tic effects. Fantastic creatures like
Alberich and Mimi, who seem to be out of their element in France, are
rooted deep down in German imaginations. The Bayreuth actors surpassed
themselves in making them startlingly lifelike, with a trembling and
grimacing realism. Burgstaller, who was then making his debut in
_Siegfried_, acted with an impetuous awkwardness which accorded well
with the part. I remember with what zest--which seemed in no way
affected--he played the hero smith, labouring like a true workman,
blowing the fire and making the blade glow, dipping it in the steaming
water, and working it on the anvil; and then, in a burst of Homeric
gaiety, singing that fine hymn at the end of the first act, which sounds
like an air by Bach or Haendel.

But in spite of all this, I felt how much better it was to dream, or to
hear this poem of a youthful soul at a concert. It is then that the
magic murmurs of the forest in the second act speak more directly to the
heart. However beautiful the scenery of glades and woods, however
cleverly the light is made to change and dance among the trees--and it
is manipulated now like a set of organ stops--it still seems almost
wrong to listen with open eyes to music that, unaided, can show us a
glorious summer's day, and make us see the swaying of the tree-tops, and
hear the brush of the wind against the leaves. Through the music alone
the hum and murmur of a thousand little voices is about us, the glorious
song of the birds floats into the depths of a blue sky; or comes a
silence, vibrating with invisible life, when Nature, with her mysterious
smile, opens her arms and hushes all things in a divine sleep.

* * * * *

Wagner left _Siegfried_ asleep in the forest in order to embark on the
funereal vessel of _Tristan und Isolde_. But he left Siegfried with some
anguish of heart. When writing to Liszt in 1857, he says:

"I have taken young Siegfried into the depths of a lonely forest;
there I have left him under a lime-tree, and said good-bye to him
with tears in my eyes. It has torn my heart to bury him alive, and
I had a hard and painful fight with myself before I could do it....
Shall I ever go back to him? No, it is all finished. Don't let us
speak of it again."

Wagner had reason to be sad. He knew well that he would never find his
young Siegfried again. He roused him up ten years later. But all was
changed. That splendid