In music the first manifestation of law is in form.
It is impossible to conceive of a combination of the integral elements of music—rhythm, melody, and harmony—in a beautiful manner without some kind of form. Form means measure, order, symmetry. In music more than in any art it is essential to the existence of the loftiest attribute of beauty, which is repose—an attribute whose divine character Ruskin proclaimed when he defined it as "the 'I am' contradistinguished from the 'I become;' the sign alike of the supreme knowledge which is incapable of surprise, the supreme power which is incapable of labor, the supreme volition which is incapable of change." Now what are the musical qualities of which Wagner makes use in order to symbolize the wielder of supreme power? Here is the phrase whose innate nobility and beauty appear to best advantage at the opening of the second scene in "Das Rheingold:"
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The melody is built out of the intervals of the common chord—the triad—the starting-point of harmony, its first and most pervasive law. This chord, too, supplies the harmonic structure. Its instrumentation (for four tubas with peculiarly orotund voices, specially constructed for Wagner) is unvarying, calm, stately, majestic, dignified, reposeful. Thus does Wagner symbolize musically the chief deity and chief personage of his tragedy in his character as Lord of Valhalla. But through the operation of the curse to which he became subject when he took the baneful ring, another character than that of a supreme god is forced upon Wotan. He has plotted to regain the ring, and restore it to the original owners of the magic gold. He has begotten a new race, the Volsungs, to execute a purpose which, as the representative of law, he is restrained himself from executing. He becomes a wanderer over the face of the earth, a mere spectator of the development of his foolish plot. How is this new character symbolized? Note the music which accompanies Wotan when, disguised as the Wanderer, he enters Mime's cavern smithy in the second scene of "Siegfried:"
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The fundamental harmonies are retained. The solemn instrumental color is held fast. The dignity of the chord progressions is still there. What, then, is gone? The element of repose. The harmonies are still triads, but tonality, with its benison of restfulness, has been sacrificed. The phrase is in no key, or rather it is in as many keys as there are chords. There is another beautiful instance in which, by the same means, a deprivation which one of the personages of the play undergoes is made plain to the listener. Note the descending series of chords which follows Wotan's kiss depriving Brünnhilde of her divinity, just after he has spoken his pathetic farewell, and just before the orchestra begins its lullaby, in the final scene of "Die Walküre." Here the loss of divine attributes in the disobedient goddess is published by absence of fixed tonality in the chords which accompany the visible signs of her punishment.
In the last two examples we have been called on to observe how changes in character and loss of attributes are delineated by departure of tonality. I will now cite a case in which not the attributes of a personage, but the property of a thing, is the composer's objective point. The case is a striking one, for it is a supernatural property which is to be brought to the notice of the listener, the power of the Tarnhelm (the familiar cap of darkness of folk-lore) to render its wearer invisible. The musical symbol of this magical apparatus in the Niblung tragedy is this:
