In the average French or Italian opera, or in the singspiels, all that matters is a number of songs, ballads or arias--call them what you will--entirely disconnected and quite destructive to the continuity that must be the essence of every drama. This continuity is an absolute necessity to every spoken play; imagine the effect if Shakespeare or Ibsen had written little pieces of rhyming verse joined up by any jumble of nonsensical prose! Neglect of this fact led every opera composer before Wagner astray. We can imagine a pre-Wagner composer telling his librettist, "Now, mind you arrange that in certain parts the words will allow me to put in arias or choruses." In short, the situation was summed up in Wagner's famous phrase, "The means of expression (music) has been made the end, while the end of expression (the drama) has been made the means." Now this state of affairs is clearly wrong. If there is no dramatic idea kept as end to work to, then what is the use of writing opera at all? Why not be content with song-cycles or ballads, or lieder like Brahms's and Schumann's? There are no divisions into aria and recitative in Wagner's operas, but dramatic continuity is retained by the voices of the characters singing music the succession of whose notes is determined by the emotional requirements of the moment. Meanwhile, the orchestra forms a sort of musical background by giving forth music which exactly suits the dramatic situation. The orchestra, in a word, as Wagner himself said of _Tristan und Isolde_, forms an emotional tide on which the voice floats like a boat on the waters. The essential relevance of the music to the dramatic situation is obtained, as a rule, by means of what are known as "leading motives." These form the basis of all Wagner's reforms. A leading motive is simply a musical phrase suggestive of a dramatic idea. Wagner's motives are marvellous in their descriptive and soul-stirring power. They seem to indicate not only the pith, but the utmost depths of the heart of the ideas which they represent. It is this that makes Wagner so very like Shakespeare. All can appreciate him, yet he is above all criticism, universal in his appeal.