even more colour.  The motion of the sea is kept up, partly with fresh musical material, until at last it all but ceases; the watchman sings his song of the soft south wind and falls asleep.  Then the sky darkens, the Flying Dutchman comes in, and the storm music rages once more.  It is woven into Vanderdecken’s magnificent scena (surely the greatest opera scena written up to the year 1842); and then disappears.  In its place we get pages of (for Wagner) wearisome twaddle.  The reason is obvious.  For the purpose of explaining the subsequent movement of the drama there is a lot of conversation which Weber, in the Singspiel, would have left to be spoken, and Mozart would have set to dry recitative.  Wagner was determined that his music should flow on; but the inspiration of the sea was gone, and he could only fill up with uninspired stuff.  He had not yet mastered his new musico-dramatic art; indeed, I much doubt whether he realized its possibilities.  In his Tristan days he knew how to avoid explanations on the stage; nothing in Tristan needs explanation; in the Mastersingers and the Ring his resources—­his inventiveness and technical mastery of music—­were unbounded, and an intractable incident he simply smothered in splendid music.  Here, the bargaining of Daland and Vanderdecken is a very intractable incident, and in trying to make the best of it he made the worst.  That is, he would have saved us an appalling longueur had he given us two minutes of frank recitative in place of twenty minutes of make-believe music—­music in the very finest kapellmeister style of the period.  Even the passage quoted (c) is made nothing of.  There are one or two fine dramatic touches, as, for instance, when Daland asks if his ship is any the worse:  “Mein Schiff ist fest, es leidet keinen Schaden,” with its bitter double meaning; but on the whole things are very dreary and dispiriting until the south wind blows up and stirs the composer’s imagination.  The sweet wind carries off the mariners to their home; the water ripples and plashes gently; and to the last bar of the act all is peace and beauty.  The music has not, perhaps, the point of, say, the quieter bits of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides, but it runs delicately along, and it more than serves.

The figure (l), which has been so prominent in the overture and sailors’ choruses, is equally noticeable in the next act.  The spinning chorus, in fact, may be said to grow out of it.  There is no break between the two acts (Wagner’s first intention was to go straight on, making the Dutchman an opera in one long act); the introduction to the second is a continuation of the conclusion of the first.  The figure is repeated several times in a long diminuendo, changing the key from B flat to A major, so we never cease to feel the presence of the eternal sea.  Inside the skipper’s old-world house one is conscious that the waves are plashing not far from the walls,