In all ages, and in every domain of art, the artist has at times been tempted to display his mastery over his material by defying it while using it. In the history of sculpture came a period when, irritated by the heaviness of stone, sculptors endeavoured to compel it to express lightness and airiness; or else, like the mannerists of the rococo period, imitated the art of the painter. In like manner the Romanticists would fain have language regarded only as a thing akin to music; their endeavour is to use words more for their sound than their meaning. They tried to make word-music, much as the prose authors of our own day try, with more or less success, to make word-pictures. It is not difficult to see what led to this particular crotchet. Their antipathy to purpose, their devotion to irony, naturally induced the desire not to be bound by, not to be responsible for, their words. They use them ironically, in such a manner that they can retract them. They will not have them standing solidly before them, indicating an aim, a purpose. Just as, by conceiving of liberty as licence, they succeeded in returning to a point where it was possible for them to do this, or to do that, as the fancy took them, so they succeeded, by conceiving of language simply as sound, in making it the vehicle of emotion without tendency, that is, without relation to life and action. They did not really escape tendency; that is an impossibility; but, as theirs was not the tendency upwards and onwards, they gravitated downwards and backwards. And, since they were perpetually compelling words to declare themselves incompetent and to abdicate in favour of music, it was only natural that the musical composers also, influenced by the spirit of the times, should endeavour to express the Romantic ideal in their art, with those means to which the poets in their impotence had constantly attempted to recur. Tieck's dramatised fairy-tales, of which _Bluebeard_ may be taken as a specimen, have a great resemblance to opera libretti. The fantastic, legend-like productions of the Romanticists are, indeed, precisely the sort of thing demanded by opera. There would have been a future for Tieck as a writer of opera libretti. As a matter of fact, he only wrote one, and that one was never set to music. The theories of Romanticism nevertheless found due expression in music. E. T. A. Hoffmann represents the transition from Romantic authorship to Romantic musical composition. As an operatic composer, he is not only the musical interpreter of Calderon, the poet of past days most admired by the Romanticists, but also collaborates fraternally with contemporary Romanticists. He writes music for Brentano's _Die lustige Musikanten_ and Zacharias Werner's _Das Kreuz an der Ostsee_, and bases an excellent three-act opera on Fouqué's _Undine_.