goes on merrily enough. The renewed altercation
with the Giants calls for little remark. When,
however, the Giants demand the Ring and Wotan calls
up Erda, the wisdom of the earth, a passage occurs
which, though more or less of an irrelevant interpolation,
gives Wagner a chance of putting forth his strength.
Erda rises to most mysterious music, counsels Wotan
to surrender the Ring, and sinks down again to her
sleep; and one forgets the irrelevancy in the thrill
of this vision of the Mother Earth, the spirit that
sleeps amongst the everlasting hills. Finally
the composer gets his great chance, and shows that,
like Handel and his own Donner, he “could strike
like a thunderbolt.” The gods are all disheartened;
mists have gathered; Donner—our old friend
Thor—raises his hammer and smashes something;
there is a flash of lightning and a peal of thunder;
the mists and clouds clear away; and we see there the
rainbow bridge over which the gods wend on their way
to Valhalla. We have Wagner the sublime pictorial
musician. The Rainbow motive is perhaps not very
graphic in itself, but it serves as a basis for a
delicious passage—evening calm and sunset
after storm—comparable only with a parallel
passage in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.
The storm itself is Wagner in the plenitude of his
power. It is short: it is not “worked
up”: in a few strokes, brief and telling
as Donner’s own hammer-strokes, the whole thing
is done. Then the Valhalla music, glorified by
a gorgeous accompaniment, is heard again, only interrupted
by the wail of the Rhinemaidens below, sorrowing for
the loss of their pretty, harmless toy. Wotan
hears the cry, and passes on to feast in his castle.
Grim care goes with him; but he has the consoling
idea of the free hero and the irresistible sword.
So ends the
Rhinegold—Fricka content
to have both Wotan and Freia; the other gods not much
concerned about anything; Wotan full of apprehensions
and also of determination—determination
to rule without paying the price of rulership.
V
I have attempted nothing more than a broad and rough
description of the Rhinegold. The opera
was planned as a prelude, and suffers from the defects
of the plan, as well as from the fact that it was written
before Wagner’s new method was ripe. He
wrote to Liszt that the music came up “like
wild,” or, as an irreverent critic once observed,
like mould on a pot of jam; and the second description
is truer than the speaker thought. The Rhinegold
has aged faster than any other of the great works.
Alongside of the sublime we find the petty; after phrases
as sweet and fresh as raindrops on young spring leaves
we find stodgy, “made,” music; the atmosphere
is not preserved. But gigantic possibilities
are opened out. The Rhine music is afterwards
used to splendid ends; the Spear motive, which makes
its first appearance in rather a trivial form—it
might be a quotation from Weber or Spohr—becomes