er on the _Dutchman_--the phrase is marked (_f_) on p.
118. The _Dutchman_ phrase is longer and at the same time less
poignant; here it is brief and extraordinarily expressive; there it is
not developed, nor, after some repetitions, heard again; here it is
made the most of musically and appears so late as in the _Dusk of the
Gods_. But the situations are analogous. Senta gazes, rapt, on
Vanderdecken; Sieglinda and Siegmund look on one another and passion
begins to dawn. This is worth noting as showing that Wagner used the
leitmotiv spontaneously, so to speak, and not always as the result of
deliberate calculation. Like all the other composers, he had his
mannerisms: having invented a melody to find utterance for a feeling
or set of feelings, when similar feelings had to be expressed again it
was natural to him to use again the first melody, or something very
like it. No composer, not even Beethoven, was more resolutely bent on
writing _truthful_ music; and having once found the music to express
certain shades of feeling, he was like a writer who, having said
something as well as he can say it, prefers repeating himself to
trying to achieve a superficial appearance of variety. Wagner, I
think, repeated himself quite unconsciously very often: when the
repetition is conscious of course we have at once the genuine
leitmotiv; but it is the maddest of errors to see in every resemblance
between phrases the deliberate employment of the leitmotiv.

The pair have drunk mead together and stand looking at one another;
the storm has died away; and from the orchestra come passages of
wondrous delicacy, tenderness and freshness, scored by a perfect
master. Suddenly the clanking of a horse's hoofs is heard; "Hunding!"
exclaims Sieglinda; the door is again thrown open and the black,
ferocious barbarian stalks in. His theme is, figuratively, as black,
gloomy, sinister and forbidding as himself; and the heavy, sullen
tones of the battery of tubas which announces it intensify its
effectiveness a hundredfold. Hunding is no villain of the piece, but a
simple, surly chief of a tribe of savage fighters, and Wagner's music
exactly describes him. Save for Siegmund's recital of his woes, the
remainder of the scene remains sullen and gloomy; Siegmund, however,
has some touching passages, and notably a phrase of unearthly
strangeness when he tells how he came back to his hut and found his
father gone, only a wolf-skin lying there; and a bit of the