s very
little tune turning of this kind in The Ring; and it is noteworthy that
where it does occur, as in Siegmund's spring song and Mimmy's croon,
"Ein zullendes Kind," the effect of the symmetrical staves, recurring
as a mere matter of form, is perceptibly poor and platitudinous compared
with the free flow of melody which prevails elsewhere.

The other and harder way of composing is to take a strain of free
melody, and ring every variety of change of mood upon it as if it were
a thought that sometimes brought hope, sometimes melancholy, sometimes
exultation, sometimes raging despair and so on. To take several themes
of this kind, and weave them together into a rich musical fabric
passing panoramically before the ear with a continually varying flow of
sentiment, is the highest feat of the musician: it is in this way that
we get the fugue of Bach and the symphony of Beethoven. The admittedly
inferior musician is the one who, like Auber and Offenbach, not to
mention our purveyors of drawing-room ballads, can produce an unlimited
quantity of symmetrical tunes, but cannot weave themes symphonically.

When this is taken into account, it will be seen that the fact that
there is a great deal of repetition in The Ring does not distinguish it
from the old-fashioned operas. The real difference is that in them the
repetition was used for the mechanical completion of conventional
metric patterns, whereas in The Ring the recurrence of the theme is
an intelligent and interesting consequence of the recurrence of the
dramatic phenomenon which it denotes. It should be remembered also
that the substitution of symphonically treated themes for tunes with
symmetrical eight-bar staves and the like, has always been the rule in
the highest forms of music. To describe it, or be affected by it, as
an abandonment of melody, is to confess oneself an ignoramus conversant
only with dance tunes and ballads.

The sort of stuff a purely dramatic musician produces when he hampers
himself with metric patterns in composition is not unlike what might
have resulted in literature if Carlyle (for example) had been compelled
by convention to write his historical stories in rhymed stanzas. That
is to say, it limits his fertility to an occasional phrase, and three
quarters of the time exercises only his barren ingenuity in fitting
rhymes and measures to it. In literature the great masters of the art
have long emancipated themselves from metric patterns. Nobod