than any of his previous works afforded. He had not, as before, to place
his characters in a scene, to arrange a background for them. Many of the
characters are the elements typified--the water-nymphs, the giants,
Donner, Loge, Erda. Wotan himself rides on the tempest, surrounded with
fearful lightnings; the Valkyrie maidens ride through the air on
supernatural horses amidst thunder and wind and rain. The whole action
takes place in the open air, or in the bowels of the earth, or the
depths of the Rhine; mountain and storm-lashed woods, dismal caverns and
chasms, the broad river, are always before us. Two scenes take place
under a man-made roof: in the first act of _The Valkyrie_ we have
Hunding's rough hut, built round an ash-tree, which penetrates the top,
and its branches sway and dash together above the actors' heads; in the
_Dusk of the Gods_ there is Gunther's hall, completely open on one side.
Undefiled Nature, healthy and wild and sweet, is always present, and
always in sympathy with the character of every scene. Besides being
magically picturesque, the music is also continuously in a high degree
dramatic, and it has yet another quality: it is charged with a sense of
a strange, remote past--a past that never existed. No archaic chords or
progressions occur, but by a series of miraculous touches the atmosphere
of a far-away past is kept before us. To save coming back to this again,
I will mention such instances as the Rhine-maidens' wail, heard far down
in the valley as the gods march triumphantly to Valhalla; the passage in
which Siegmund recounts how on coming home one day he found the house in
ashes, his sister and father gone, and only a wolf-skin lying on the
ground; the Fate theme, and the haunting song of the Rhine-maidens in
the last act of the _Dusk of the Gods_.

Now, though one would regret the loss of some of the music I have
mentioned, the _Rhinegold_ is tedious, long in proportion to the
significance--musical and dramatic--of its content, and on the whole a