where no dissonances can possibly exist_!” When Bernard Shaw published “The Perfect Wagnerite” he wrote for a public which still considered Wagner a little in advance of the contemporary in music. What did he say? “My second encouragement is addressed to modest citizens who may suppose themselves to be disqualified from enjoying _The Ring_ by their technical ignorance of music. They may dismiss all such misgivings speedily and confidently. If the sound of music has any power to move them they will find that Wagner exacts nothing further. There is not a single bar of ‘classical music’ in _The Ring_--not a note in it that has any other point than the single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama. In classical music there are, as the analytical programmes tell us, first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias, recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are passacaglias on ground basses, canons and hypodiapente, and other ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like. And this is why he is so easy for the natural musician who has had no academic teaching. The professors, when Wagner’s music is played to them, exclaim at once, ‘What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no cabeletta to it--not even a full close? Why was that discord not prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he indulge in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key that has not one note in common with the key he has just left? Listen to those false relations. What does he want with six drums and eight horns when Mozart worked miracles with two of each? The man is no musician.’ The layman neither knows nor cares about any of these things. It is the adept musician of the old school who has everything to unlearn; and I leave him, unpitied, to his fate.” All Wagner asked his contemporaries to do, in fact, was to forget all they knew about opera! VI