The observation is more a definition than an encomium.

He is a radical in that, to his sense, music is nothing if not articulate.

Wagner's luminous phrase, "the fertilisation of music by poetry," would have implied for him no mere aesthetic abstraction, but an intimate and ever-present ideal.

He was a musician, yet he looked out upon the visible world and inward upon the world of the emotions through the transforming eyes of the poet.

He would have none of a formal and merely decorative beauty--a beauty serving no expressional need of the heart or the imagination.