“The plastic unity and simplicity of the mythical subjects allowed of the concentration of the action on certain important and decisive points, and thus enabled me to rest on fewer scenes with a perseverance sufficient to expound the motive to its ultimate dramatic consequences. The nature of the subject, therefore, could not induce me, in sketching my scenes, to consider in advance their adaptability to any particular musical form, the kind of musical treatment being in each case necessitated by these scenes themselves. It could, therefore, not enter my mind to engraft on this my musical form, growing, as it did, out of the nature of the scenes, the traditional forms of operatic music, which could not but have marred and interrupted its organic development. I therefore never thought of contemplating on principle and as a deliberate reformer the destruction of the aria, duet, and other operatic forms; but the dropping of those forms followed consistently from the nature of my subjects.”[12] [Illustration: RICHARD WAGNER. From a photograph from life taken in Vienna about 1875 by Fr. Luckhardt. ] He found the germs of his future musical system in the ballad of Senta. In this the legend of the unhappy Hollander is told, and in its musical investiture Wagner invented two melodic themes with distinct purposes. The first was intended to illustrate the personality of the Dutchman as an embodiment of yearning for rest. The second was designed to represent the redeeming principle, the _ewig weibliche_, the eternal womanhood, which became the ruling ethical feature of all Wagner’s lyric works. Here are the two themes:— [Illustration: [Music]] [Illustration: [Music]] These two themes being designed to represent certain ideas, it was inevitable that the composer should use them whenever those ideas recurred. As he tells us himself in the essay quoted above:— “I had merely to develop, according to their respective tendencies, the various thematic germs comprised in the ballad, to have, as a matter of course, the principal mental moods in definite thematic shapes before me. When a mental mood returned, its thematic expression also, as a matter of course, was repeated, since it would have been arbitrary and capricious to have sought another _motive_ so long as the object was an intelligible representation of the subject, and not a conglomeration of operatic pieces.”