Of all Wagner's philosophic compositions, his psychological conjurations out of the shadowy depths of his own fancy and the equally cloudy shallows of Schopenhauer and Feuerbach, Loge is the most intimately conceived and the most finely wrought. Disappearing, indeed, he is, but by no means futile. The Mephistopheles of the rock-ribbed north, the Lucifer of the hills, he unites all the subtlety of the metropolitan conception of the sophisticated Goethe with the breadth and spontaneity of the harp-strokes of the storm-bred bard.
Wagner does not paint Loge so brilliantly in text as he does in music. This Satanic tempter of the wise ones is an operatic character raised to the seventh power. His words are unconvincing without his music, which charges them and him with a boundless significance. Never once in all his flickering career does he utter a single sentence of such elemental majesty as that of Boito's Mefistofele: "Son lo spirito che nega." That looming figure of the archlibrettist of Tuscany spreads the shadow of contemporaneous sophistication across the operatic firmament. Standing with his defiant gaze upon the throne of the many-voiced invisible, he is a lyric reincarnation of the epic Lucifer of Milton.
Loge is no such mighty spirit. He comes upon the scene whining excuses for an ill-done errand. He slips, he slides, he wriggles away. He is the aurora of casuistry, the embodiment of the elusive. The flickering fire is his outward manifestation. He is mean. He is a sneak. But he is the intellectual superior of the entire coterie of futile gods, and he laughs at their infantile incapacity. Poor old Wotan! He mumbles in his beard that he cannot do mental tricks as Loge can. A simple-minded old god is he, who would gladly cheat the lumbering giants out of their guerdon, but does not know how. So he turns to Loge, who comes waving and caracoling upon the scene—to what theme? That of the fire! A theme which is as elusive as his nature, a theme which has neither beginning nor end, which wanders along in the form of an indefinite decimal of harmony and never for an instant establishes a definite tonality.
Every movement of Loge, every betrayal of a new thought formed in his shifty mind, is accompanied by an utterance of this motive in the orchestra. Not once in "Das Rheingold" does the theme rest itself upon the firm foundations of a major triad. Chromatic in form, it is chromatic, chameleon-like in color. It is the real Loge. It is a musical triumph, because in terms of purely descriptive imitation it expresses a psychologic study. The music is the shifting, flickering, changeful, destroying fire; the fire is the soul of Loge and the first fruit of perdition.
The theme returns in the last scene of "Die Walküre," when Wotan, the helpless father, has put his best-beloved to sleep. He is to surround her with a belt of guardian fire. Fire is the soul of Loge, a lovely protector for unconscious virtue! Again we hear the fire music, but only for fire. Loge, most subtle of the gods of the field, has to all appearances been the most futile. He has disappeared already. But now his fire, at any rate, returns and beams beneficently from a base of diatonic major harmonies with tinkling of blissful bells. Did Wagner realize the fathomless depths of his own sarcasm here? Or is it all a beautiful chance?
In the last scene of "Siegfried" there is an echo of the Loge theme, but it means almost nothing. The same echo is heard in "Götterdämmerung," Act I. In Act III. of the same drama, when Brünnhilde seizes the torch to fire the funeral pyre whose flames shall set all Walhalla in a blaze, the Loge chromatics, together with a gleam of the ring theme, flashes up, but it is as futile as the almost-forgotten Loge. Here was Wagner's opportunity to tell the truth about his own secret conception of this vast phantasmagoria of fact and fable. At the very end of "Das Rheingold" the crafty one says:
"A feverish fancy
Doth woo me to wander
Forth in flickering fire:
To burn and waste them