ubjects, strettos, and pedal
points; there are passacaglias on ground basses, canons ad hypodiapente,
and other ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their
prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never driving at
anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving
at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like.
And this is why he is so easy for the natural musician who has had no
academic teaching. The professors, when Wagner's music is played to
them, exclaim at once "What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there
no cabaletta to it--not even a full close? Why was that discord not
prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he indulge
in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key that has not
one note in common with the key he has just left? Listen to those false
relations! What does he want with six drums and eight horns when Mozart
worked miracles with two of each? The man is no musician." The layman
neither knows nor cares about any of these things. If Wagner were to
turn aside from his straightforward dramatic purpose to propitiate the
professors with correct exercises in sonata form, his music would at
once become unintelligible to the unsophisticated spectator, upon whom
the familiar and dreaded "classical" sensation would descend like the
influenza. Nothing of the kind need be dreaded. The unskilled, untaught
musician may approach Wagner boldly; for there is no possibility of a
misunderstanding between them: The Ring music is perfectly single and
simple. It is the adept musician of the old school who has everything to
unlearn: and him I leave, unpitied, to his fate.

THE RING OF THE NIBLUNGS

The Ring consists of four plays, intended to be performed on four
successive evenings, entitled The Rhine Gold (a prologue to the other
three), The Valkyries, Siegfried, and Night Falls On The Gods; or, in
the original German, Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Die
Gotterdammerung.

THE RHINE GOLD

Let me assume for a moment that you are a young and good-looking woman.
Try to imagine yourself in that character at Klondyke five years ago.
The place is teeming with gold. If you are content to leave the gold
alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking them, enjoying with
perfect naivete its color and glitter and preciousness, no human being
will ever be the worse for your knowledge of it; and