It
was speaking through music, no more, monotonous as the Sahara, league
after league, and I lost amid sands. A chord is heard in "Lohengrin"
to sustain Elsa's voice, and it performs its purpose; a motive is
heard to attract attention to a certain part of the story, and it
fills its purpose, when Ortrud shrieks out the motive of the secret,
and in its simplest form, at the church door, the method may be
criticised as crude, but the crudest melodrama is better than this
desert wandering. While I ponder on the music of the younger
generation, remembering the perplexity it had caused me, I hear a
vagrant singing on the other side of the terrace:
[Illustration]
Moi, je m'en fous, Je reste dans mon trou
and I say: "I hear the truth in the mouth of the vagrant minstrel, one
who possibly has no _trou_ wherein to lay his head." _Et moi
aussi, je reste dans mon trou, et mon trou est assez beau pour que j'y
reste, car mon trou est_--Richard Wagner. My _trou_ is the
Ring--the Sacrosanct Ring. Again I fall to musing. The intention of
Liszt and Wagner and Strauss was to write music. However long Wotan
might ponder on Mother Earth the moment comes when the violins begin
to sing; ah! how the spring uncloses in the orchestra, and the lovers
fly to the woods!.
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