is wholly taken up with the Tarnhelm and its magic
when the theme is first pointedly uttered by the orchestra. The sword
theme is introduced at the end of The Rhine Gold to express Wotan's hero
inspiration; and I have already mentioned that Wagner, unable, when it
came to practical stage management, to forego the appeal to the eye as
well as to the thought, here made Wotan pick up a sword and brandish
it, though no such instruction appears in the printed score. When this
sacrifice to Wagner's scepticism as to the reality of any appeal to an
audience that is not made through their bodily sense is omitted, the
association of the theme with the sword is not formed until that point
in the first act of The Valkyries at which Siegmund is left alone by
Hunding's hearth, weaponless, with the assurance that he will have to
fight for his life at dawn with his host. He recalls then how his father
promised him a sword for his hour of need; and as he does so, a flicker
from the dying fire is caught by the golden hilt of the sword in the
tree, when the theme immediately begins to gleam through the quiver of
sound from the orchestra, and only dies out as the fire sinks and the
sword is once more hidden by the darkness. Later on, this theme, which
is never silent whilst Sieglinda is dwelling on the story of the sword,
leaps out into the most dazzling splendor the band can give it when
Siegmund triumphantly draws the weapon from the tree. As it consists of
seven notes only, with a very marked measure, and a melody like a simple
flourish on a trumpet or post horn, nobody capable of catching a tune
can easily miss it.

The Valhalla theme, sounded with solemn grandeur as the home of the gods
first appears to us and to Wotan at the beginning of the second scene
of The Rhine Gold, also cannot be mistaken. It, too, has a memorable
rhythm; and its majestic harmonies, far from presenting those novel or
curious problems in polyphony of which Wagner still stands suspected by
superstitious people, are just those three simple chords which festive
students who vamp accompaniments to comic songs "by ear" soon find
sufficient for nearly all the popular tunes in the world.

On the other hand, the ring theme, when it begins to hurtle through
the third scene of The Rhine Gold, cannot possibly be referred to any
special feature in the general gloom and turmoil of the den of the
dwarfs. It is not a melody, but merely the displaced metric accent which
mus