allel. There is no need here for Donner with his hammer:
the All-father himself is abroad in wrath and majesty, and his
daughters laugh and rejoice in the riot. There is nothing uncanny in
the music: we have that delight in the sheer force of the elements
which we inherit from our earliest ancestors: the joy of nature
fiercely at work which is echoed in our hearts from time immemorial.
The shrilling of the wind, the hubbub, the calls of the Valkyries to
one another, the galloping of the horses, form a picture which for
splendour, wild energy and wilder beauty can never be matched.

Technically, this Ride is a miracle built up of many of the
conventional figurations of the older music. There is the continuous
shake, handed on from instrument to instrument, the slashing figure of
the upper strings, the kind of basso ostinato, conventionally
indicating the galloping of horses, and the chief melody, a mere
bugle-call, altered by a change of rhythm into a thing of superb
strength. The only part of the music that ever so remotely suggests
extravagance is the Valkyrie's call; and it, after all, is only a
jodel put to sublime uses. Out of these commonplace elements, elements
that one might almost call prosaic, Wagner wrought his picture of
storm, with its terror, power, joyous laughter of the storm's
daughters--storm as it must have seemed to the first poets of our
race. The counterpoint is not so obviously wonderful as in _Tristan_
and the _Mastersingers_, but only a contrapuntist equal to Bach and
Handel could have written such counterpoint. We may gain a clearer
idea of what this means if we compare, not to the disadvantage of one
or the other, this Ride with Berlioz's "Ride to the Abyss." At first
sight, Berlioz seems the more daring. He trusts to a persistent rhythm
and to orchestral effects. There is no inner structure--the separate
parts, or batteries of parts, have no individuality: nothing of the
sort is attempted or indeed wanted. The horses gallop on like mad
things: their pace cannot be checked; themes, properly speaking, there
are none--we hear the screeches of fearsome wild-fowl, the excitement
and the noise increase, until at last the catastrophe is reached, and
the final climax is the terrible gibberish-chant of all the devils in
hell. Regarded as sheer music, the thing gets as far by the twentieth
bar as ever it gets. The piece is as near to pure colour in music as
can be attained. Why, Wagner with his counterp