The Wagnerian Romances

As the curtain rises upon the turbulent sea and black weather, the Norwegian vessel has got safely within the haven. While the sailors furl sails, cast cables, the captain, Dala...

Siegfried has been calmly gazing into Mime's eyes; trying through these to get at the truth of him. Mime expresses surprise that after so many unquestionable services the boy sh...

At the sound of Elsa's voice calling: "Ortrud, where are you?" she assumes the last abjectness. "Here!" she replies, cowering upon the earth. "Here at your feet!" Simple Elsa's...

And so the ingenuous seductress finds the genial, clever, mellow neighbour's attitude toward her in this scene more canny than she can have expected, or quite relishes. It almos...

Headed by Wotan and Fricka, the gods ascend toward the bridge. Loge looks after them in mingled irony and contempt. "There they hasten to their end, who fancy themselves so firm...

Kurwenal, catching sight of the woman approaching, tugs at his master's mantle: "Attention, Tristan! Message from Isolde!" Tristan's start suggests how complete his abstraction,...

Hans Sachs looks after the departing figure with a meditative smile. "So entirely ill-natured have I never yet found any one. He cannot fail to come to grief of some sort. Many...

Tristan, left alone, falls to tossing and writhing with impatience. His burning fever is confused to his sense with the heat of the sun, and this day of joy he calls the sunnies...

"Go, then, madman, go!" she bids him in lovely wrath. "Traitor, see, I do not hold you back! I leave you free, go your way, go your way! Let your doom be to have that which you...

Her words, all at once, their significance penetrating fully, have brought a change in him. Gravely he moves apart from her, and his voice is for a moment stern as well as sorro...

The sun is high; heated with his exertions, Siegfried returns to his mossy couch under the trees, and is presently again looking overhead for the friendly bird. "Once more, dear...

"If it is no good save for you to swim around, it is of small use to me!" is Alberich's dejected observation. As if their treasure had been disparaged, Woglinde informs him that...

The peculiar action of the potion is detected from the above. It seems less to create passion than to remove all that obscured and controlled it, dissolve the barriers which up...

The suggestion is verily too much! "To share the tumult which, insensate, possesses you? A different matter it is which impelled me, fearful, to break Wotan's commandment...." B...

He stands so still for a time, silent, puzzled by her, unwilling certainly to frighten her further, that her immediate fear subsides; her countenance betrays, the stage-directio...

Fully returned at length to a sense of the common surrounding world, Sachs asks David for his day's lesson, and the apprentice briskly sings his verse, first comically confusing...

Forth from his cell comes Gurnemanz, to be recognized as a knight of the Grail only by the straight under-tunic of the Order. He has heard a groan, not to be mistaken for the cr...

Tannhaeuser, exasperated, reckless, frenzied with that temperamental need of his to dominate, that impatience of being lessoned, losing sight of all but one thing, that it shall...

The attempt has been made in the following to give an idea of the charm and interest of the original text of the Wagner operas, of Wagner's extraordinary power and fertility as...

Siegfried is singing at the top of his lungs: "In the water flowed the stream of fire, it hissed aloud in anger, but the cold tamed and chilled it; in the water it flows no more...

The three are left outside whom no festivity can allure. In long silence they remain, sunk in gloomy study, each on his side. To attempt arriving at clearness by questions does...

"Then through the sulphur-cleft slip down with me!" And Loge vanishes down a cleft in the rock, through which Wotan, after bidding his family wait for him where they are until e...

Apprentices in number, lively and mischievous imps, have entered and are setting the place aright for the meeting of the master-singers, placing seats for these on one side and...

These are strange words for Tristan the knight to hear. Applied to himself, such words as perfidy, treason.... He brushes his arm wildly across his eyes: "Phantoms of the Day! M...

The father, after a moment watching from the doorway, waiting for his daughter to run as usual to greet him, speaks, not altogether displeased: "My child, you see me standing at...

The sorcerer has from the battlements seen Parsifal approaching, who, thrust out from the Castle of the Grail, had, by the peculiar magic of the place, found the path to it obli...

Seated in the light of the full moon, they have freedom at last each to pore over the other's winning beauty. She is struck, fondly peering into his features, with the sense of...

He steps ashore. All in spell-bound attention watch for his first action, his first words. These are for the swan, and contain not much enlightenment for the breathless listener...

The third act shows the scene, a high rocky peak rising from among great pine-trees, where the Valkyries assemble for their return together to the hall of Wotan. On the clouds t...

The Marker's chalk is not idle; a number of workmanlike scratches have been heard. Walther has stopped short, jarred by the sound. He resumes after a moment: "In a thorny hedge,...

Hearing a stir, she again listens intently for Siegfried's horn. Not that, but Hagen's lugubrious Hoiho! comes to her ear: "Hoiho! Awake! Lights! Bright torches! We bring home s...

There is no doubt of the impression the song produces upon the audience. As he pauses between the verses, Walther cannot but seize their irrepressible exclamations. "That is a v...