ABSTRACT
Just as opera seria and intermezzo had coexisted in eighteenth-century Italy, a clear-cut division between "serious" and "comic" works continued to be the European norm over the next hundred years. Both kinds of stage works continued to evolve in the nineteenth century. One of the stylistic shifts of the early nineteenth century was toward what we now call Romanticism in music. Italy—the birthplace of opera—continued to believe that the sung-through approach was the way to go, even though many other countries had abandoned sung recitative for spoken dialogue. Two things made Richard Wagner's enormous music dramas cohesive: the first was Wagner's own fervent nationalism, for the plots presented mythic stories drawn in part from ancient German legends, interweaving the Teutonic gods with brave mortals, duplicitous dwarves, and various other magical and supernatural beings. The second unifying device was an elaborate system of musical leitmotifs.
