Too much ridicule has been expended on those who, in the days when the works of Wagner were new to the world, declared them impossible of performance. After witnessing one complete series of the dramas forming the programme of this year's festival I am profoundly impressed by the newness of the art that has been worked out, mainly in this place, under stress of Wagner's peculiar requirements. The stage manager and the singing actor, no less than the orchestral player and the conductor, have been compelled to acquire a new technique. It is even possible to state approximately the order in which the special kinds of technique required by Wagner were developed. Of course the instrumental came first, for without it there could have been no attempt to bring the new art before the world. Here the most important influence, in addition to the composer's own, was that of Liszt, Bülow, and Richter--the original stalwarts of the Wagnerian school. Next arose a new race of dramatic singers, of whom Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Niemann, and Materna were early examples; and the key to the enigma of the music was found. But Wagner's art is complex. Including, as it does, all the elements of the tragedy, which Aristotle describes as having music for one of its parts, together with modern scenic presentation, it is indeed somewhat more complex than any other known art, and that is why it has taken so long to master the technique of it. To the civilised world of no more than twenty-five years ago it was still inconceivable that both the drama and the music in one work could be important. A play with a little incidental music was a familiar thing, and so was an opera with a conventional dramatic framework having as its only purpose the advantageous display of musical embroideries. But a dramatic work with music as an integral part lay outside the range of all that was then believed to be possible, and long after the new race of dramatic singers had arisen the peculiar problems of _mise-en-scène_ and stage management which Wagnerian drama presents were left quite unsolved. However, no such battle had to be fought over the stage presentation as had been fought over the music. There was the Bayreuth theatre, with plenty of time and, latterly, plenty of money to work out the scenic and mechanical problems; and very slowly they were worked out. The improvement since 1896, when I last saw the "Ring" here, is enormous, and from the mighty trilogy as now presented that old sense of awkward, cumbrous, and unmanageable material has to a great extent disappeared--not, indeed, to the same extent in all the four parts (prologue and three-fold drama). The change and improvement is most startling in "Rheingold," which, with all its mythological and thaumaturgical paraphernalia, used to be thought peculiarly clumsy and full of bad quarters of an hour, despite the genius that scintillated here and there. Now that the staging has been perfected, it no longer