And over the entire body of
Wagner's music, there float, a massive diadem, the towers and parapets
and banners of Nuremberg the imperial free city, monument of a
victorious burgherdom, of civic virtue that on the ruins of feudalism
constructed its own world, and demonstrated to all times its dignity and
sobriety and industry, its solid worth.
For life itself made the Wagnerian gesture. The vortex of steel and
glass and gold, the black express-packets plowing the seven seas, the
smoking trains piercing the bowels of the mountains and connecting
cities vibrant with hordes of business men, the telegraph wires setting
the world aquiver with their incessant reports, the whole sinister
glittering faery of gain and industry and dominion, seemed to tread and
soar and sound and blare and swell with just such rhythm, such grandeur,
such intoxication. Mountains that had been sealed thousands of years had
split open again and let emerge a race of laboring, fuming giants. The
dense primeval forests, the dragon-haunted German forests, were sprung
up again, fresh and cool and unexplored, nurturing a mighty and
fantastic animality. Wherever one gazed, the horned Siegfried, the man
born of the earth, seemed near once more, ready to clear and rejuvenate
the globe with his healthy instinct, to shatter the old false barriers
and pierce upward to fulfilment and power.
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