nothing of the sort is attempted or indeed wanted.  The horses gallop on like mad things:  their pace cannot be checked; themes, properly speaking, there are none—­we hear the screeches of fearsome wild-fowl, the excitement and the noise increase, until at last the catastrophe is reached, and the final climax is the terrible gibberish-chant of all the devils in hell.  Regarded as sheer music, the thing gets as far by the twentieth bar as ever it gets.  The piece is as near to pure colour in music as can be attained.  Why, Wagner with his counterpoint seems old-fashioned and formal by comparison!  The four constituents, the wild laughter of the shakes of the wood-wind, the slashing figure of the strings, the galloping figure of the bass, the Ride theme—­had these been used by any one save Wagner the result would have been unendurably wooden.  But Wagner had unlimited harmonic resources at his disposal; and he had the determination and the gift to achieve perfect truth in his delineation of a storm.  Delineation, I say, for here we have drawing as well as colour.  Of colour there is plenty:  notice, for example, the use of the brass against the descending chromatics; but the colour is mainly harmonic.  In a sense Wagner was not an innovator:  so long as the methods of his mighty predecessors served him he sought no others—­effects, whether of orchestration or of melody, were to him simply means:  never for a second was he beguiled into regarding them as ends; and every musician knows that plenty of them came at his call, more readily and spontaneously than in the case of any of the later musicians.

It is worth looking at the plan of this Ride—­which is, be it remembered, only the prelude to the gigantic drama which is to follow.  After the ritornello the main theme is announced, with a long break between the first and second strains; and again a break before it is continued.  Then it sounds out in all its glory, terse, closely gripped section to section, until the Valkyries’ call is heard; purely pictorial passages follow; the theme is played with, even as Mozart and Beethoven played with their themes, and at the last the whole force of the orchestra is employed, and his object is attained—­he has given us a picture of storm such as was never done before, and he has done what was necessary for the subsequent drama—­made us feel the tremendous might of the god of storms.  A few of my readers may know Handel’s “Horse and his Rider” chorus—­how he piles mass on mass of tone until in the end we seem to see a whole irresistible sea rushing over Pharaoh and his host.  Wagner does a thing perfectly analogous; but as I have remarked with regard to Weber and Mendelssohn and their picturesque music, where Handel, having painted his tremendous picture, had achieved his end and was satisfied and left off, is just the point where Wagner begins what to him is much the more important thing, the drama.  The omnipotent master of Valhalla comes on apace:  the storm is a mere indication of what is coming.