If the reader thinks I treat this episode rather flippantly, let me promptly admit that this is so.  It is pantomime of the most grotesque sort, not serious opera.  The dragon would not frighten a child.  The whole thing is an artistic mistake:  the fight should take place with the beast wholly or nearly out of sight:  an occasional lash of the tail, with plenty of smoke and red fire, would be much more effective than this construction of lath and pasteboard.  The music hardly ever reaches a high level.  There is not in existence any fine music descriptive of any form of fighting; and here slashing passages on the strings, blares of the brass, shrieks of the wood-wind, do not cover the inevitable failure of invention.  Fafner’s dying speech is better, for Wagner had something urgent to say on his own account:  he wishes to urge on us the significance of Siegfried’s coming career; and he does it with immense impressiveness.  The day of the Ending of the gods comes a little nearer when Siegfried takes possession of the Ring and places it on his finger.  As was arranged from the beginning of time, things are taking their course; Fate, answering none who questions, works out her plans silently, mysteriously, inexorably.  A sense of our darkness regarding our destiny fills the music with a profound emotion.

If there has been too much of the pantomimic grotesque so far, Wagner soon offers us compensations.  The music now is amongst his freshest and most fragrant.  A reservation must be made touching the absolute perfection of its beauty, but only a minute one.  When first the bird sang sweetly in the branches outspread above Siegfried’s head we heard the beginning of the piece known in the concert room as “Forest Voices,” the most exquisite sylvan picture ever done in music.  A low rippling figure, or rather part-figure and part-melodic theme, is heard:  it mounts higher, descends again, sways about, swells and dies away; other melodies are interwoven with it; it becomes more rapid in its motion, and grows louder until we feel the wind getting up and the leaves dancing, and then comes the voice of the bird.  This may sound a little high-falutin’, but is the only way in which I can render my impression.  The picture is so absolutely convincing that many readers who, like myself, first heard the thing in a concert room will remember that with the one hint conveyed by the title no scenery was needed to make its meaning and feeling quite clear.  The bird-voice is managed with consummate art:  a penny toy would have enabled the composer to give a faithful imitation of bird-song—­and would have spoilt the faithfulness of the whole picture.  So Wagner has translated the real bird-song into terms of art, and thereby given us its spirit while sufficiently suggestive of the original.  It is not sustained for long.  Siegfried, as I have described, tries to cut a reed so as to imitate it, and there is some innocent fooling as he only gets odd squeaks out of