strous flower, into the shimmering thing that
enchants King Mark's garden and the rippling stream and the distant
horns while Isolde waits for Tristan, or into the devastating fever that
chains the sick Tristan to his bed of pain.

For all these beings, and behind them Wagner, and behind him his time,
yearn for the past, the pre-natal, the original sleep, and find in such
a return their great fulfilment. Siegmund finds in the traits of his
beloved his own childhood. Siegfried awakes on the flame-engirdled hill
a woman who watched over him before he was born, and waited unchanged
for his ripening. It is with the kiss of Herzeleide that Kundry enmeshes
Parsifal. Brunhilde struggles for the forgiving embrace of Wotan, sinks
on the breast of the god in submission, reconciliation, immolation. And
it is towards an engulfing consummation, some extinction that is both
love and death and deeper than both, that the music of his operas
aspires. The fire that licks the rock of the Walkyrie, the Rhine that
rises in the finale of "Goetterdaemmerung" and inundates the scene and
sweeps the world with its silent, laving tides, the gigantic blossom
that opens its corolla in the Liebestod and buries the lovers in a rain
of scent and petals, the tranquil ruby glow of the chalice that suffuses
the close of "Parsifal," are the moments toward which the dramas
themselves labor, and in which they attain their legitimate conclusion,
completion and end. But not only his finales are full of that
entrancement. His melodic line, the lyrical passages throughout his
operas, seem to seek to attain it, if not conclusively, at least in
preparation. Those silken excessively sweet periods, the moment of
reconciliation and embrace of Wotan and Brunhilde, the "Ach, Isolde"
passage in the third act of "Tristan," those innumerable lyrical flights
with their beginnings and subsidings, their sudden advances and
regressions, their passionate surges that finally and after all their
exquisite hesitations mount and flare and unroll themselves in
fullness--they, too, seem to be seeking to distill some of the same
brew, the same magic drugging potion, to conjure up out of the
orchestral depths some Venusberg, some Klingsor's garden full of subtle
scent and soft delight and eternal forgetfulness.

And with Wagner, the new period of music begins. He stands midway
between the feudal and the modern worlds. In him, the old and classical
period is accomplished. Indeed, so