The positive side of Wagner’s program was the development of a new kind of opera in the 1850s, for which he reserved a special name: music drama. Music, in these works, shares the honors with poetry, drama, and philosophy — all furnished by Wagner himself — as well as the stage design and acting. Wagner coined the word Gesamtkunstwerk, meaning “total work of art,” for this powerful concept. He always insisted on the distinction between music drama and ordinary “opera.”

Since words and ideas are so important in the Gesamtkunstwerk, the music is very closely matched to the words. Yet it is also unrelievedly emotional and intense, as Romantic doctrine required. The dramas themselves deal with weighty philosophical issues, or so at least Wagner and his admirers believed, and they do so under the symbolic cover of medieval German myths and legends.

This use of myths was another Romantic feature, one that strikingly anticipated Freud, with his emphasis on myths (for example, the myth of Oedipus) as embodiments of the deepest unconscious truths. Wagner employed the old romance of Tristan and Iseult, the saga of the Nordic god Wotan, and the Arthurian tale of Sir Perceval to present his views on love, political power, and religion, respectively. Wagner’s glorification of Germanic myths in particular made him the semiofficial voice of German nationalism, which in turn paved the way for Hitler.

One of the first great conductors and a superb orchestrator, Wagner raised the orchestra to new importance in opera, giving it a role modeled on Beethoven’s symphonies with their motivic development. Leitmotivs were among the motives he used for this symphonic continuity. The orchestra was no longer used essentially as a support for the singers (which was still the situation, even in Verdi); it was now the orchestra that carried the opera along. Instead of the alternation of recitatives, arias, and ensembles in traditional opera, music drama consisted of one long orchestral web, cunningly woven in with the singing.