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It is worth insisting on this, partly because it is eminently characteristic of Wagner, partly because it enables us now to trace with some certainty the growth of the Nibelung's Ring, both drama and music, from its birth to its final execution. The history of the building-up of the drama, like the drama itself, is a mightily complicated and entangled matter.
"Well said, child. Now canst sit on old Nibelung's croup? His back- bone is somewhat sharper than if he had battened in a citizen's stall; but, if thine aunt can find thee some sort of pillion, I'll promise thee the best ride thou hast had since we came from Innspruck, ere thou canst remember." "Christina has her own mule," replied her uncle, "without troubling Nibelung to carry double."
It will be seen that Wagner never ceased to work during all this dreary time. He drafted his Wieland the Smith, made tentative shots at what at length grew into the Nibelung's Ring, and poured forth an enormous quantity of very prosy prose. Deferring a consideration of this last, let me tell briefly what his everyday life was.
In three weeks they came riding into the land, to Nibelung's castle, in the marches of Norway, whither they were sent. Here they found the knight. The mounts of the messengers were weary from the lengthy way. Both Siegfried and Kriemhild were then told that knights were come, who wore such clothes as men were wont to wear at Burgundy.
At this point, when we are wondering how, with Brünnhilde wiped from his memory, he can proceed, Hagen hands him a horn filled with wine, in which he has been seen expressing the juice of an herb; this, the Nibelung's son, wise in the virtues of simples, tells him, will sharpen his memory and bring close remote events.
Then was the hero in dire need. Siegfried gan fear a deal his death, when the warder struck such mighty blows. Enow his master Siegfried loved him for this cause. They strove so sore that all the castle rang and the sound was heard in Nibelung's hall. He overcame the warder and bound him, too. The tale was noised abroad in all the Nibelungs' land.
He sat down to the piano and began to play softly the Castle motive from the Nibelung's Ring. He kept repeating it in different keys. 'What about the mumps, wife? he asked Mrs Brindley, who had been out of the room and now returned. 'Oh! I don't think it is mumps, she replied. 'They're all asleep. 'Good! he murmured, still playing the Castle motive.
In "The Flying Dutchman," "The Nibelung's Ring," and "Tannhauser" the idea is practically his creation. In the last of these dramas it is evolved out of the simple episode in the parent-legend of the death of Lisaura, whose heart broke when her knight went to kiss the Queen of Love and Beauty.
He first makes several struggles to keep the power while shifting its responsibilities, and these form the subject of three of the four dramas. The power is symbolised by the gold of the Rhine; this gold, made into a Ring the Nibelung's Ring gives absolute power to its possessor.
Also, while considered by itself "The Dusk of the Gods" is interesting mainly on account of the music, considered in association, as Wagner wished, and as one must for, after all, it is but the final act of a stupendous drama, and it is unfair and foolish to consider any one act of a drama alone with the other minor dramas of the greater drama, "The Nibelung's Ring," it is dramatically not only interesting, absorbing, but absolutely indispensable, true, inevitable.
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