shall doubt his greatness and unique genius.  “As I renounce love, so all shall renounce it, with gold have I bought you, for gold shall you crave.”  Love shall die and lust shall take its place; he will force even the wives of the gods to do his will, for his wealth has made him master of the whole world.  Compared to his restless activity, the giant “Fafner” is “stupid”; he is incapable of transforming gold into power; he merely enjoys its possession, content with the consciousness of his wealth.

But the curse of Alberich, the first who transmuted the shining metal into money, rests on gold and power.  “It shall not bring gladness—­who has it be seared by sorrow, who lacks it devoured by envy....”  The curse of the eternal concatenation:  tyranny—­slavery, the care which accompanies wealth and the envy of the have-nots, can only be lifted from the world by a man who is inwardly free, who is neither master nor slave.  Siegfried understands the song of the birds and the elementary beings, the Rhine-daughters; he is a stranger to human desires and passions.  “I inherited nothing but my body—­and living it is consumed.”  He is proof against the magic of the ring; the only value he knows is love.  Alberich, his opponent, says, in speaking of him:  “My curse has no sting for the mettlesome hero, for he knows not the worth of the ring; he squanders his prodigal strength, laughing and glowing with love his body is burning away.”  Half way between Alberich, the inwardly worthless wielder of power, and Siegfried, the truly free man, the embodiment of all virtue, who is murdered by the powers of darkness, stands Wotan, in whose heart both motives, authority and love, are struggling for supremacy, who will renounce neither love nor power.  Artistically and symbolically the salvation of the world from the curse of greed and tyranny is brought about by the restitution of the ring, and its dissolution in the pure waters of the river from whence it had been taken; the gold is given back to the Rhine-daughters, to fulfil again its original purpose, namely, to delight the heart of man with its dazzling sheen.

Thus Wagner, the greatest and most inspired exponent of love among modern artists, declared that of all values love was the greatest.  His intuitive genius left all the doctrines formulated by Schopenhauer and Buddha far behind and definitely rejected pessimism as a creed.  There is an interesting letter from him to Matilda Wesendonk, written while he was composing the music of Tristan, and containing modifications of Schopenhauer’s philosophy which he considered requisite.  “It is a question of pointing out the road to salvation which no philosopher, not even Schopenhauer, discovered, the road which leads to the perfect pacification of the will through love; I do not mean abstract love for all humanity, but true love, based on sexual love, that is to say love between man and woman.”