[Gutenberg 63163] • Studies in the Wagnerian Drama

"MR. KREHBIEL is a critic whose honest, painstaking work it is impossible not to respect. He has read much that relates to the subject of this book, for there is evidence that Mr. Krehbiel has made extensive studies in the very wide field of German Wagner literature.... His work is a mirror in which (very pleasantly, however) the work of many foreign thinkers on the Wagnerian music-drama is reflected. One of these thinkers-the chief one, to the mind of the writer of this review-was Wagner himself. Like Wagner, Mr. Krehbiel goes back, in tracing the origin of the music-drama, to the Greek theater, and also to the music drama of the Florentine reformers of the seventeenth century, who had the same theory as Wagner - that music should faithfully reproduce the spirit of the words to which it is written. Whoever is interested in this highly important phase of musical development will find it very ably treated in Rockstro's article on the Opera, in "Grove's Dictionary."

"Mr. Krehbiel's general discussion of leading motives, or typical phrases, as he calls them "(leit-motifen" they are called in German, and leading motives will probably remain the most acceptable translation), is capital, and is enforced by several admirably selected examples. He points out that leading motives are musical symbols, not labels, and illustrates their dramatic value by showing how the merry call which Siegfried, in the music drama of that title, blows upon his horn is, in the "Dusk of the Gods," transformed into the stately measures which are heard when Siegfried sets out in quest of adventure, and finally swells to a thrilling paean at the climax of the Death March.

"This general discussion of Wagnerian methods is followed by analyses of Wagner's music-dramas. Herein Mr. Krehbiel quotes some of the principal leading motives, and though he does not give them their generally accepted titles, he paraphrases these in describing their characteristics. Mr. Krehbiel has made careful investigations into the sources from which Wagner drew the material for his plots, and has, after the manner of a German monographist, charged his chapters on the music-dramas with an almost embarrassing amount of such matter. Most interesting, however, is his account of the old Mastersingers, and his quotation from a poem written by the veritable Hans Sachs and set to music by the veritable Pogner. It would perhaps have been even more interesting had Mr. Krehbiel quoted from Wagenseil's book on the Mastersingers, from which he evidently gathered much of his material, the two master-tones on which Wagner built two of the most important motives in his music-drama-the Mastersingers' March and the Art Brotherhood."

-"New Outlook," Volume 46