Of even more importance than the article A Happy Evening in the story of Wagner\'s development is the essay on The Overture that appeared in the Gazette Musicale in January 1841,—that is to say, a couple of months after the completion of Rienzi, and nearly six months before the commencement of the Flying Dutchman. Here he anticipates some of the ?sthetic he was afterwards to expound so eloquently and so convincingly in the great article on Beethoven and elsewhere. He begins with a survey of the early history of the Overture. There had always been, apparently, a reluctance to plunging the spectator forthwith into the opera, just as in earlier times a prologue had always preceded the play. The prologue, however, had this at any rate to be said for it, that it summarised the action of the coming play, and in this and other ways prepared the spectator to listen more intelligently. The early Overture, however, could not do this, for at that time the psychological powers of music were not sufficiently developed to permit of the summarising in a few minutes of the actions and the motives of an opera. It became a conventional, not a characteristic prelude. Later on a regular "Overture form" was elaborated, but even this was psychologically impotent. What connection has the overture to the Messiah, for example, with the oratorio itself? Would it not serve equally well as prelude to a hundred others of the old oratorios or operas? Practically the only method of musical development these composers had at their service was the fugal: it was impossible for them to work out an extended musical piece by means of ever-widening circles of pure feeling.

Next came a tripartite form of overture,—an opening and closing movement in quicker time, with an intermediate section in slower time and of softer character. This gave a certain amount of opportunity for the presentation of one or two of the main moods or episodes or characters of the opera: and in the "Symphony" that introduces the Seraglio, Mozart has given us a little masterpiece in this genre. But there was a certain helplessness in the division of the "Symphony" into three sections, and in the predetermined nature of their contents: and in course of time there was evolved the operatic overture proper,—a continuous musical piece, making a sort of dramatic play with the main motives of the opera. This was the form with which Gluck and Mozart worked such wonders. Gluck\'s masterpiece is the overture to Iphigenia in Aulis: Mozart\'s, those to the Magic Flute, Figaro, and Titus. According to Wagner, Mozart\'s merit was that he did not attempt to express in his overture all the details of the plot, but "fastened with his poet\'s eye on the leading idea of the drama, divested it of all its inessentials and material accidenti?, and set it forth as a musically transfigured creation, a passion personified in tones, and presented it to the main idea as the justificatory counterpart of this,—a something through which the idea, and even the dramatic action itself, became intelligible to the spectator\'s feeling." At the same time the overture became a self-contained tone-piece,—this being true even of an overture like that to Don Giovanni, which runs without any formal close into the first scene of the opera. This form of overture became the property of Cherubini and Beethoven. The former remained mostly faithful to the transmitted type, which Beethoven also used in the E major overture to Fidelio. But Beethoven in time broke through the cramping limitations of this form. His "prodigious dramatic instinct," having never found the opera into which it could pour the whole of itself, turned for an outlet to instrumental music pure and simple,—to the field in which he could "shape in his own way the drama of his desire out of pure tone-images," a drama "set free from the petty trimmings of the timorous playwright." The result of this effort was the great Leonora overture, which, "far from giving us a musical introduction to the drama, really sets that drama before us more completely and more affectingly than the ensuing broken action does. This work is no longer an overture, but itself the mightiest of dramas."[322]

Weber too is commended for making his overtures dramatic "without losing and wasting himself in a painful depiction of insignificant accessories of the plot." Even when his rich fantasy led him to incorporate more subsidiary musical motives than the form transmitted to him could conveniently carry, he always managed to preserve the dramatic unity of his conception. He invented a new form, that of the "dramatic fantasia," of which the Oberon overture is one of the finest examples. "Nevertheless," says Wagner,—and here again we see his rooted antipathy to anything in the nature of excessive detail-painting in music[323]—"it is not to be denied that the independence of purely musical production must suffer by subordination to a dramatic thought, if this thought is not seized in one broad trait consistent with the spirit of music,—for the composer who tries to depict the details of the action itself cannot develop his dramatic theme without breaking his musical work to fragments." The inevitable ending of this style of overture is the pot-pourri,—a form of which Spontini\'s overture to the Vestale may be said to have been the beginning. The public liked this kind of thing because it dished up for them again the most effective snatches of melody from the operas.

The summing up is that the ideal form and ideal achievement are those of the Don Giovanni and Leonora overtures. In the former no attempt is made to reproduce the course of the drama itself step by step: the drama is freshly conceived as the contest between two broad principles—the arrogance of Don Giovanni and the anger of a higher power—and "the invention, as well as the conduct," of these symbolic motives "belongs quite unmistakably to no other province than that of music." Beethoven\'s method in the Leonora overture, on the other hand, is "to concentrate in all its noble unity the one sublime action which, in the drama itself, is weakened and impeded by the necessity of padding it out with trivial details,—to show this action in its ideal new motion, nourished only by its inner impulses." This "ideal action" is, of course, the loving self-sacrifice of Leonora. But by reason of its very greatness and its intense dramatic quality, the Leonora overture ceases to be an overture in the proper sense of the word. It anticipates too fully the completed drama: if it is not understood by the hearer, because of his lack of knowledge of the opera, it conveys only a fragment of its real message to him: if it is wholly understood, it weakens his subsequent enjoyment of the drama itself.

Wagner therefore returns to the overture to Don Giovanni as the ideal, because here "the leading thought of the drama is worked out in a purely musical, not a dramatic, form." In this way the musician "most surely attains the general artistic aim of the overture, which is simply an ideal prologue, transporting us into that higher sphere in which to prepare our mind for the drama." The musical conception of the main idea of the drama can still be distinctly worked out and brought to a definite close; in fact "the overture should form a musical art-work complete in itself." No better model could be had than Gluck\'s overture to Iphigenia in Aulis. In a word, though the overture must not attempt to reproduce stage by stage all the episodes of the story, it can suggest in its own way the dramatic contest of two main principles by a contest between two symbolic musical ideas: only the working-out of these musical ideas must follow from the nature of the themes themselves. But it must be always borne in mind—and the frequency with which Wagner returns to this point shows the importance he attached to it—that "the working-out must always take its rise from the purely musical significance of the themes: never should it take account of the course of events in the drama itself, for this would at once destroy the sole effective character of a piece of music."

As I have already pointed out, this and one or two of the other articles of the Paris time are interesting because they show us the mature ?sthetics of the \'sixties and \'seventies trying to find expression in the young Wagner of 1840. To most of the principles here laid down he remained faithful, as we shall see, to the end of his days. But it is interesting also to note that though theoretically he always remained constant to the guiding principles he here lays down for the overture, his practice by no means always conformed to them. His ideal overture, as we have just seen, was one of the type of that to Don Giovanni or that to Iphigenia in Aulis—i.e. one that either made no use at all of thematic material from the opera itself, or the minimum use of it, the dramatic conflict of the stage action being fought out ideally, as it were, in the overture, in the persons of two symbolic musical themes. "In this conception of the overture," he says, "the highest task would be to reproduce the characteristic idea of the drama by means pure and simple (mit den eigentlichen Mitteln) of self-subsistent (selbstst?ndigen) music, and to conduct it to a conclusion which should correspond, by anticipation, with the solution of the problem in the scenic play."

It is difficult to square his practice in some of his own overtures with the theoretical principles he here lays down. Not one of his overtures corresponds with the ............