raged round the 'Nuove Musiche'; at the end of the seventeenth round Lully; in the latter part of the eighteenth round Gluck; in the latter part of the nineteenth round Wagner. On each occasion the ground of controversy was in all essentials the same. A past tradition had hardened until it was merely an obstruction and a hindrance; a reformer arose to clear it from the path and to vindicate for art the utmost freedom to proclaim what it would. The very terms of recrimination repeat themselves. Your old music,' says the attacking force, 'is so stereotyped that it has no longer any significance; it may give pleasure to the ear but it says nothing to the soul.' Your new music,' say the defenders, 'is mere violence and anarchy; it may express passions which, perhaps, were better left unexpressed, but it is false to the principles and ideals of its own cause.' Monteverde, Lully, Gluck, were assailed with the same charges of ugliness and bad musicianship which, thirty years ago, were brought against Wagner; they responded by building up a scheme of dramatic music upon which, for our own generation, Wagner has laid the coping-stone. It is necessary to state this fact at the outset, because criticism, which in every age believes that its verdict is not only final but original, has too readily assumed that the real problem began with the publication of Oper und Drama,' and with the composition of The Ring.' Even Wagner himself, it may be said with deference, does insufficient justice to Gluck, and almost ignores the important part played by Lully. That he should do so is entirely natural. He was preoccupied with his own statement of the question; and of necessity the terms in which he stated it were different from those employed by his predecessors. He was in the thick of the arena, and may well have gazed more keenly on opponents than on allies. But now that the battle is over and the smoke has rolled away, it is possible to look back dispassionately on the whole course of events, to trace the ancestry of the Bayreuth idea, and, what is more important, to estimate in some measure its influence on the subsequent course of the musical drama. Tolstoy, that uncompromising preacher of artistic truth, once declared that the musical drama was an untenable convention, and illustrated this doctrine with a very unsympathetic description of 'Siegfried.' If we grant his premise, the conclusion is unanswerable. Assume that the drama is the direct representation of humanity, the mirror held up to nature, the faithful reflection of life which, if seen through a temperament, is nevertheless seen as it is, then it would seem to follow that a play in which music is the medium of the dialogue must of necessity be untrue. The drama which Plato feared for his Guardians, and would have feared still more if he could have foreseen 'The Powers of Darkness,' consists wholly of imitation; in modern terms it gives us human speech and action as we might expect to find them outside the theatre. In Hedda Gabler' and 'Die Weber,' in 'Strife' and 'Justice,' we are moved by the fidelity with which the dramatist sets living men and women upon the stage; the illusion (if we can call it an illusion) would be shattered by the ordered phraseology of music. But to take this as the type and pattern of dramatic truth is to prove far too much. It would rule out 'Faust,' for men do not speak in rhyme, and 'Othello,' for they do not speak in blank verse; it would close the doors of the theatre on almost all its greatest masterpieces. Let us examine the assumption from which this conclusion proceeds. The origin of our drama is to be found in religious service. The Doric word, from which its name is derived, has a definitely ritual meaning; the earliest examples were choric songs and dances with a single episode, in which the poet, who was also the chorusleader, improvised before the audience a story in honour of the god. These episodes were probably accompanied by mimetic or sympathetic gestures on the part of the chorus; they were wholly rhythmic in form; they were almost certainly in that heightened 'poetic' tone of which recitative and aria parlante are our modern equivalents. In course of time the episodes became more numerous, and so led to a rude dialogue between leader and chorus; then, as a later development, came the gradual introduction of actors and of scenic representation. And, long after these had become familiar, the ritual conception remained paramount. The plays were given at the Dionysiac Festival; the subjects were taken from the mythology of gods and heroes; the altar stood at the centre of the orchestra; more than half the principal seats were reserved for the priests. To this corresponded the whole character of the earlier Greek Tragedy. Eschylus, as Prof. Murray says, carried his theme on a great wave of religious emotion; the characters are of more than human stature; the style and phraseology are raised above the level of common speech. To an audience that felt these stories as an essential part of its religion the whole effect must have been comparable to that produced by the Christian Passion-play at Ober-Ammergau or the Mahominedan at Teheran. When we remember that in all countries music exercises a potent influence on religious emotion, there is little wonder that the very texture and fibre of Eschylean tragedy should have been saturated with it. The musical drama in short is not a perversion, not even an extension, of the dramatic idea, but the pure essence of its original form. With Euripides there comes a change of aim which may very roughly be compared with the distinction between music-drama and opera. Whether we regard him as