ctors' heads; in the
_Dusk of the Gods_ there is Gunther's hall, completely open on one side.
Undefiled Nature, healthy and wild and sweet, is always present, and
always in sympathy with the character of every scene. Besides being
magically picturesque, the music is also continuously in a high degree
dramatic, and it has yet another quality: it is charged with a sense of
a strange, remote past--a past that never existed. No archaic chords or
progressions occur, but by a series of miraculous touches the atmosphere
of a far-away past is kept before us. To save coming back to this again,
I will mention such instances as the Rhine-maidens' wail, heard far down
in the valley as the gods march triumphantly to Valhalla; the passage in
which Siegmund recounts how on coming home one day he found the house in
ashes, his sister and father gone, and only a wolf-skin lying on the
ground; the Fate theme, and the haunting song of the Rhine-maidens in
the last act of the _Dusk of the Gods_.

Now, though one would regret the loss of some of the music I have
mentioned, the _Rhinegold_ is tedious, long in proportion to the
significance--musical and dramatic--of its content, and on the whole a
bore. I never go to see it. The Fricka music in the second scene is as
effective on the piano as in the theatre, and the last scene is as
effective on a concert orchestra as in the theatre; in fact, in the
theatre the device of a pasteboard rainbow, coloured to suit German
taste, detracts from the effect. Only a fool would dare to say that
Wagner should have done this, that or the other; but I venture to say
that if he had not suffered from that very German malady, a desire to
work back to the beginning of things, and to embody the result in his
art, Wagner would have found a better means than a two-hour long
"fore-evening" to prepare for the real drama of the _Ring_.

That drama opens in earnest with _The Valkyrie_--the story of how, in
pursuing his ambitious plan, Wotan is forced to sacrifice first his own
son, then his daughter Brunnhilde, who is the incarnation of all that is
sweet and beautiful in his own nature. She shares, it is true, his
curiously limited immortality--an immortality that may be, and finally
is, curtailed--but she can suffer a punishment worse to her than
extinction. The prelude opens with the roar and hoarse scream of the
storm as it dashes through the forest--- the plash of the rain, the
flashing of lightning and the roll o