The Perfect Wagnerite | Page 8

never driving at
anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving
at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like.
And this is why he is so easy for the natural musician who has had no
academic teaching. The professors, when Wagner's music is played to

them, exclaim at once "What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no
cabaletta to it--not even a full close? Why was that discord not prepared;
and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he indulge in those
scandalous and illicit transitions into a key that has not one note in
common with the key he has just left? Listen to those false relations!
What does he want with six drums and eight horns when Mozart
worked miracles with two of each? The man is no musician." The
layman neither knows nor cares about any of these things. If Wagner
were to turn aside from his straightforward dramatic purpose to
propitiate the professors with correct exercises in sonata form, his
music would at once become unintelligible to the unsophisticated
spectator, upon whom the familiar and dreaded "classical" sensation
would descend like the influenza. Nothing of the kind need be dreaded.
The unskilled, untaught musician may approach Wagner boldly; for
there is no possibility of a misunderstanding between them: The Ring
music is perfectly single and simple. It is the adept musician of the old
school who has everything to unlearn: and him I leave, unpitied, to his
fate.

THE RING OF THE NIBLUNGS
The Ring consists of four plays, intended to be performed on four
successive evenings, entitled The Rhine Gold (a prologue to the other
three), The Valkyries, Siegfried, and Night Falls On The Gods; or, in
the original German, Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Die
Gotterdammerung.
THE RHINE GOLD
Let me assume for a moment that you are a young and good-looking
woman. Try to imagine yourself in that character at Klondyke five
years ago. The place is teeming with gold. If you are content to leave
the gold alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking them,
enjoying with perfect naivete its color and glitter and preciousness, no
human being will ever be the worse for your knowledge of it; and
whilst you remain in that frame of mind the golden age will endure.
Now suppose a man comes along: a man who has no sense of the
golden age, nor any power of living in the present: a man with common
desires, cupidities, ambitions, just like most of the men you know.
Suppose you reveal to that man the fact that if he will only pluck this

gold up, and turn it into money, millions of men, driven by the invisible
whip of hunger, will toil underground and overground night and day to
pile up more and more gold for him until he is master of the world!
You will find that the prospect will not tempt him so much as you
might imagine, because it involves some distasteful trouble to himself
to start with, and because there is something else within his reach
involving no distasteful toil, which he desires more passionately; and
that is yourself. So long as he is preoccupied with love of you, the gold,
and all that it implies, will escape him: the golden age will endure. Not
until he forswears love will he stretch out his hand to the gold, and
found the Plutonic empire for himself. But the choice between love and
gold may not rest altogether with him. He may be an ugly, ungracious,
unamiable person, whose affections may seem merely ludicrous and
despicable to you. In that case, you may repulse him, and most bitterly
humiliate and disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse the
love he can never win, and turn remorselessly to the gold? With that, he
will make short work of your golden age, and leave you lamenting its
lost thoughtlessness and sweetness.
In due time the gold of Klondyke will find its way to the great cities of
the world. But the old dilemma will keep continually reproducing itself.
The man who will turn his back on love, and upon all the fruitful it, and
will set himself single-heartedly to gather gold in an exultant dream of
wielding its Plutonic powers, will find the treasure yielding quickly to
his touch. But few men will make this sacrifice voluntarily. Not until
the Plutonic power is so strongly set up that the higher human impulses
are suppressed as rebellious, and even the mere appetites are denied,
starved, and insulted when they cannot purchase their satisfaction with
gold, are the energetic spirits driven to build their lives upon riches.
How inevitable that course has become