But to make the actors sing without cessation would fatigue both them and the audience; and, moreover, it would be untrue to nature, since men and women do not frame every thought and emotion in words. Hence Wagner conceived the idea of allotting the voicing of the ceaseless melody to the orchestra, while the personages of the drama should utter their words in a form of lyric recitative based on the broader principles of Peri, as expressed in his preface to “Eurydice,” but freed from acquired conventions and modified according to the promptings of Wagner’s own musical genius. Naturally, then, the question arose in the composer’s mind, “What form is my melody to have?” For he knew as well as Schumann did that music demands first of all things form. Now, the basis of musical form is the repetition of melodic phrases. There is no form, and therefore no coherence, no sense, in music consisting of disjointed phrases, each of which is heard once and never again. Yet to repeat them in any of the old-fashioned ways would have been to load himself down with some one of the set forms which he was trying to escape. Consequently this formidable problem was before him: How was he to make his endless melody intelligible to the auditor, to give it a palpable significance, to convey through it to the hearer the emotional moods of his personages, and yet impose upon it musical form, based upon repetition, but free from the artificiality of the older formulas? He found the solution in the suggestion which had come to him when he invented the two principal themes of Senta’s ballad in “The Flying Dutchman.” The solution of the problem was the perfection of this system of representative themes, each designed to stand for a particular person, thought, mood, or action, and to be repeated by the orchestra or vocalist whenever its subject had significance, though not necessarily presence, in the scene before the audience.