In 1842 Wagner finished first _Rienzi_ and then the _Dutchman_; in April of 1845, that is to say three years later, _Tannhäuser_ was complete, and in October of that year it was produced at Dresden. Its success or non-success with the public and those strange animals the critics does not greatly concern us to-day. Wagner's own account of the proceedings is not very trustworthy. The opera was cut and doctored to suit the singers--notably Tichatscheck; the first performance seems to have missed fire, and at the second the house was empty; at the third it was full; and, but for the intrigues of some of the musicians and scribblers, and the insanity of the management, it appears probable--one has a right to use so moderate a word--that before long it might have won in Dresden the success it presently won throughout Europe. That, I say, is not a matter for the twentieth century to worry about; but the twentieth century is bound to marvel over the obtuseness of the middle nineteenth in not recognizing the advent of the greatest power that had yet meddled with high and serious opera. (I do not mean that Wagner's was a greater musical power than Mozart's and Beethoven's. But Mozart never had a libretto to compare with Wagner's; and _Fidelio_, though serious enough in all conscience, is not an opera at all.) In three years, 1842-45, the growth of Wagner's strength was astounding, incredible. One sees at once how the old stage devices have departed from the libretto, and with them the fragmentary and jerky style of music; the intermittent inspiration of the _Dutchman_ is replaced by an unchecked torrent of inspired music. All the little suggestions of Bellini and Donizetti are clean gone; the amorphous melody of the _Dutchman_ is gone, or metamorphosed by being charged with energy, colour and meaning; every phrase has character, and communicates a very definite shade of feeling; in every phrase we feel how intense has been the inner thought and emotion, and with what terrible directness these are communicated to us. I say terrible directness because it is in _Tannhäuser_ that we first find the godlike Wagner hurling his thunderbolts. It was Spohr who spoke of the godlike or titanic energy of the music, and this energy finds expression, not as it did in _Rienzi_, in noisy orchestration, big ensembles and thumping rhythms, but, in a far greater degree than in the _Dutchman_, in the stuff of the music itself. We find no more lumpish harmonies and basses of leaden immovability: the basses stalk about with arrogant independence, and the harmonic progressions, even when most daring and perilous, are superbly poised. The old awkwardnesses, due to the endeavour to copy and to be original at the same time, have disappeared. Wagner wrote _Tannhäuser_ entirely to express and to please himself: he had given up the notion of being original; he was bent only on being himself.