In the depths of the river dwell the Rhine-maidens, having a lump of gold which they admire because it shines, but for which they have no other use. An ugly little dwarf pursues them; and when he cannot get their love, he decides to get along with their gold. He steals it, and makes from it a magic ring, which represents the ability to build cities and palaces, to command luxury and pleasure--to be, in short, our present master class. Even the gods are seduced by this lure, and fall to quarreling and intriguing for the magic power of gold. The god Wotan wrests it from the dwarf Alberich; and the latter puts a curse upon it, to the effect that it can only be worn by those who have renounced love--which is just as you see it in our modern world, and just as Wagner saw it when he was a court servant in Dresden, and was driven mad by the insolence of hereditary privilege. There are two giants, who represent our great captains of industry, and have built Wotan a palace known as Walhalla. The giants have been promised Wotan’s sister, the goddess of youthful beauty and goodness, as their pay for this labor; but they elect to take the ring instead. This is Wagner’s way of telling us his opinion of the great bankers and gentlemen of wealth whom he vainly besought to assist him in the production of his beautiful works of art. There were no factories in old German mythology; but the scene shows us a cavern down in the bowels of the earth, where Alberich, by the power of his ring, compels all his fellow dwarfs to toil at making treasures for him. We see him wielding the lash, and the music snarls and whines, and it is precisely the atmosphere you find in every sweat-shop and cotton mill and coal mine under our blessed competitive system. And when we see one of the giants slay his brother, and carry off the ring, and turn himself into a dragon, to sit upon it and guard it for the balance of time, we know that Wagner has visited the millionaire clubs of Dresden, and seen the fat old plutocrats in their big leather arm-chairs. Wotan, the old god, sees too late the ruin he has brought into the world; he decides that the only way of escape is to create a hero who shall slay the dragon of privilege and break the spell of economic might. This hero is the young Siegfried, the child of nature who knows no fear; Bernard Shaw says that he is Wagner’s young Anarchist associate, Bakunin. And note that in this Siegfried myth Wagner foreshadows the downfall not only of capitalism, but also of religion. The last of the four operas is called “The Twilight of the Gods,” and the two evil spells of gold and of superstition are broken by the strong arm and the clear mind of a human youth.