alkyrie_ bearing with him a vivid memory of the brilliance
and sweetness of the close must at the very least be struck by the
sombre colouring of the opening of _Siegfried_ the following evening.
I do not mean the orchestral colouring, but the intrinsic thing, the
music itself. The tapping of the hammer on steel goes on, and in mock
seriousness the orchestra gives out a series of prolonged sighs or
groans of the most lugubrious character, reaching a climax as poor
miserable Mime at last gives up his job in despair. Mime, we must
remember, is a half-comic personage; and were his music allotted to
some heroic man facing an impossible task it would be much the same,
save that Wagner would not have so exaggerated the hysterical emotion.
To depict a being facing an impossible task with no noble, but with
only an ignoble, motive requires such an exaggerated mode of
expression. Mime's grief is real enough, but the cause of it
contemptible. After a considerable deal in this mournful key comes the
sudden entry of the bright young savage Siegfried, driving the bear.
His first theme is simply a bugle hunting call: Siegfried was then
nothing but a hunter, a wild child of the forest. But as he gets on
with what he has to say Wagner warms up to his work, and we get many
inspired pages, some of them showing the tendency to indulge in
counterpoint of the finest sort which manifested itself more fully in
the _Mastersingers_, though here the movement is fuller of rude
impetuosity. The movement--for it is a distinct movement--in which
Siegfried describes how he had often looked into the smooth-running
brook, and seeing his reflection there knew he did not resemble Mime,
who therefore could not be his father--for the cub is like the
bear--is one of Wagner's loveliest, and full of a delicate pastoral
feeling (again, in contrast with everything in the _Valkyrie_). The
Wanderer music is sublime. The theme was borrowed from Liszt, and
Liszt ought to have been grateful, for the possibilities of his own
musical subject were surely unfolded to him for the first time. In the
music here, even more than in the vision of the stage, we have the
grey Wanderer of the Scandinavian imagination--the mystery of wood,
mountain, river and ravine, with human sadness superadded, is clearly
communicated to us. Passing over the repetitions from the preceding
operas, concerning which I have already said sufficient, we come to
the nightmare music, where Wagner once