Wagner left a large number of pamphlets and treatises, which are likely to remain among the classics of musical literature. The most important is his "Opera and Drama," written in 1851. This is a full discussion, in singularly vigorous and clear language, of the entire nature of opera as poetically conceived and as practically carried out by the previous masters, and as proposed to be carried out by Wagner himself. Many of Wagner's writings have now been translated into English. His opera texts are highly esteemed by his admirers, and respected by all. As a poet the general opinion seems to be that he was given to magnificent phraseology rather than to delicacy of fancy or humor. He is most at home with the grand, the gigantic, the superhuman; and in nearly all that he writes the primeval undertone of the minor makes itself felt. It is entirely uncertain whether opera will continue to follow the lines he laid down, with the same severity, but there can be no question that his influence upon the course of art will be very great. In musical discourse, especially in the harmonic side of it, Wagner has made very great variations from the practices of his predecessors, even the most free of the instrumental writers--Schumann. His modulations are carried into more remote keys, and the tempered scale is taken as a finality of our tonal system. All the keys are brought near, as he treats them, and in any key any chord whatever can be introduced without effecting a modulation, provided it be so managed that the sense of tonality is not unsettled. Personally Wagner was rather small, very fastidious in his attire and surroundings. In 1869 Mme. Cosima, daughter of Liszt, and wife of Von Buelow, left him and became the wife of Wagner. During the last ten years of his life they had an elegant residence at Bayreuth, where Mme. Wagner still has her home. Wagner died in Venice, whither he had gone for the mild climate. No musician in the entire history of art has occupied the attention of the whole contemporaneous world to anything like the same degree as did Richard Wagner, from the performance of "_Lohengrin_," in 1850, until his death in 1883. CHAPTER XXXV. VIRTUOSITY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY; PAGANINI; BERLIOZ; CHOPIN; LISZT. I. Strictly speaking, there was no break in the continuity of art development represented in the virtuoso appearances recorded in Chapter XXX, and those with which we have presently to deal. In point of chronology, many of those recorded in the present chapter were contemporaneous with some of those in the former. Nevertheless, the artists with whom we are now concerned represent principles more decidedly belonging to the romantic, and hence to the nineteenth century, than did those whose operations have already been discussed as part of the record of the eighteenth. This is seen in the quality and the novelty of their playing, and still more in the influence which they exercised upon the musicians who came after.