The Music of The Ring - Page 2

strike down through the
water and light up the glittering treasure, hitherto invisible.
The reference of the strange little theme of the wishing cap is
equally manifest from the first, since the spectator's attention
is wholly taken up with the Tarnhelm and its magic when the theme
is first pointedly uttered by the orchestra. The sword theme is
introduced at the end of The Rhine Gold to express Wotan's hero
inspiration; and I have already mentioned that Wagner, unable,
when it came to practical stage management, to forego the appeal
to the eye as well as to the thought, here made Wotan pick up a
sword and brandish it, though no such instruction appears in the
printed score. When this sacrifice to Wagner's scepticism as to
the reality of any appeal to an audience that is not made through
their bodily sense is omitted, the association of the theme with
the sword is not formed until that point in the first act of The
Valkyries at which Siegmund is left alone by Hunding's hearth,
weaponless, with the assurance that he will have to fight for his
life at dawn with his host. He recalls then how his father
promised him a sword for his hour of need; and as he does so, a
flicker from the dying fire is caught by the golden hilt of the
sword in the tree, when the theme immediately begins to gleam
through the quiver of sound from the orchestra, and only dies
out as the fire sinks and the sword is once more hidden by the
darkness. Later on, this theme, which is never silent whilst
Sieglinda is dwelling on the story of the sword, leaps out into
the most dazzling splendor the band can give it when Siegmund
triumphantly draws the weapon from the tree. As it consists of
seven notes only, with a very marked measure, and a melody like
a simple flourish on a trumpet or post horn, nobody capable of
catching a tune can easily miss it.

The Valhalla theme, sounded with solemn grandeur as the home of
the gods first appears to us and to Wotan at the beginning of the
second scene of The Rhine Gold, also cannot be mistaken. It, too,
has a memorable rhythm; and its majestic harmonies, far from
presenting those novel or curious problems in polyphony of which
Wagner still stands suspected by superstitious people, are just
those three simple chords which festive students who vamp
accompaniments to comic songs "by ear" soon find sufficient for
nearly all the popular tunes in the world.

On the other hand, the ring theme, when it begins to hurtle
through the third scene of The Rhine Gold, cannot possibly be
referred to any special feature in the general gloom and turmoil
of the den of the dwarfs. It is not a melody, but merely the
displaced metric accent which musicians call syncopation, rung on
the