Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/90

 not in degree, but in kind. How could I “compare” Wagner with Beethoven? I might as well compare the Parthenon with the Cathedral of Cologne,—or either with the Falls of Niagara. The musical language of Wagner has always impressed me as something like the original language of the eternal elements—something awe-inspiringly eloquent, speaking in tones, rising from mysterious depths, of understanding and passion. It is difficult to illustrate by example, but I will try. Among the funeral marches in musical literature, Beethoven's and Chopin's had always most sympathetically appealed to my feelings—Beethoven's with the stately solemnity of its mourning accents, and Chopin's with its cathedral bells interwoven with melodious plaints. But when I hear the Siegfried dead-march in the “Götterdämmerung,” my heart-beat seems to stop at the tremendous sigh of woe, never heard before, rushing through the air.

To me, as one who was born and had grown up in Germany, Wagner's Nibelungen-Ring, especially “Young Siegfried” and the “Götterdämmerung,” had a peculiar home-born charm which grew all the stronger the more familiar I became with those tone poems. The legends of Siegfried in various forms had been among the delights of my early boyhood. Siegfried was one of the mythical heroes of the Rhineland. And when I heard the “Leit-motifs” of the Nibelungen-Ring, they sounded to me like something I had heard in my cradle—in the half-consciousness of my earliest dreams. This, indeed, was an illusion; but that illusion showed how Wagner, to my feeling at least, had in those phrases touched the true chord of the saga as it hovers over my native land, and as it is echoed in my imagination.

I shall never forget my first impressions of “Parsifal” which I enjoyed many years later. The performances at