An instance of Wagner’s subtle feeling is the passage where Wotan “kisses away” Bruennhilda’s godhood and lays her to sleep, as one with the rocks and stones of mother earth, Erda, whose music accompanies the act.  Wotan, like Alberich, has renounced love; so just previously we have heard the corresponding passage from the Rhinegold.  We have the lulling Sleep theme, and then comes the Fire-music, a thing unmatched—­and, so far as I know, never attempted—­in all music.  The mighty Spear strikes the ground to the mighty Spear theme; the earth seems to shiver as the fire comes up; then the flames mount, yellow against the deep blue sky; the Loge music sparkles in the orchestra, the strings sustain a continuous whizz and roar, and over it all, and at times in it or under it, swings that lulling Sleep theme.  If it is not too futile a word to use, the Siegfried “heroic” theme, as Wotan uses it in commanding the fire (Loge) that only the noblest hero ever born shall pass to Bruennhilda, is the most pompous form in which it appears throughout the Ring; but the situation warrants it, demands it.  Amidst the roar of the fire and with the divine lulling phrase, fragments of the Farewell are heard; and twice, as Wotan looks back on his daughter, we hear the Fate theme—­the Scandinavian sense that this tragedy mysteriously had to be:  the mighty god and lord of the universe himself knows and feels that the things preordained must happen.  He goes slowly off; the central tragedy is virtually accomplished; to the end the fire blazes and sparkles, and the curtain descends on a soft chord.  The revolving seasons will pass; strange events will happen in the outer world of men; Bruennhilda will sleep there, the guarding fire seen from afar by awe-stricken warrior tribes.

The spring freshness of the music, its vivid pictorial quality, the intense human feeling expressed, its profound sense of the past and the mystery of things, the godlike power, place it hardly second, if indeed second, to Tristan.  There are love-duets in music which may be compared with those in Tristan:  there is nothing with which the music of the Valkyrie may be compared.  The grandeur of Handel’s picture-painting in Israel in Egypt is a different quality altogether.  Handel is unapproachable; but he worked with a different aim, in a different way, and in a different material.  Wagner’s music is beautiful and sublime, and he blent the human element with the others in a fashion no other musician has attempted.

CHAPTER XVI

‘SIEGFRIED’

I