Great music is always sad, because it tells us of the perfect; and such is the difference between what we are and that which music suggests, that even in the vase of joy we find some tears.
The music of Wagner has color, and when I hear the violins, the morning seems to slowly come. A horn puts a star above the horizon. The night, in the purple hum of the bass, wanders away like some enormous bee across wide fields of dead clover. The light grows whiter as the violins increase. Colors come from other instruments, and then the full orchestra floods the world with day.
Wagner seems not only to have given us new tones, new combinations, but the moment the orchestra begins to play his music, all the instruments are transfigured. They seem to utter the sounds that they have been longing to utter. The horns run riot; the drums and cymbals join in the general joy; the old bass viols are alive with passion; the 'cellos throb with love; the violins are seized with a divine fury, and the notes rush out as eager for the air as pardoned prisoners for the roads and fields.
The music of Wagner is filled with landscapes. There are some strains, like midnight, thick with constellations, and there are harmonies like islands in the far seas, and others like palms on the desert's edge. His music satisfies the heart and brain. It is not only for memory; not only for the present, but for prophecy.
Wagner was a sculptor, a painter in sound. When he died, the greatest fountain of melody that ever enchanted the world, ceased. His music will instruct and refine forever.
All that I know about the operas of Wagner I have learned from Anton Seidl. I believe that he is the noblest, tenderest and most artistic interpreter of the great composer that has ever lived.
SIR HENRY IRVING
LOOKING FORWARD
[Speech of Henry Irving[10] at a banquet given in his honor, London, July 4, 1883, in view of his impending departure for a professional tour of America. The Lord Chief Justice of England, John Duke Coleridge, occupied the chair.]