act of _The Valkyrie_); but he succeeds equally well without these touches of his unrivalled stage-craft. Further back I referred to Wagner's earlier and later use of the _leit-motif._ In its naive, primitive simplicity the device is certainly not highly artistic. When our academic gentry use it in their festival oratorios, they are supposed to show themselves very advanced. But what purpose, musical or other, is subserved by arbitrarily allying a musical phrase to a personage or an idea and blaring it out whenever that personage or idea comes to the front? Wagner early realized the uselessness of the proceeding, and, as I pointed out, in _Tannhäuser_ there are no _leit-motifs_, though passages and parts of passages are repeated. In _Lohengrin_ it is used rather for a dramatic than a musical purpose. By the time he wrote _Tristan_ he had learnt the splendid artistic uses to which a rather commonplace device could be put. The differences between the _leit-motif_ in _Lohengrin_ and the _leit-motif_ in _Tristan_ are two: in _Tristan_ they are more significant--indeed, they are pregnant to bursting--and more fully charged with energy and colour; also they are not stated and restated in their elementary form as in _Lohengrin_, but continually subjected to a process of metamorphosis. This last mode of developing a theme he probably learnt from Liszt, and without it both _Tristan_ and the _Ring_ would be very different. But while these are the most striking characteristics of Wagner's later leading themes and mode of using them, it must be remembered that he was now absolute master of every device of operatic art previously known, and of many he invented as he went along. The same theme in _Tristan_ has a dozen functions to fulfil; it may be changed almost out of recognition to suit a particular occasion, and a few minutes later, for a dramatic purpose, it may be stated in all its original plainness. I advise all who wish to understand _Tristan_ not to fret themselves with those rascally and stupid guide books which merely addle the brain with their interminable lists of motives. Throughout the opera new matter is continually introduced, with old themes, changed or unchanged, woven into the tissue; and to go hunting for these old themes, to try to recognise them whenever they crop up, is not only to lose one's enjoyment of the music, but to run a fair risk of misapprehending it altogether, and the drama as well. This jack-fool twaddle about there being not a single phrase in an opera which has not grown out of another is manifestly absurd--for out of what does the first one grow?--and utterly untrue. In every scene of _Tristan_ an enormous amount of new material is added; it is the richest thematically of all the operas. But this labelling of nearly every phrase as the This, That, or the Other motive has confused thousands of people; they fatigue themselves by incessantly trying to remember the significance of