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If we run into problems we can't agree on, we holler for help. But if he acts like most of the Blue Doctors I know, he'll think he's in command." A jitney stopped for them, and then zoomed out across the field toward the ship. The gantry platform was just clanging to the ground, unloading three technicians and a Four-bar Electronics Engineer.
There are no regular four-bar measures and full closes as in the earlier work; but a great deal is nothing more than dry recitative disguised.
There are ten bars of introduction: in the eleventh, to the Dutchman theme, Senta sings the "Yo-ho-ho"; at the fifteenth, with a glorious swing and rush she dashes into the ballad "Traft ihr das Schiff im Meere an, Blutroth die Segel, schwarz der Mast? Auf hohem Bord der bleiche Mann, Des Schilfes Herr, wacht ohne Rast." This consists of eight bars a four-bar section repeated.
Many points in his prolonged passages which are simply arpeggios of the chord of the diminished seventh must have seemed novel in the eighteen-forties, though we hardly notice them now. The four-bar lengths send the music along with a swing very different from the jerkiness of contemporary opera music.
The wide sweep of the tide of music that we find in the Valkyrie is absent; there is a tendency to shorten the measures, a hesitation between boldly going on, as in his later manner, and the symmetrical four-bar measures of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin.
The class will now find it quite easy to extemporize the whole of a four-bar phrase. Suggestions can be made by the teacher, such as: 'Begin on the third beat of the bar. 'Introduce two triplets in the course of the phrase, and so on. When this becomes easy to them they will be ready to begin eight-bar melodies.
Last summer I was surprised beyond measure to see the large herds of twenty to forty pronghorn antelopes still surviving on the Laramie plains, fenced in on all sides by the wires of the great Four-Bar Ranch, part of which I believe are stretched illegally.
The song is, I say, a pretty one; indeed, it is so pretty that but for the enchantment of each successive phrase no one could stand the monotony of so long a series of four-bar phrases. Of that fault in Lohengrin I shall have more to say presently.
Vigorous and brilliant as his orchestral writing is, it is generally kept in subservience to the voices, and though in the more declamatory parts of the opera he writes with the utmost freedom, he has a lurking affection for four-bar rhythm, and many of the songs are conveniently detachable from the score. 'Sigurd' is animated throughout by a loftiness of design worthy of the sincerest praise.
Much of the music does not rise above the level of Spontini or Marschner; there are wearisome pages, there are heavy chords repeated again and again with violin figurations on top, there are lines of the verse repeated to fit in with the conventional melodies in four-bar lengths. Very often the result, it must be admitted, is lamentable.
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