other specimen of the
lyrical Wagner. Even more characteristic of Wagner is the dying down
of the storm. We can _see_ the setting sun and the departing
storm-clouds in the music, and with these we are made to feel the
abating wrath of the god. And then comes the noblest piece of
recitative in all music. The words in which Bruennhilda appeals to her
father have already been (roughly) quoted: to give an idea of the
musical phrases would require too many pages of this book. The Sleep
theme enters as Wotan sees a way to the great compromise--the
compromise foredoomed to bring him to ruin. He will put Bruennhilda to
sleep to await the hero; but he will hedge her in with fire so that
the hero shall be a true one. With the indescribable finesse,
subtlety, of his own particular art, Wagner lets us feel how
Bruennhilda, in begging to be protected in this (rather unusual) way,
is reading only her own father's thought: he seems for a long time to
contend, but at last yields. The music steadily increases in force and
passion, and at each stage where one would think the composer could
strike no harder he immediately does it. More and more of the divine
fury pours into the music, until the climax is reached in the bars
preceding the Farewell.

In the meantime we have had the wonderful Eternal Love theme--not
sexual love, but the mystic force that created the worlds and holds
them in their courses: in all Wagner there is no nobler and sweeter
passage than that in which Bruennhilda first sings it. The vivid
musical description of the crackling flames which are to surround her
is another of an unequalled series of marvels. The Farewell I have
already compared with that at the end of _Lohengrin_: the voice part
is at times in Wagner's own style of song-recitative, but a great deal
of it is sheer simple melody. No master has excelled, or perhaps
matched, Wagner in the art of expressing the most profound and
poignant pathos without ever a suspicion of letting it lapse into
bathos; and this he does by--what at first it may seem ridiculous to
say of so opulent and luxurious a genius as Wagner's--by his
instinctive artistic austerity. The word is not too strong to be
applied to the resolute simplicity which enabled him to write such
melodies as those of which I am now speaking and the Farewell in
_Lohengrin_: the temptation to let himself go, to wallow in sadness
and to wring our bowels must have been almost too tremendous to be
resisted by