As he proceeds with the Ring his leit-motives in general become more and more concentrated. Now and then he will employ a fairly extended theme, but never without a good psychological reason. One of the longest motives in the whole tetralogy is that of the "Volsung race." Its length is justified by the duty it has to perform: to concentrate the nobility and the suffering of that race into a chord or two would be beyond the powers of any musician; none but Wagner, indeed, could have expressed such an infinity of elevated grief within the compass of seven or eight bars. Some of the other motives are astounding in their brevity and eloquence. Not till after his work on the Rhinegold had unsealed his imagination and perfected his technique could he have hoped to hit off the wild, half-animal energy of the Valkyries in some four or five notes that are merely the expansion of a single chord, or have dared to trust to what is virtually only a series of syncopations to symbolise Alberich's work of destruction (the Vernichtungsarbeit motive). Never before could he have written anything so eloquent of death as the "Announcement of death" motive in the Valkyrie. In Siegfried, though the number of new motives is comparatively small, the same process of concentration is observable. The god-like nature and the stately gait of the Wanderer are suggested to us in three or four notes. And in the Götterdämmerung the concentration is amazing. In that stupendous work he is, in my opinion, at the very summit of his powers. He never wastes a note now: every new stroke he deals is incredibly swift, direct and telling. Absolutely sure of himself, he dispenses with a prelude—for the few bars of orchestral writing before the voices enter can hardly be called one—and trusts to the colour of a mere couple of chords to tune the audience's imagination to the atmosphere of the opening scene. One short characteristic figure suffices for the motive of Hagen, and nowhere in the whole of Wagner's or anyone else's work is a figure of two notes used so multifariously and with such far-reaching suggestion. It is evident that he now feels the harmonic instrument to be the most serviceable and flexible of all; and hundreds of his most overpowering effects in the Götterdämmerung are achieved by harmonic invention or harmonic transformation. The grisliness of the Hagen theme comes in large part—putting aside the question of orchestral colour—from the sort of dour, irreconcilable element it seems to introduce into certain chords,—though in reality the harmony has nothing essentially far-fetched in it—as in that tremendous passage near the end of the first Act of the Götterdämmerung—
No. 26.
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Hagen!
The new themes, too, rely for a great deal of their poignancy upon some subtle and fleeting taste of sweetness or some swift suggestion of darkness and mystery in the harmony, as in the exquisite motive that is associated with the wedding of Gutrune—
No. 27.