writing _truthful_ music; and having once found the music to express certain shades of feeling, he was like a writer who, having said something as well as he can say it, prefers repeating himself to trying to achieve a superficial appearance of variety. Wagner, I think, repeated himself quite unconsciously very often: when the repetition is conscious of course we have at once the genuine leitmotiv; but it is the maddest of errors to see in every resemblance between phrases the deliberate employment of the leitmotiv. The pair have drunk mead together and stand looking at one another; the storm has died away; and from the orchestra come passages of wondrous delicacy, tenderness and freshness, scored by a perfect master. Suddenly the clanking of a horse's hoofs is heard; "Hunding!" exclaims Sieglinda; the door is again thrown open and the black, ferocious barbarian stalks in. His theme is, figuratively, as black, gloomy, sinister and forbidding as himself; and the heavy, sullen tones of the battery of tubas which announces it intensify its effectiveness a hundredfold. Hunding is no villain of the piece, but a simple, surly chief of a tribe of savage fighters, and Wagner's music exactly describes him. Save for Siegmund's recital of his woes, the remainder of the scene remains sullen and gloomy; Siegmund, however, has some touching passages, and notably a phrase of unearthly strangeness when he tells how he came back to his hut and found his father gone, only a wolf-skin lying there; and a bit of the Valhalla motive in the orchestra thrills one with its suggestiveness. One is carried into the dimmest recess of a forest where man has never been, far back in a period so old that it is ridiculous to call it ancient. Throughout the music is in Wagner's grandest manner; the vocal writing is perfect; and though there are plenty of theatrical strokes, they are done in a nobler way than the mere opera way of _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_. In a word, the music is big: the breadth and sweep are enormous: the greatest Wagner has arrived, the Wagner who has gone far beyond the hesitations and littlenesses even of the _Rhinegold_. Hunding is characterised more clearly and with more decisive strokes than Hagen in the last opera of the _Ring_, partly because there is more genuine inspiration in the _Valkyrie_, partly, perhaps, because Hunding is a much simpler personage.