a rationalist or as 'the one religious man in an irreligious age and both views have been maintainedthere can be no doubt that he humanised tragedy, and that in so doing he considerably modified the orthodox idea of his time. Contrast, for example, the three great presentations of Elektra ' in Greek Tragedy. In Eschylus the human motive is almost ignored; in Euripides it animates the whole play and sets the entire tone of its most dramatic scene. In Sophocles the counsel of the gods is not to be challenged; Euripides not only challenges but condemns-his Orestes obeys the divine voice and is punished with all the bitterness of remorse. Hence in Euripides we are no longer sustained by the feeling of ever-present Godhead working out a divine purpose which we can neither judge nor comprehend; that solace is denied us, and we are left face to face with the naked issues of human sin and human suffering. For this reason his tragedy would often be unendurably poignant-it is so, for instance, in The Trojan Women'— A few on 'historical' themes. But the only one of these which has survived-the 'Persæ '-is a sort of Triumphlied or Te Deum after victory, unless he had alleviated it by passages of sheer music, points of repose in which we gain a momentary respite from such pity and such terror. So we have the Euripidean choruses-the 'interpolations,' as Aristotle calls them-which carry us far away from the stage, which sing to us the song of Cyprus or the song of the western seas, which bathe our souls in pure melody, and send us back to the scene quieted and refreshed. Music, in short, is here used not to intensify the dramatic note but to relax it; and from this usage important consequences were to follow. Greek Comedy sat looser to the religious conception, for its purpose was largely a satiric portraiture of current life and current events. But Aristophanes always makes his appeal to patriotism, which at Athens was a second religion, and in more than one play shows himself fully conscious of his religious surroundings. The very licence of the Frogs' is, so to speak, under ecclesiastical sanction; it is the direct ancestor of the Messe de l'Âne' and the Fête des Fous'; and amid all its audacious burlesque this comedy contains two of the most beautiful hymns in the Greek language. Further, as Greek Comedy departs from ritual observance it becomes less musical: in the Plutus' the chorus is no more than a stage crowd; it is absent from the recovered scenes of Menander. . When, after the dark centuries, drama revived again in western Europe, it passed through very much the same stages of evolution. No doubt there were two convergent streams-that of the folk-drama with its mumming play, its May game and its morris dance; and that of the liturgical drama with the story of the Nativity for Christmas, the Quem quæritis' for Easter, and the cycle of mystery plays for Corpus Christi. But, though divergent, they both alike sprang from religious origins: the one from some primitive memory of natureworship, the other so directly from the ritual of the Church that historians are unable to date the point of transition; and both were for the most part essentially musical in character. The dances had their rude accompaniment, the choral songs their rude melody; the ecclesiastical chant, already at a high pitch of organisation, announced the sacred message in melodic phrase and celebrated it with hymn and canticle. From the former of these sprang the Maggi or May songs of the Tuscan peasants, which are at least as old as the fourteenth century. From the latter came, in direct succession, the Sacre Rappresentazioni and their kindred forms, which, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, appeared in Florence, in Mantua and in other Italian cities. The musical importance of these is discussed in an admirable essay by M. Romain Rolland,* and in the very interesting volume recently published by Mr W. J. Henderson. They deserve, indeed, some special consideration, for they anticipate by nearly two hundred years the music-drama which we usually associate with the name of Monteverde. They were given on great festivals after Vespers. The scene was one of the Florentine churches-notably San Felice in Piazza-and was embellished with every form of decoration and stage device that the best artists and mechanicians could invent. Here is the description of a scene by Brunelleschi † : 'Dans la voûte de l'église, un ciel, plein de figures vivantes, tournait; une infinité de lumières luisaient et scintillaient. Douze petits angelots, ailés, aux cheveux d'or, se prenaient par la main, et dansaient, suspendus. Au-dessus de leurs têtes trois guirlandes de lumières, d'en bas, paraissaient des étoiles. On eût dit qu'ils marchaient sur des nuages. Huit enfants groupés autour d'un socle lumineux descendirent ensuite de la voûte. Sur le socle était debout un petit ange d'une quinzaine d'années, solidement attaché par un mécanisme de fer invisible et assez souple pour lui laisser la liberté de ses mouvements. La machine une fois descendue sur la scène, l'ange alla saluer la Vierge et fit l'Annonciation. Puis il remonta au ciel, au milieu de ses compagnons qui chantaient, tandis que les anges du ciel dansaient dans l'air une ronde.' The stories were taken from Holy Writ, or (occasionally) from the lives of saints, and were represented by dramatic action and by dialogues and speeches which, it would appear, were sometimes recited and sometimes sung. To quote again from M. Rolland: 'Certaines parties de la pièce, d'un caractère traditionnelPrologues (Annunziazioni), Epilogues (Licenzi), prières, etc. * L'Opéra avant l'Opéra,' in 'Musiciens d'Autrefois,' |