=The Flying Dutchman. Change of Style=.—_The Flying Dutchman_, however, showed Wagner in an entirely different light. With it, instead of receiving his inspiration from without, as had been the case with the preceding operas, it came from within. On his way to Paris he had made a stormy voyage of several weeks from a port on the Baltic to London. He was familiar with the myth of the Flying Dutchman, and found that the sailors on board his ship believed it implicitly. This in connection with Heine’s version of the legend, which represents the unhappy mariner as doomed to perpetual wandering on stormy seas until he finds a woman faithful unto death, made a strong impression on him, and while in Paris he wrote the poem and composed the music within seven weeks after finishing _Rienzi_. A more sudden metamorphosis of style is unknown in the history of music. The earlier work was an opera pure and simple, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, characterized by pomp, brilliancy, sonority. Its successor was conceived as a drama in which music served to emphasize the action and to intensify the emotional situations; instead of being master, it was servant; external effects were disregarded save only as they were in harmony with this conception. Not that the composer entirely achieved this ideal; _The Flying Dutchman_ displays not a few lapses into operatic conventionalities, but as a whole it was a startling and radical change which puzzled and displeased the public. They had looked for something in the style of _Rienzi_ and could make nothing of a work so contrary to the popular idea of what an opera should be. Accordingly, after a few performances, it was dropped from the repertory. =Tannhäuser=.—Nothing daunted by the lack of favor shown his change of style, Wagner carried it to a still greater extent in his next opera, _Tannhäuser_ (1845), founded on a medieval legend. The dramatic motive of this is much the same as that of _The Flying Dutchman_, one of which Wagner was particularly fond—the power of love to redeem and save from the consequences of sin and error. _Tannhäuser_ brought about his head the full storm of hostile criticism which with _The Flying Dutchman_ had only begun to lower. He was reproached for its difficulty, for its lack of pleasing melodies, for the audacious harmonies which many critics considered inexcusable dissonances. Singers objected to the broad declamation it required; they complained that it would eventually ruin their voices.