THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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music of the left hand, music as accompaniment to the spectacle was permissible anyway: in ballet, and above all in the Being­beside­oneself of the bacchanal (that can
be combined with ballet). The garden of love made into music here still contained a legacy of festiveness in which the set is a large part of the attractive and lecherous
business itself. The embarkation for Cythera, the fine hesitant one, is far off, unless it rings,isolated backwards and forwards, in Offenbach's introductory music to the
barcarole, in his luxurious Evoës and in his ‘latest concerto’ of Orpheus, but the gardens of love and magic islands of the Baroque certainly appear, both coarsened and
magicized, in the great bacchanals throughout, especially in that of the Paris ‘Tannhäuser’. Here is a masterpiece of desire and of nothing else in the world, an abyss of
satyriasis, demonized down from strains of Tristan, and far off in the abyss, from the shore which it does not have, the song of the nymphs wafts across, the brothel
radiance of a higher order, with a rose of hell. Yet more dubiously in fact than in the bacchanal the salute of beach and radiance could be at hand where climaxes of
operatic action, where above all conclusions of acts and the landscape of the finale are also to be made present. The various consecrations of swords, prayer scenes
and trumping conclusions in Meyerbeer and therefore also in Wagner here became a cliché. A cliché in statu nascendi in the case of Siegmund's lovesickness and
Siegfried's sword­song, the entry of the gods into Valhalla and all the other transportable fortissimi of something allegedly right or wonderlandish which now seems to
break through and yet remains merely rhetoric, effect without cause, a braggart tone. Verdi, although likewise belonging to the age of Meyerbeer, kept himself freer
from the cliché of such climaxes precisely by delivering it in the minor parts and confining it to them, so to speak. Thus, to give a single example, the triumphal march in
Aida sparkles, being kept as superficial as it should be, but the moment afterwards when Amneris crowns the victor with laurels does not sparkle musically, and the
love­scene between Othello and Desdemona when the Pleiades touch the ocean, when space grows small and the world grows deep, differs in this low point of its own
characteristically from the contrived climax of the conclusion of another act, between Siegmund and Sieglinde, when the Volsungs' blood glows in flood. The Wagner of
‘Tristan’ certainly does not need to be directed into the piano mood and the wholly extraordinary, he is a teacher of the piano mood and of the aurora to night beyond
compare, but the convention of the climax, from ‘Rienzi’ to the ‘Ring of the Nibelungen’ and beyond, is the satanic angel who beats this wicked great genius with his
fists. The