kably an opera, with chorus, concerted pieces, grand finales,
and a heroine who, if she does not sing florid variations with
flute obbligato, is none the less a very perceptible prima donna. In
everything but musical technique the change from Lohengrin to The Rhine
Gold is quite revolutionary.

The explanation is that Night Falls On The Gods came in between them,
although its music was not finished until twenty years after that of
The Rhine Gold, and thus belongs to a later and more masterful phase of
Wagner's harmonic style. It first came into Wagner's head as an opera
to be entitled Siegfried's Death, founded on the old Niblung Sagas, which
offered to Wagner the same material for an effective theatrical tragedy
as they did to Ibsen. Ibsen's Vikings in Helgeland is, in kind, what
Siegfried's Death was originally intended to be: that is, a heroic piece
for the theatre, without the metaphysical or allegorical complications
of The Ring. Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of the Saga cannot by any
perversion of ingenuity be adapted to the perfectly clear allegorical
design of The Rhine Gold, The Valkyries, and Siegfried.

SIEGFRIED AS PROTESTANT

The philosophically fertile element in the original project of
Siegfried's Death was the conception of Siegfried himself as a type of
the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own impulses by
an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear, sickliness of
conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral crutches of law and
order which accompany them. Such a character appears extraordinarily
fascinating and exhilarating to our guilty and conscience-ridden
generations, however little they may understand him. The world has
always delighted in the man who is delivered from conscience. From Punch
and Don Juan down to Robert Macaire, Jeremy Diddler and the pantomime
clown, he has always drawn large audiences; but hitherto he has been
decorously given to the devil at the end. Indeed eternal punishment is
sometimes deemed too high a compliment to his nature. When the late Lord
Lytton, in his Strange Story, introduced a character personifying the
joyousness of intense vitality, he felt bound to deny him the immortal
soul which was at that time conceded even to the humblest characters in
fiction, and to accept mischievousness, cruelty, and utter incapacity
for sympathy as the inevitable consequence of his magnificent bodily and
mental health.

In short, though men felt a