A most strange and unclassifiable chamber in the palace of musical art is reserved for Beethoven's "Fidelio." A sort of despair is likely to come over one who attempts to state how Beethoven stands in relation to dramatic music. If one says that he was not a great dramatic composer, there arise the questions--Did he not make the Symphony a hundred times more dramatic than it ever was before? Did he not make music in association with Goethe's "Egmont" that seems to belong for evermore to that drama? Did he not individualise Leonora in music as well as Mozart had individualised the much less exalted characters of Donna Anna and Zerlina? Did he not achieve in his "Third Leonora" something that no one has ever equalled or can ever hope to equal in the domain of the dramatic overture? In fact he did all those things, and several more that can be cited in apparent refutation of the statement that he was not a great dramatic composer. And yet it is certain that he never composed dramatic music as one to the manner born--not with the unfailing adequateness to the theme of Gluck, the felicitous profusion of Mozart, the glowing picturesqueness of Weber. No; in the mighty river of Beethoven the symphonist's invention shrinks to a trickle in his one opera. The water is incomparably limpid, and blossoms of the rarest beauty and fragrance grow on the banks of the stream; but every page is stamped, as it were, with the admission that writing operas was not Beethoven's strong point: and beyond question he acted wisely in writing only one. How mighty is the change when he takes the symbols of his one musical drama and uses them for a monumental purpose, in the great "Leonora" Overture! Beethoven is Shakespearean in the range of his mind and in his attitude towards life, which he always approaches on the purely human side, and without the preoccupations of the Court, the camp, the cloister, the academic grove, or the church. But he is not Shakespearean in his medium of expression, which is hard and unyielding--a kind of musical bronze or granite. Yet "Fidelio"--despite its jejune story, which suggests that Beethoven, having objected to Mozart's "Don Giovanni" as scandalous, felt it his duty to compose an opera on a subject that should be "strictly proper," and despite its thin vein of invention--inevitably retains its hold on the musical world. To call the success of it a _succès d'estime_ would be a misuse of words. It focuses a certain range of poetic ideas that nothing else of its kind touches, and stands--with its Wordsworthian simplicity and moral goodness--among other operas like a Sister Clare amid a group of fine ladies. CHAPTER III. BERLIOZ. [Sidenote: ="Symphonie Fantastique."= _November 1, 1901._]