A study of Wagner

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ...would be improper, the Italians have invented that species of singing termed by them simple recitative. Its name almost sufficiently explains its nature: it is a succession of notes so arranged as to coincide with the laws of harmony, though never accompanied but by a single instrument, whose office is merely to support the voice, and to direct it in its modulations. Though, for the sake of this accompaniment, recitative is, like other music, divided into bars, yet are not these bars, as in other music, necessarily of equal lengths; the notes of which they are composed being subjected to no precise musical measure, but regulated, in this respect, almost wholly by the natural prosody of the language. Thus this kind of recitative answers completely its end, and it detains the audience very little longer than the spoken recital would do; and, being music itself, the transition from it to the higher and more interesting parts is perfectly natural and agreeable to the ear."2 1 The " My Lord " to whom the Letters are addressed is, I should say from internal evidence, Lord Monboddo. They are in the most approved polite style of the eighteenth century. Mr. John Brown might have been the subject of the classic story of the lecturer on chemistry who is reported to have said, "The gases will now have the honour of combining before your Royal Highness." Further--"The Italians have observed that all those passages in which the mind of the speaker is agitated by a rapid succession of various emotions are, from their nature, incompatible with any particular strain or length of melody; for that which constitutes such particular strain is the relation of several parts to one whole.... But while the Italians conceived such passages to be incompatible with that...