is effective in the theatre.  It would be absurd to suppose that he was not perfectly well aware that every one would yawn if after hearing the Valkyrie his audience found Siegfried to be simply a continuation of the Valkyrie, found the two operas to be virtually the same work with the scissors put through the score at an arbitrarily chosen point.  Consider the scenery of the two operas:  First Act of the Valkyrie, Hunding’s hut with the smouldering fire; Second, a rocky defile in the mountains and no particular weather; Third, storm round the Valkyries’ rock, black flying clouds, the pines tossing their branches to the tempest, and, at the end, a peaceful evening sky and then the yellow flames shooting up against it.  We must note the change to the beginning of Siegfried:  a dark cave, and outside it the forest, green, fresh and bright; Second Act, the entrance to Hate-cave, time, night, long before dawn, and at the end a summer morning, with the sun shimmering on the grass and the trees gently murmuring in the wind; Third, a rocky ravine in the early morning, grey storm-clouds scudding past, the wind whistling; at the end, a mountain top, Bruennhilda sleeping, the peaceful trees, a horse quietly grazing, morning sunlight.  This sequence shows how carefully the matter was schemed; and we may now turn to the music.

When the same leitmotivs are largely employed throughout a long operatic work there must be a superficial, or, if I may say so, external, monotony in the character of the music.  A first glance at the scores reveals to the eye the same series of notes and chords repeated again and again; to any but the most attentive listener a first hearing leaves the impression of the same themes and passages endlessly repeated.  But any one who leaves the theatre on an evening after the Valkyrie bearing with him a vivid memory of the brilliance and sweetness of the close must at the very least be struck by the sombre colouring of the opening of Siegfried the following evening.  I do not mean the orchestral colouring, but the intrinsic thing, the music itself.  The tapping of the hammer on steel goes on, and in mock seriousness the orchestra gives out a series of prolonged sighs or groans of the most lugubrious character, reaching a climax as poor miserable Mime at last gives up his job in despair.  Mime, we must remember, is a half-comic personage; and were his music allotted to some heroic man facing an impossible task it would be much the same, save that Wagner would not have so exaggerated the hysterical emotion.  To depict a being facing an impossible task with no noble, but with only an ignoble, motive requires such an exaggerated mode of expression.  Mime’s grief is real enough, but the cause of it contemptible.  After a considerable deal in this mournful key comes the sudden entry of the bright young savage Siegfried, driving the bear.  His first theme is simply a bugle hunting call:  Siegfried