Throughout the Ring Wagner fairly let himself go in the matter of gorgeous, riotous colour in depicting Nature—­the earth, the waters, clouds, and the working of the elements.  He had ampler opportunities than any of his previous works afforded.  He had not, as before, to place his characters in a scene, to arrange a background for them.  Many of the characters are the elements typified—­the water-nymphs, the giants, Donner, Loge, Erda.  Wotan himself rides on the tempest, surrounded with fearful lightnings; the Valkyrie maidens ride through the air on supernatural horses amidst thunder and wind and rain.  The whole action takes place in the open air, or in the bowels of the earth, or the depths of the Rhine; mountain and storm-lashed woods, dismal caverns and chasms, the broad river, are always before us.  Two scenes take place under a man-made roof:  in the first act of The Valkyrie we have Hunding’s rough hut, built round an ash-tree, which penetrates the top, and its branches sway and dash together above the actors’ 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.