f majesty and musical
expression. The loss of all simplicity and dignity, the impossibility
of any credible scenic presentation of the incidents, and the extreme
staginess of the conventions by which these impossibilities are got
over, are no doubt covered from the popular eye by the overwhelming
prestige of Die Gotterdammerung as part of so great a work as The Ring,
and by the extraordinary storm of emotion and excitement which the music
keeps up. But the very qualities that intoxicate the novice in music
enlighten the adept. In spite of the fulness of the composer's technical
accomplishment, the finished style and effortless mastery of harmony and
instrumentation displayed, there is not a bar in the work which moves
us as the same themes moved us in The Valkyries, nor is anything but
external splendor added to the life and humor of Siegfried.

In the original poem, Brynhild delays her self-immolation on the pyre of
Siegfried to read the assembled choristers a homily on the efficacy of
the Love panacea. "My holiest wisdom's hoard," she says, "now I make
known to the world. I believe not in property, nor money, nor godliness,
nor hearth and high place, nor pomp and peerage, nor contract and
custom, but in Love. Let that only prevail; and ye shall be blest in
weal or woe." Here the repudiations still smack of Bakoonin; but the
saviour is no longer the volition of the full-grown spirit of Man, the
Free Willer of Necessity, sword in hand, but simply Love, and not even
Shelleyan love, but vehement sexual passion. It is highly significant
of the extent to which this uxorious commonplace lost its hold of Wagner
(after disturbing his conscience, as he confesses to Roeckel, for years)
that it disappears in the full score of Night Falls On The Gods, which
was not completed until he was on the verge of producing Parsifal,
twenty years after the publication of the poem. He cut the homily out,
and composed the music of the final scene with a flagrant recklessness
of the old intention. The rigorous logic with which representative
musical themes are employed in the earlier dramas is here abandoned
without scruple; and for the main theme at the conclusion he selects a
rapturous passage sung by Sieglinda in the third act of The Valkyries
when Brynhild inspires her with a sense of her high destiny as the
mother of the unborn hero. There is no dramatic logic whatever in the
recurrence of this theme to express the transport in which Brynhi