen shillings, but if you take a
wheel from a watch the whole mechanism is destroyed; it was just this
that distinguished his productions from operas, and in conceding the
principle that they might be trimmed he would have surrendered
everything.

It might seem superfluous to have dwelt so long upon a point which,
when clearly laid out, can scarcely be controverted, were it not that
it has been continually misunderstood, not only by nearly everybody at
the present day, but even by critics of the rank of Gluck, Goethe, and
Grillparzer. To speak either of music as enforcing the words or of the
words as forming a basis for musical expression is to place one of
them--in the former case music, in the latter the words--in an
inferior position towards the other, whereas they are organic parts of
the whole, and co-equals. Wherever either principle is adopted it will
result in that very looseness of construction which is the vital