That the articles praising the Italians at the expense of the Germans were the products of more than the mere impression of Schr?der-Devrient\'s singing and acting—that they came from the depths of a real change in his intellectual and emotional nature—is shown by the length of time he remained at the same standpoint.

The text of Das Liebesverbot was written in a mood of fiery youthful protest against what he held to be the cramping puritanism of the moralists. He deliberately transforms Shakespeare\'s Measure for Measure. "Young Europe and Ardinghello, helped by the strange antipathy I had conceived towards classical operatic music, gave me the keynote for my conception, which was especially directed against puritanical hypocrisy, and consequently led to the bold glorification of unfettered sensualism (freien Sinnlichkeit). I took care to understand the serious Shakespearean subject only in this sense; I saw only the gloomy strait-laced viceroy, himself burning with love for the beautiful novice, who, while she implores him to pardon her brother condemned to death for illicit love, kindles a ruinous fire in the rigid Puritan\'s breast by the lovely warmth of her own human emotion. The fact that these powerful motives are so richly developed by Shakespeare only in order that in the end they may be all the more seriously weighed in the scales of justice, did not concern me in the least; all I had in mind was to expose the sinfulness of hypocrisy and the unnaturalness of harsh moral judgments."[298] He adds that he was probably influenced by Auber\'s Masaniello and the Sicilian Vespers.

The composition of Das Liebesverbot carries us from 1834 to the spring of 1836, and still the Southern fever has not abated. In 1837 he carries the same enthusiasm about with him in K?nigsberg and Riga; we can imagine that the more serious side of him had some difficulty in developing in such an environment as a fourth-rate operatic and theatrical troupe. While in Magdeburg he writes a short article on "Dramatic Song," in which he returns to the thesis of three years before, though with more wisdom. "Why," he asks, "cannot we Germans see that we are not the possessors of everything; why cannot we openly and freely admit that the Italian is superior to the German in Song, and the Frenchman superior to him in the light and animated treatment of operatic music? Can he not oppose to these his deeper science, his more thorough culture, and above all the happy faculty that makes it possible for him easily to make the advantages of the Italians and the French his own, whereas they will never be able to acquire ours? The Italians are singers by nature. The less richly-endowed German can hope to emulate the Italian only by hard study." Wagner rightly points out that no artist can hope to achieve full expression of himself without a technique that has become second nature to him. It was the acquirement by Mozart of this technique in his childhood that gave his mature music its incomparable ease and finish, while there was always a certain awkwardness about Weber, owing to his having begun late and learned his technique during the years when he was actually practising his art. Without perfect vocal technique, the highest kind of dramatic expression is impossible. The great Schr?der-Devrient, the finest operatic artist in Germany, was at one time within an ace of giving up her career as a singer, so great was the strain on her voice through a faulty production; but she studied hard on the right Italian lines, with the result that she can now sing the most trying parts without the slightest fatigue.[299] All this is sensible enough—so sensible, indeed, that Wagner could repeat it thirty years later in his "Report upon a proposed German School of Music for Munich." But that the nimble and relatively superficial Italian music still exercised something of its old fascination upon him is shown by another article of the same year on Bellini. Here, while admitting that a good deal of Italian music is poor stuff, and that the forms and tricks of the Bellinian opera are things only too easy to imitate, he yet lauds Bellini\'s melody at the expense of that of the Germans, and his simplicity at the expense of their clumsy erudition. "The German connoisseur of music," he says, "listens to one of Bellini\'s operas with the spectacle............