To be able to follow the music of The Ring, all that is necessary is to
become familiar enough with the brief musical phrases out of which it
is built to recognize them and attach a certain definite significance
to them, exactly as any ordinary Englishman recognizes and attaches a
definite significance to the opening bars of God Save the King. There is
no difficulty here: every soldier is expected to learn and distinguish
between different bugle calls and trumpet calls; and anyone who can
do this can learn and distinguish between the representative themes or
"leading motives" (Leitmotifs) of The Ring. They are the easier to learn
because they are repeated again and again; and the main ones are so
emphatically impressed on the ear whilst the spectator is looking for
the first time at the objects, or witnessing the first strong dramatic
expression of the ideas they denote, that the requisite association is
formed unconsciously. The themes are neither long, nor complicated, nor
difficult. Whoever can pick up the flourish of a coach-horn, the note of
a bird, the rhythm of the postman's knock or of a horse's gallop, will
be at no loss in picking up the themes of The Ring. No doubt, when it
comes to forming the necessary mental association with the theme, it
may happen that the spectator may find his ear conquering the tune more
easily than his mind conquers the thought. But for the most part the
themes do not denote thoughts at all, but either emotions of a quite
simple universal kind, or the sights, sounds and fancies common enough
to be familiar to children. Indeed some of them are as frankly childish
as any of the funny little orchestral interludes which, in Haydn's
Creation, introduce the horse, the deer, or the worm. We have both the
horse and the worm in The Ring, treated exactly in Haydn's manner, and
with an effect not a whit less ridiculous to superior people who decline
to take it good-humoredly. Even the complaisance of good Wagnerites
is occasionally rather overstrained by the way in which Brynhild's
allusions to her charger Grani elicit from the band a little rum-ti-tum
triplet which by itself is in no way suggestive of a horse, although a
continuous rush of such triplets makes a very exciting musical gallop.
Other themes denote objects which cannot be imitatively suggested by
music: for instance, music cannot suggest a ring, and cannot suggest
gold; yet each of these has a representative theme which pervades the
score in all directions. In the case of the gold the association is
established by the very salient way in which the orchestra breaks into
the pretty theme in the first act of The Rhine Gold at the moment when
the sunrays strike down through the water and light up the glittering
treasure, hitherto invisible. The reference of the strange little
theme of the wishing cap is equally manifest from the first, since the
spectator's attention is wholly taken up with the Tarnhelm and its magic
when the theme is first pointedly uttered by the orchestra. The sword
theme is introduced at the end of The Rhine Gold to express Wotan's hero
inspiration; and I have already mentioned that Wagner, unable, when it
came to practical stage management, to forego the appeal to the eye as
well as to the thought, here made Wotan pick up a sword and brandish
it, though no such instruction appears in the printed score. When this
sacrifice to Wagner's scepticism as to the reality of any appeal to an
audience that is not made through their bodily sense is omitted, the
association of the theme with the sword is not formed until that point
in the first act of The Valkyries at which Siegmund is left alone by
Hunding's hearth, weaponless, with the assurance that he will have to
fight for his life at dawn with his host. He recalls then how his father
promised him a sword for his hour of need; and as he does so, a flicker
from the dying fire is caught by the golden hilt of the sword in the
tree, when the theme immediately begins to gleam through the quiver of
sound from the orchestra, and only dies out as the fire sinks and the
sword is once more hidden by the darkness. Later on, this theme, which
is never silent whilst Sieglinda is dwelling on the story of the sword,
leaps out into the most dazzling splendor the band can give it when
Siegmund triumphantly draws the weapon from the tree. As it consists of
seven notes only, with a very marked measure, and a melody like a simple
flourish on a trumpet or post horn, nobody capable of catching a tune
can easily miss it.
The Valhalla theme, sounded with solemn grandeur as the home of the gods
first appears to us and to Wotan at the beginning of the second scene
of The Rhine Gold, also cannot be mistaken. It, too, has a memorable
rhythm; and its majestic harmonies, far from presenting those novel or
curious problems in polyphony of which Wagner still stands suspected by
superstitious people, are just those three simple chords which festive
students who vamp accompaniments to comic songs "by ear" soon find
sufficient for nearly all the popular tunes in the world.
On the other hand, the ring theme, when it begins to hurtle through
the third scene of The Rhine Gold, cannot possibly be referred to any
special feature in the general gloom and turmoil of the den of the
dwarfs. It is not a melody, but merely the displaced metric accent which
musicians call syncopation, rung on the notes of the familiar chord
formed by piling three minor thirds on top of one another (technically,
the chord of the minor ninth, ci-devant diminished seventh). One soon
picks it up and identifies it; but it does not get introduced in the
unequivocally clear fashion of the themes described above, or of that
malignant monstrosity, the theme which denotes the curse on the gold.
Consequently it cannot be said that the musical design of the work is
perfectly clear at the first hearing as regards all the themes; but
it is so as regards most of them, the main lines being laid down as
emphatically and intelligibly as the dramatic motives in a Shakespearean
play. As to the coyer subtleties of the score, their discovery provides
fresh interest for repeated hearings, giving The Ring a Beethovenian
inexhaustibility and toughness of wear.
The themes associated with the individual characters get stamped on the
memory easily by the simple association of the sound of the theme with
the appearance of the person indicated. Its appropriateness is generally
pretty obvious. Thus, the entry of the giants is made to a vigorous
stumping, tramping measure. Mimmy, being a quaint, weird old creature,
has a quaint, weird theme of two thin chords that creep down eerily one
to the other. Gutrune's theme is pretty and caressing: Gunther's bold,
rough, and commonplace. It is a favorite trick of Wagner's, when one
of his characters is killed on the stage, to make the theme attached
to that character weaken, fail, and fade away with a broken echo into
silence.