Crossword-Solution: THEMATIC 8 letters, 20 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 15

The more complex characters, instead of having a simple musical label attached to them, have their characteristic ideas and aspirations identified with special representative themes as they come into play in the drama; and the chief merit of the thematic structure of The Ring is the mastery with which the dramatic play of the ideas is reflected in the contrapuntal play of the themes.

The thematic system gives symphonic interest, reasonableness, and unity to the music, enabling the composer to exhaust every aspect and quality of his melodic material, and, in Beethoven's manner, to work miracles of beauty, expression and significance with the briefest phrases.

But how if you find some anti-Wagnerite raising the question whether the thematic system does not enable the composer to produce a music drama with much less musical fertility than was required from his predecessors for the composition of operas under the old system! Such discussions are not within the scope of this little book.

Further, there is to be considered the mass of shapeless "dry recitative" which separates these symmetrical numbers, and which might have been raised to considerable dramatic and musical importance had it been incorporated into a continuous musical fabric by thematic treatment.

The second-year class concerns itself with "the thematic and polyphonic melody, the larger forms, harmony in its aesthetic bearings, the aesthetic effects of the more complicated rhythms, comparative criticism and the various schools of composition." These valuable contributions to method and scope in the study of the History of Art and the History of Music are original with Wellesley, and are distinctly a part of her history.