the top of a rock as the sun strikes it through the water. Alberich does not think much of the gold if its only use is for these water-children's games. But one of the Rhine-daughters tells him that “he who could make the gold into a ring would become master of the world,” and to these words the so-called Ring-motif is first sung (see Melody, Example 11). The Rhine-daughter sings it in a childlike, indolently graceful way which well expresses the kind of toy the ring or the world itself would be to her. One of her sisters bids her be careful, but they reassure themselves with the thought that the Rhine-gold is safe, since no one can win it who does not renounce love. Alberich broods over what he hears, and already the theme changes its character as he thinks of such mastery of the world as he might gain by it (Melody, Ex. 12). He curses love and grasps the gold. The theme of world-mastery grows dark with the darkness of the Nibelung's mind. The waters of the Rhine change into black mists which grow grey and thin, while the now sinister theme becomes softer and smoother. Then it breaks gently forth in a noble, swinging rhythm and massively soft brazen tones, as Wotan awakes on a mountain height and gazes upon Walhalla, his newly finished palace which he has bid the giants build, so that from it he may rule the world (Melody, Ex. 13). The theme thus shows no trivial connexion with a stage-property, mechanically important in the plot; but it represents the desire for power, and what that desire means to each different type of mind. The gods, as the giants plaintively admit, “rule by beauty”; hence the “Walhalla-motif.” What it becomes in the mind of the Nibelung is grimly evident when Alberich uses his ring in Nibelheim. The Rhine-daughters' exultant cry of “Rhine-gold” is there tortured in an extremely remote modulation at the end of a very sinister transformation of the theme; and the orchestration, with its lurid but smothered brass instruments, its penetrating low reed tones and its weird drum-roll beaten on a suspended cymbal, is more awe-inspiring than anything dreamed of by the cleverest of those composers who do not create intellectual causes for their effects.
A famous and typical instance of Wagner's use of Leitmotif in tragic irony is the passage where Hagen gives Siegfried friendly welcome, to the melody of the curse which Alberich pronounced on the ring and all who approached it. The more subtle examples are inexhaustible in variety and resource; and perhaps the climax of subtlety is the almost entire absence of Leitmotif in the first scene of the third act of Götterdämmerung, when Siegfried throws away his last chance of averting his doom. The Rhine-daughters appear to him, and ask him to give them the ring that is on his finger. Siegfried refuses. They laugh at his stinginess and disappear. Siegfried is piqued, and calls them back to offer them the ring. Unfortunately they tell him of its curse, and prophesy death to him if he keeps it. This arouses his spirit of contradiction; and he tells them that they might have won it from him by coaxing, but never by threats, and that he values his life no more than the stone he tosses away as he speaks to them. In spite of the necessary allusions to the ominous theme of the curse, which would give any less great composer ample excuse for succumbing to the listener's sense of impending doom, Wagner's music speaks to us through the child-minds of the Rhine-daughters and terrifies us with the ruthless calm of Nature.
Almost as subtle, and much more directly impressive, is the pathos of the death of Siegfried, which is heightened by an unprecedented appeal to a sense of musical form on the scale of the entire tetralogy. Siegfried's whole character and career is, indeed, annihilated in the clumsy progress towards this consummation; but Shakespeare might have condoned worse plots for the sake of so noble a result; and indeed Wagner's awkwardness arises mainly from fear of committing oversights. Hagen, the Nibelung's son, has managed to make Siegfried unwittingly drink a love-potion with Gutrune, which causes him to forget his own bride, Brünnhilde. Siegfried is then persuaded to transform himself by his magic Tarnhelm into the likeness of his host, Gutrune's brother Gunther, in order to bring Brünnhilde (whose name is now quite new to him) from her fire-encircled rock, so that Gunther may have her for his bride and Siegfried may wed Gutrune. This is achieved; and Brünnhilde's horror and bewilderment at meeting Siegfried again as a stranger in his own shape creates a situation which Siegfried cannot understand, and which Hagen pretends to construe as damning evidence that Siegfried has betrayed Gunther's honour as well as Brünnhilde's. Hagen, Gunther and Brünnhilde therefore agree that Siegfried must die. In order to spare Gutrune's feelings it is arranged that his death shall appear as an accident in a hunting party. While the hunting party is resting Siegfried tells stories of his boyhood, thus recalling the antecedents of this drama with a charming freshness and sense of dramatic and musical repose. When he comes to the point where his memory has been clouded by Hagen's spells, Hagen restores his memory with another magic potion. Siegfried calmly continues to tell how he found Brünnhilde asleep on the fiery mountain. Hagen affects to construe this as a confession of guilt, and slays him as if in righteous wrath. The dying Siegfried calls on Brünnhilde to awaken, and asks “Who hath locked thee again in sleep?” He believes that he is once more with Brünnhilde on the Valkyries' mountain height; and the harmonies of her awakening move in untroubled splendour till the light of life fades with the light of day and the slain hero is carried to the Gibichung's hall through the moonlit mists, while the music of love and death tells in terrible triumph more of his story than he ever knew.
The bare conception of such art as this shows how perfect is the unity between the different elements in Wagner's later music-drama. If the music of Tristan is more polyphonic than that of Lohengrin, it is because it is hardly figurative to call its drama polyphonic also. Compare the mere fairy-tale mystery of Lohengrin's command that Elsa shall never ask to know his name, with the profound fatalism of Isolde's love-potion. Apart from the gain in tragic force resulting from Wagner's masterly development of the character of Brangaene, the raw material of the story was already suggestive of that astounding combination of the contrasted themes of love and death, the musical execution of which involves a harmonic range almost as far beyond that of its own day as the ordinary harmonic range of the 19th century is beyond that of the 16th. In his next work, Die Meistersinger, Wagner ingeniously made poetry and drama out of an explicit manifesto to musical critics, and proved the depth of his music by developing its everyday resources and so showing that its vitality does not depend on that extreme emotional force that makes Tristan und Isolde almost unbearably poignant. Few things are finer in music or literature than the end of the second act of Die Meistersinger, from the point where Sachs's apprentice begins the riot, to the moment when the watchman, frightened at the silence of the moonlit streets so soon after he has heard all that noise, announces eleven o'clock and bids the folk pray for protection against evil spirits, while the orchestra tells us of the dreams of Walther and Eva and ends by putting poetry even into the pedantic ineptitudes of the malicious Beckmesser. Die Meistersinger is perhaps Wagner's most nearly perfect work of art; and it is a striking proof of its purity and greatness that, while the whole work is in the happiest comic vein, no one ever thinks of it as in any way slighter than Wagner's tragic works. The overwhelming love-tragedy of Tristan und Isolde is hardly less perfect, though the simplicity of its action exposes its longueurs to greater notoriety than those which may be found in Die Meistersinger.
These two works interrupted the execution of the Ring and formed the stepping-stones to Parsifal, a work which may perhaps be said to mark a further advance in that subtlety of poetic conception which, as we have seen, gave the determining impulse to Wagner's true musical style. But in music he had no more to learn, and Parsifal, while the most solemn and concentrated of all Wagner's dramas, is musically not always unsuggestive of old age. Its harmonic style is, except in the Grail music, even more abstruse than in Tristan; and the intense quiet of the action is far removed from the forces which in that tumultuous tragedy carry the listener through every difficulty. Again, while the Eucharistic features in Parsifal attract some listeners, the material effect of their presentation
