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The working out of the ideas is really very ingenious, and despite the imitations the movement goes far to demonstrate the possession of high gifts by the young composer. The last movement, allegro molto vivace, is the least pleasing to the average hearer, but it is an amazing exhibition of contrapuntal mastery in one so immature. The principal theme is this:
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Here the model in thought is Mozart, and the same master is followed in the working out. Wagner, in later years, speaking of the boy who wrote this symphony, said: "He cares no more for melodies, only for themes and their treatment; he delights in the stretti of the fugue, in the combination of two or three motives; he enters into orgies of counterpoint; he exhausts every imaginable artifice." This is a sufficient description of this new "Jupiter" movement, which ends with a stirring peroration, presto, closing with as many chords of the tonic and dominant as there are at the finish of the fifth symphony of Beethoven.
[APPENDIX B]
WAGNER AND THE BALLET
The difficulties which have always stood in the path of a realisation of Wagner's ideals in regard to the ballet in opera are worthy of some consideration, because they are the results of a high conception of the functions of the dance in the drama. Wagner's troubles in this department began with his "Rienzi." In his "Communication" he says: "I by no means hunted about in my material for a pretext for a ballet, but with the eyes of the opera composer I perceived in it a self-evident festival that Rienzi must give to the people, and at which he would have to exhibit to them in dumb show a drastic scene from their ancient history, this scene being the story of Lucretia and the consequent expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome." He confesses in a note that this ballet had to be omitted from all the stage performances of "Rienzi."
Why? Simply because the pantomimic ballet called for imagination on the part of the ballet-master and mimetic skill in the dancers. If these elements in the ballet were wanting in Wagner's day, they are almost wholly absent now. Yet, except in cases where the ballet is seen by the spectator to be a mere entertainment for the personages on the stage, as in the garden scene of "Les Huguenots," it ought to have some connection with the drama. That later composers than Wagner have had some desires of this sort is proved by the presence of the Brocken scene in Boïto's "Mefistofele," the inferno scene in Franchetti's "Asrael," and other such episodes. But nowhere is there such an opportunity for a highly significant ballet as in the first scene of "Tannhäuser."