The Old and the New Music

In the old-fashioned opera every separate number involved the
composition of a fresh melody; but it is quite a mistake to
suppose that this creative-effort extended continuously
throughout the number from the first to the last bar. When a
musician composes according to a set metrical pattern, the
selection of the pattern and the composition of the first stave
(a stave in music corresponds to a line in verse) generally
completes the creative effort. All the rest follows more or less
mechanically to fill up the pattern, an air being very like a
wall-paper design in this respect. Thus the second stave is
usually a perfectly obvious consequence of the first; and the
third and fourth an exact or very slightly varied repetition of
the first and second. For example, given the first line of Pop
Goes the Weasel or Yankee Doodle, any musical cobbler could
supply the remaining three. There is very little tune turning of
this kind in The Ring; and it is noteworthy that where it does
occur, as in Siegmund's spring song and Mimmy's croon, "Ein
zullendes Kind," the effect of the symmetrical staves, recurring
as a mere matter of form, is perceptibly poor and platitudinous
compared with the free flow of melody which prevails elsewhere.

The other and harder way of composing is to take a strain of free
melody, and ring every variety of change of mood upon it as if it
were a thought that sometimes brought hope, sometimes melancholy,
sometimes exultation, sometimes raging despair and so on. To take
several themes of this kind, and weave them together into a rich
musical fabric passing panoramically before the ear with a
continually varying flow of sentiment, is the highest feat of the
musician: it is in this way that we get the fugue of Bach and the
symphony of Beethoven. The admittedly inferior musician is the
one who, like Auber and Offenbach, not to mention our purveyors
of drawing-room ballads, can produce an unlimited quantity of
symmetrical tunes, but cannot weave themes symphonically.

When this is taken into account, it will be seen that the fact
that there is a great deal of repetition in The Ring does not
distinguish it from the old-fashioned operas. The real difference
is that in them the repetition was used for the mechanical
completion of conventional metric patterns, whereas in The Ring
the recurrence of the theme is an intelligent and interesting
consequence of the recurrence of the dramatic phenomenon which it
denotes. It should be remembered also that the substitution of
symphonically treated themes for tunes with symmetrical eight-bar
staves and the like, has always been the rule in the highest
forms of music. To describe it, or be affected by it, as an
abandonment of melody,