[1] This suggestion was adopted in the performances at Covent Garden in 1905.--ED.
Never have the musical splendours of the "Ring" been revealed to British audiences as in the past three weeks. The windy and cloudy eloquence of the "Walküre" music and the heroic pathos of Brynhild's leave-taking have long been pretty thoroughly appreciated, but not so the songs of the forge in "Siegfried," where Wagner throws an almost fabulous kind of energy into the picture of the typical young man singing at his work, summing up all that is finest in that enthusiasm of labour which is perhaps the best part of our inheritance from the nineteenth century. These songs were, in the recent production, allowed to develop without cuts or distortion. The brawny rhythm, the iron clangour, the fizz and tumult of the instrumentation--all these things came out as never before at a performance in this country. So, too, with the long love duet of Siegfried and Brynhild and the ravishing trio of the Rhine Maidens in the last act of "Götterdämmerung." But, apart from such dazzling moments, the performances were in their completeness and sustained excellence an extraordinary revelation of the composer's power in the use of musical symbolism. Just before the rise of the curtain on the first act of "Siegfried" one hears that whine or snarl of the Nibelung dwarf, entering on the minor ninth along with the hammering theme. It sounds merely comical and trivial. But just as a personal fault, first observed as something funny, may in the experience of life or study of history be found developing into a source of appalling mischief, so, as these dramas progress, do we find the symbol of Nibelung hatred developing from a comical snarl into those monstrous and multitudinous yells that rend the welkin and dismay the soul amid the gathering horror of the "Götterdämmerung" tragedy. Persons who are in the habit of chattering about the _Leitmotiv_ as though it were a nostrum might with advantage take note of a few such points. The symbols of Nibelung hatred are not more effective nor anywise better done than the other symbols in the "Ring," but they are shorter and more peculiarly orchestrated, and so easier to follow.