d explanations on the stage; nothing in _Tristan_ needs
explanation; in the _Mastersingers_ and the _Ring_ his resources--his
inventiveness and technical mastery of music--were unbounded, and an
intractable incident he simply smothered in splendid music. Here, the
bargaining of Daland and Vanderdecken is a very intractable incident,
and in trying to make the best of it he made the worst. That is, he
would have saved us an appalling _longueur_ had he given us two
minutes of frank recitative in place of twenty minutes of make-believe
music--music in the very finest kapellmeister style of the period.
Even the passage quoted (_c_) is made nothing of. There are one or two
fine dramatic touches, as, for instance, when Daland asks if his ship
is any the worse: "Mein Schiff ist fest, es leidet keinen Schaden,"
with its bitter double meaning; but on the whole things are very
dreary and dispiriting until the south wind blows up and stirs the
composer's imagination. The sweet wind carries off the mariners to
their home; the water ripples and plashes gently; and to the last bar
of the act all is peace and beauty. The music has not, perhaps, the
point of, say, the quieter bits of Mendelssohn's _Hebrides_, but it
runs delicately along, and it more than serves.

The figure (_l_), which has been so prominent in the overture and
sailors' choruses, is equally noticeable in the next act. The spinning
chorus, in fact, may be said to grow out of it. There is no break
between the two acts (Wagner's first intention was to go straight on,
making the _Dutchman_ an opera in one long act); the introduction to
the second is a continuation of the conclusion of the first. The
figure is repeated several times in a long diminuendo, changing the
key from B flat to A major, so we never cease to feel the presence of
the eternal sea. Inside the skipper's old-world house one is conscious
that the waves are plashing not far from the walls, and that the air
is salt and fresh there. There is a pervading dreamy atmosphere: again
we are carried away into far-off times; the scene has the unreality of
a dream, a dream of the sea. Mlle. Senta quickly shatters that
illusion with her passion and living young blood; but in memory one
always has this cottage, where women pass the days in singing, where
there are no clocks, and time can only be measured by the waves as
they break on the shore. The maiden's spinning song is small scale
music; nothing ambitious is wanted