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Throughout his earlier works the guiding theme is used with increasing frequency, it is true, so that in 'Lohengrin' its employment adds materially to the poetical interest of the score; but in 'Das Rheingold' we are in a different world. Here the guiding theme is the pivot upon which the entire work turns.
As she still had a fine voice, and was full of goodwill towards me, I allowed her to practise the last act of Walkure for herself, and the Rhine Maidens scenes from the Rheingold with her two daughters, and frequently in the course of the winter we had managed to give short performances of this music for our friends.
Music, of course from Frohberger and Haydn to Mendelssohn, Wagner, Raff, and Debussy abounds in examples of natural imagery. In claiming a certain excellence for his method one need scarcely imply that MacDowell has ever threatened the supremacy of such things as the "Rheingold" prelude or the "Walküre" fire music.
He saw a large room, some seventy feet long, filled with a miscellaneous foreign crowd South Germans, Austrians, Russians, Italians seated in groups round small tables, smoking, playing cards or dominoes, reading the day's newspapers which the funicular had just brought up, or lazily listening to the moderately good band which was playing some Rheingold selection at the farther end.
He let you go thinking you had seen and learned nothing, and in doing so warded off a search party to-morrow." Blessed is he that expects nothing, for he shall not be disappointed. Roland walked with Greusel across the bridge and through the streets to the entrance of the Rheingold, and there stopped. "I shall not go down with you," he said.
"Three bars farther on he is writing for three violins and a flute. He withdraws his instruments in a couple of bars; it would take anyone else five-and-twenty." At a little distance the old stag who had never missed a festival at Bayreuth was telling the young lady at his side that the "Walküre" is written in the same style as the "Rheingold" and the first two acts of "Siegfried."
But it may be confessed without much fear of contradiction that for him Wagner is his model even in Salome, where the head of John the Baptist is chanted to the tune of Donner's motive from Rheingold. At the Stuttgart festival, in 1912, which endured a week, I was struck by the Wagner obsession in the music of his only legitimate successor.
"He asked me, finally, if any one in Frankfort knew I had come to the forest, and I answered that the guild of twenty knew, and that we were all to meet to-night at the Rheingold tavern to report.
The difference in style between 'Lohengrin' and 'Das Rheingold' is so very marked that it is only natural to look for some explanation of the sudden change other than the natural development of the composer's genius. Wagner's social position at this point in his career may have reacted to a certain extent upon his music.
Had he been caught, like his friends, and, like them, imprisoned during these years, it is not likely that the world would now possess those seven monuments of his ripest genius, "Rheingold," "Die Walküre," "Siegfried," "Götterdämmerung," "Tristan and Isolde," "Die Meistersinger," and "Parsifal."
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