The works of the first half of Wagner’s life were operas in the strict sense of the word. That they differed from all existing operas is certain, but that was no more than would be expected from their genesis and their author. So do Rossini’s operas differ from Mozart’s,—the whole Italian school from the German. _Die Feen_ and _Das Liebesverbot_, founded on Shakespeare’s _Measure for Measure_; _Rienzi_ and _The Flying Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ (surely the most entrancing of all romantic operas), _Siegfried’s Death_, can have no other title; and—apart from _Barbarossa_, which had no claim to it—they make up the sum of the theatrical work executed before 1848. Wagner, writing for the stage, found the model in existence and adopted it. Even the strictest of his disciples admit this. Indeed how can they deny what he himself asserted? Those were hard times. But music which had come at the Poet’s call furnished him a scanty means of life as Kapellmeister. Then came 1848 and banishment, days of still greater stress and need, and misery indescribable, when only the dreariest drudgery of a music-seller’s hack kept body and soul together. Yet those were the days when he threw off the last shackles of conventionality and gave to the world the newly born idea of the Tone-Drama. That was the time when he first found himself and opened the wings of his mighty genius, soaring into regions which no man before him had dared or indeed been able to attempt. The unsuitability to music of his _Barbarossa_ had opened out a new conviction in the Tone-Poet’s mind. Music and poetry must go hand in hand; the idea of writing music to another man’s verse—that is to say, to command—was intolerable to him; but that the union should be happy the subject must be fitting; it must be “the purely human freed from all conventionality.” Again: “When I with full consciousness and of my own free will gave up Frederick [Barbarossa], I had entered upon a new and decisive period of my development as artist and as man, the period when my conscious artistic will set out upon an entirely new path made with unconscious necessity, a path upon which I am now starting as artist and man to meet a new world.” Upon this his greatest critic says: “The works which followed, created upon this foundation and freed from the Ghost of Opera, reveal this _new world_.” Wagner recognizes the dual nature of man. There is the outer man and the inner man. The perfect drama appeals to both. But music is the language of the inner man, which has for its special duty the expression of feelings and sensibilities—indeed, it can represent nothing else.