r Seemann, sie finden?
Betet zum Himmel dass bald
Ein Weib Treue ihm halt'!"

The three themes are of very unequal power. The first is one of the
landmarks in musical history; neither Wagner himself nor any of the
other great masters ever hit upon a more gigantic theme, terrible in
its direct force at its announcement, still more terrible as it is
used in the overture and later in the drama. The second, Senta, is a
piece of sloppy German sentimentality: this is not a heroine who will
(rightly or wrongly) sacrifice herself for an idea, but a hausfrau who
will always have her husband's supper ready and his slippers laid to
warm on the stove shelf. It is significant that Senta herself in her
moment of highest exaltation does not refer to it: Wagner often
calculated wrong, but he never felt wrong. The third, the grief and
anguish of the condemned sailor, and pity for him, is one of the most
wonderful things in music; for blent with its pathos is the feeling of
a remoter time, the feeling that it all happened in ages that are
past, the feeling for "old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long
ago." This sense of the past, the historic sense--call it what you
will--was thus strong in Wagner at this early period, and it grew even
stronger later on, finding its most passionate expression in _Tristan_
and its loveliest expression in the _Mastersingers_. The faculty to
shape pregnant musical themes is the stamp of the great master. The
early men are supposed to have "taken church melodies" and worked them
up into masses: what they did was to take meaningless strings of
notes, bare suggestions, and give them form and meaning by means of
rhythm (for only boobies talk of the old church music not possessing
rhythm). The later composers sometimes followed the same
procedure--which is equivalent to a sculptor "taking" a block of
marble and hewing out a statue; but more and more they trusted to
their own imaginations. In either case the "mighty line" results; and
there is not a great composition in the world which has not great
themes; and, _vice versa_, when the themes are trivial the work
evolved from them is invariably trivial. I see modern works full of
cleverness and colour: I do not waste much time on them; there cannot
be anything in them, and they will not survive. Along with some weak
motives--or, to be more accurate, motives which are musically weak but
dramatically a help--Wagner has a huge list of tremendous