ABSTRACT
The Berlin complication forms a background to the composition, ay, the scoring of Die Walkure, just as an earlier phase thereof had cast its shadow across the final filing of the whole Ring poem. But the musician's power of detachment far exceeds that of the verbal reviser, and little trace of mental distraction, though much of sadness, is there to find in this first supremely great work of the full-grown master. The music must have been brewing to some purpose in its composer's "every limb," since a week has not run out before he writes Liszt, July 3. In Die Walkure we naturally do not look for the same intricacy of musical structure that makes the much later Gotterdammerung so fascinatingly inexhaustible a study; yet with one bold stroke the younger master has accomplished what could scarcely have been achieved by complexity.
