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Updated: May 24, 2025
It was curious to hear, in the vast luminous music of the "Rheingold," flowing like water about the earth, bare to its roots, not only an amplitude but a delicacy of fine shades not less realised than in Chopin. Wagner, it is true, welds the lyric into drama, without losing its lyrical quality. Yet there is no perfect lyric which is made less by the greatness of even a perfect drama.
He was diagramming with his pencil some new mechanical device to be used at the Metropolitan in the production of the Rheingold, when he became conscious that she was looking at him intently, and that he was talking to the four walls. Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture.
But there, in a strange world, his loneliness seemed so frightful that he became very depressed, and made all haste back to Zurich. It was there he wrote the happy music of Das Rheingold. He began the score of Die Walküre at a time when his normal condition was one of suffering. Then he discovered Schopenhauer, whose philosophy only helped to confirm and crystallise his instinctive pessimism.
It is an inversion of the theme of enchantment, a proceeding analogous to reversing the rod, or spelling the charm backward. Wagner makes use of the same device in "Gotterdammerung" when he symbolizes the end of things by inverting the symbol of the original elements in "Das Rheingold."
Unfortunately, our circle was soon to suffer a great loss by Liszt's illness a skin eruption which confined him to his bed for a considerable period. As soon as he was a little better, we quickly went to the piano again to try over by ourselves my two finished scores of Rheingold and the Walkure.
So few people can give one any idea of the music. Go ahead, as long as you like. I can smoke, too." Landry flattened himself out on his cushions and abandoned himself to ease with the circumstance of one who has never grown quite accustomed to ease. Ottenburg played on, as he happened to remember. He understood now why Thea wished him to hear her in "Rheingold."
Meanwhile I plunged with renewed zeal into my work, and had finished a fair copy of the Rheingold score by the 26th of September. In the peaceful quietness of my house at this time I first came across a book which was destined to be of great importance to me. This was Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.
After a brief visit to London, to conduct some concerts for the London Philharmonic, Wagner was back again in Zurich, hard at work on the "Walküre," the first opera of the three, as the "Rheingold" was considered the introduction. By April 1856, the whole opera was finished and sent to Liszt for his opinion.
'Das Rheingold' has a freshness and an open-air feeling which are eminently suitable to the prologue of a work which deals so much with the vast forces of nature as Wagner's colossal drama.
"To-day he's a decent, hard-working feller, Abe, and for two years he's been working for the Rheingold Building and Construction Company. What he don't know about putting up tenement houses, Abe, ain't worth knowing."
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