BRYNHILD'S IMMOLATION 172

THE QUEST OF THE ELUSIVE 183

AN INVOLUNTARY INSURGENT 196

HUNDING'S WIFE 206

THE CORRIDOR OF TIME 224

AVATAR 240

THE WEGSTAFFES GIVE A MUSICALE 255

THE IRON VIRGIN 268

DUSK OF THE GODS 280

SIEGFRIED'S DEATH 294

INTERMEZZO 307

A SPINNER OF SILENCE 315

THE DISENCHANTED SYMPHONY 324

MUSIC THE CONQUEROR 347

MELOMANIACS

THE LORD'S PRAYER IN B

At the close of the first day they brought Baruch into the great Hall of
the Oblates, sometime called the Hall of the Unexpected. The young man
walked with eyes downcast. Aloft in the vast spaces the swinging domes
of light made more reddish his curly beard, deepened the hollows on
either side of his sweetly pointed nose, and accented the determined
corners of his firmly modelled lips. He was dressed in a simple tunic
and wore no Talith; and as he slowly moved up the wide aisle the Grand
Inquisitor, visibly annoyed by the resemblance, said to his famulus,
"The heretic dares to imitate the Master." He crossed himself and
shuddered.

Mendoza abated not his reserve as he drew near the long table before the
Throne. Like a quarry that is at last hemmed in, the Jew was quickly
surrounded by a half thousand black-robed monks. The silence--sick,
profound, and awful--was punctuated by the low, sullen tapping of a
drum. Its droning sound reminded the prisoner of life-blood dripping
from some single pore; the tone was B, and its insistent, muffled,
funereal blow at rhythmic intervals would in time have worn away rock.
Mendoza felt a prevision of his fate; being a musician he knew of
music's woes and warnings. And he lifted eyes for the first time since
his arrest in a gloomy, star-lit street of Lisbon.

He saw bleached, shaven faces in a half circle; they seemed like skulls
fastened on black dummies--so immobile their expression, so deadly
staring their eyes. The brilliant and festal