Wagner died in Venice on 13 February 1883: so the post-Wagnerian period has now become the post-Wagnerian century.* It is a century which has been more concerned with criticism, biography and, latterly, manuscript study than with analysis in the full and fundamental sense of that term: and this is scarcely surprising in view of the difficulties which the analysis of Wagner presents. The best analytical results during this first century have been achieved by those who, in totally different ways, have made the most consistent efforts to be comprehensive. Ernest Newman's essentially literary commentaries and Alfred Lorenz's formal segmentations and comparisons of the later works may be, and often are, arraigned for their superficialities and over-simplifications; but their critics have not so far succeeded in replacing them with anything as stimulating or as wide-ranging. Perhaps that will be possible only after a second century of Wagner studies devoted to painstakingly detailed analysis, using appropriately rigorous and sophisticated techniques. It will then be for the third century of Wagner studies to attempt the great synthesis between detail and totality! Yet even the most cursory consideration of exactly what those techniques might be reminds us of the work that remains to be done with respect to music with which analysts have so far made the most conspicuously constructive progress: music without texts, symphonic music. Nearly fifty years after the death of Schenker we still await those comprehensive studies of symphonic music which will make definitive statements about the connections, if any, between structural fundamentals and stylistic evolution, and between the technique and the quality of a composition: in fact, we still await truly critical analytical accounts of individual composers, and of historical periods. Small wonder, then, that a subject in some ways more demanding the analysis of large-scale compositions with texts should be in an even more primitive state, and it is not the purpose of this paper to attempt a great leap forward, proposing comprehensive new theories from which more sophisticated techniques may eventually emerge. Rather, the object is to consider certain essential features of
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