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Updated: May 20, 2025
The first scene prepares us to understand clearly and to grasp firmly the forces that are presently to be let loose and run the drama on to its tragic dénouement; and after that, scene follows scene with absolute inevitability. During Wagner's five years of theorising after quitting Dresden in 1849 he had thought of subjects and written parts of the Ring. Tristan is the greatest work he completed.
The scene between Siegfried and Brünnhilda is more inspired; and the journey to the Rhine is one of Wagner's finest bits of picture-painting. The change of feeling towards the end is superb: a sense of foreboding and dread comes into the music and prepares us for the coming disaster. But when the curtain rises on the hall of the Gibichungs we at once get more artificiality and theatricality.
"Some day they will venture to make judicious long cuts in Wagner's operas, and then they'll be interesting. It always amuses me, this reverence of little people for the great ones as if a great man were always great. No he is always great. But often it's in a dull way. And the dull parts ought to be skipped." "I don't like the opera this evening," said she.
It is usually claimed by Wagner's most rabid partisans that she was unable to hold her place in the new surroundings, and that his genius needed a helpmate more in sympathy with his high ideals.
With the new drama this was impossible. Wagner's insistent refusal to permit any mutilation of his work always appeared to Intendants and Impresarii who were anxious to meet him halfway like monstrous egotism. What Rossini and Meyerbeer had always consented to without the smallest hesitation might, they thought, content a Richard Wagner.
He took the £20, and then, his artistic conscience happily triumphing over his commercial conscience, he used the money to live upon until he had completed his own opera on the same subject. It failed and is forgotten. How Wagner's fared all the world knows. Rienzi was now getting ready at Dresden, and thither Wagner went in April, 1842.
Bayreuth is Wagner's creation in the world of action, as the music-dramas are his creation in the world of art; and it is a triumph not less decisive, in its transposition of dream into reality. Remember that every artist, in every art, has desired his own Bayreuth, and that only Wagner has attained it.
This, let me remark in passing, was and is common enough when a widowed mother has married a second time. Several such cases are within my own experience; and malicious snarls at Wagner's double name, as though at some period he had gone under an alias, are purely futile and worthy only of an advocate with a desperate case.
Beckmesser's song is almost outrageous caricature; the parody of the academics of Wagner's day who made no mistakes from the academic point of view, and yet could write nothing that sounded right, is excruciatingly funny; then David, under the impression that the chief of the academics is serenading Magdalena, comes out, goes in to fetch a stick, comes out again armed, and sets to work with it upon Beckmesser; the good burghers have been annoyed by Beckmesser's caterwauling and Sachs' hammering; out they come to keep their streets in order; and the tumult begins in serious earnest.
But nothing was done until 8 o'clock, when the movements began which disposed of our army as follows: Wagner's division was sent to Spring Hill to guard the reserve artillery and the wagon trains, all ordered to Spring Hill, from any raid by Hood's cavalry. General Stanley, the corps commander, went with Wagner.
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