"Doch als mir Isabella die Erdenliebe erschloss, Da schmolz das Eis in tausend Liebesthränen."
("But when Isabella revealed earthly love to me, the ice was melted into a thousand tears of love"), the orchestra completes his thought with a reminiscence of the theme of Isabella's enchantment of him in the court (see No. 7, from the overture)--
O war Dein Herz denn stets verschlossen, drang Liebe nie in Deine Brust?
The finale to the second Act is as admirably animated as its predecessor; Luzio's carnival song, the dance, and the chorus have a truly southern warmth in them; and there is a lively quartet between Isabella, Dorella, Luzio and Brighella.
Altogether _Das Liebesverbot_, like _Die Feen_, is a work upon which Wagnerian criticism will always look with an affectionate eye. If it contains much that Wagner did right to decline to take seriously in later life, there is also much in it that is eloquent of the coming dramatist in music,--a surprising quickness of apprehension, a faculty for big picture-building, and above all an irresistible ardour. Like all Wagner's music of this time, the score anticipates many of the mannerisms of the later operas. It is unusually generous with the typical Wagnerian "turn"; at one point what must be a rather comic effect in performance is made by a series of these turns being executed in octaves by piccolo, flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, violins and 'cellos--
The later Wagnerian method of accumulating excitement, which we have seen anticipated in _Die Feen_, is employed also in _Das Liebesverbot_, as in the following passage, which, like the one previously quoted, gives us a decided foretaste of the meeting of Tristan and Isolde--
And if for nothing else _Das Liebesverbot_ would be interesting for its use of the leit-motive. There was virtually none of it in _Die Feen_.
_Rienzi_ will always be something of a puzzle to the student. Wagner's own accounts of it in later years show that he too was a little uncertain as to the reasons for its obvious defects. He had tired of his life among little theatrical people in minor provincial towns, so he deliberately planned _Rienzi_ on an elephantine scale in order that it might be impossible except in one of the larger opera houses. He had "grand opera" in his mind throughout, he tells us; he intended not merely to imitate the showiest works of this _genre_ but to surpass them in prodigality. Yet to suppose, he adds, that this was all that was in his mind would be to do him an injustice. He was "really inspired" by the subject, and especially by the character of Rienzi. First and foremost he had _Rienzi_ in view, grand opera being only a secondary consideration; yet grand opera was "only the spectacles through which he saw the subject." He always saw it, he goes on to say, on its own merits, and never aimed consciously at merely musical effects; yet he could never see the material except in terms of the merely musical effects,--the arias, choruses, finales, processions, and so on,--of grand opera. "Thus on the one hand I was always influenced by my subject in working out the details of the work, while on the other hand I governed my subject entirely in accordance with the 'grand opera' form that was in my mind." It is pretty evident that he found it as difficult to come to any settled conclusion with regard to _Rienzi_ as we do. There is truth in the view that many of the banalities of it are due to his having the Paris opera and the Paris public in view. But we have only to study the score in conjunction with those of _Die Feen_ and _Das Liebesverbot_ to see that many of these same banalities are the logical outcome of his cast of mind and his musical attainments at that epoch, and would certainly have appeared in his music even if the idea of Paris had never occurred to him.