the first in order of conception and was indeed the root from
which all the others sprang.

The history of the matter is as follows. All Wagner's works prior
to The Ring are operas. The last of them, Lohengrin, is perhaps
the best known of modern operas. As performed in its entirety at
Bayreuth, it is even more operatic than it appears at Covent
Garden, because it happens that its most old-fashioned features,
notably some of the big set concerted pieces for principals and
chorus (pezzi d'insieme as I have called them above), are
harder to perform than the more modern and characteristically
Wagnerian sections, and for that reason were cut out in preparing
the abbreviated fashionable version. Thus Lohengrin came upon the
ordinary operatic stage as a more advanced departure from current
operatic models than its composer had made it. Still, it is
unmistakably an opera, with chorus, concerted pieces, grand
finales, and a heroine who, if she does not sing florid
variations with flute obbligato, is none the less a very
perceptible prima donna. In everything but musical technique the
change from Lohengrin to The Rhine Gold is quite revolutionary.

The explanation is that Night Falls On The Gods came in between
them, although its music was not finished until twenty years
after that of The Rhine Gold, and thus belongs to a later and
more masterful phase of Wagner's harmonic style. It first came
into Wagner's head as an opera to be entitled Siegfied's Death,
founded on the old Niblung Sagas, which offered to Wagner the
same material for an effective theatrical tragedy as they did to
Ibsen. Ibsen's Vikings in Helgeland is, in kind, what Siegfied's
Death was originally intended to be: that is, a heroic piece for