But in spite of all this, I felt how much better it was to dream, or to hear this poem of a youthful soul at a concert.  It is then that the magic murmurs of the forest in the second act speak more directly to the heart.  However beautiful the scenery of glades and woods, however cleverly the light is made to change and dance among the trees—­and it is manipulated now like a set of organ stops—­it still seems almost wrong to listen with open eyes to music that, unaided, can show us a glorious summer’s day, and make us see the swaying of the tree-tops, and hear the brush of the wind against the leaves.  Through the music alone the hum and murmur of a thousand little voices is about us, the glorious song of the birds floats into the depths of a blue sky; or comes a silence, vibrating with invisible life, when Nature, with her mysterious smile, opens her arms and hushes all things in a divine sleep.

* * * * *

Wagner left Siegfried asleep in the forest in order to embark on the funereal vessel of Tristan und Isolde.  But he left Siegfried with some anguish of heart.  When writing to Liszt in 1857, he says: 

“I have taken young Siegfried into the depths of a lonely forest; there I have left him under a lime-tree, and said good-bye to him with tears in my eyes.  It has torn my heart to bury him alive, and I had a hard and painful fight with myself before I could do it....  Shall I ever go back to him?  No, it is all finished.  Don’t let us speak of it again.”

Wagner had reason to be sad.  He knew well that he would never find his young Siegfried again.  He roused him up ten years later.  But all was changed.  That splendid third act has not the freshness of the first two.  Wotan has become an important figure, and brought reason and pessimism with him into the drama.  Wagner’s later conceptions were perhaps loftier, and his genius was more master of itself (think of the classic dignity in the awakening of Bruennhilde); but the ardour and happy expression of youth is gone.  I know that this is not the opinion of most of Wagner’s admirers; but, with the exception of a few pages of sublime beauty, I have never altogether liked the love scenes at the end of Siegfried and at the beginning of Goetterdaemmerung.  I find their style rather pompous and declamatory; and their almost excessive refinement makes them border upon dulness.  The form of the duet, too, seems cut and dried, and there are signs of weariness in it.  The heaviness of the last pages of Siegfried recalls Die Meistersinger, which is also of that period.  It is no longer the same joy nor the same quality of joy that is found in the earlier acts.