What help for me? I must obey the commands of my brother, who holds me bondsman to him.
By evil craft fashioned Alberich from the ravished Rhinegold a yellow ring: etc.
(Vocal score, p. 151.) From the words one would be _a priori_ inclined to associate the music with Alberich rather than with Mime; and as it is not employed again in the _Rhinegold_, the meaning we are suddenly asked to attach to it at the opening of _Siegfried_ seems a little far-fetched.
Wagner was not long in realising that however thrilling the timbre of the human voice may be, and useful as it is for making clear the course of the action and the sentiments of the characters, the orchestra is the most powerful and most resourceful of all the instruments at the disposal of the operatic composer. More and more the main current of his thinking goes into this. In the _Rhinegold_ the orchestral texture is by no means continuous; frequently it merely punctuates or supports the vocal declamation by means of a detached chord or two, much in the way that it used to sustain the older recitative. As the _Ring_ proceeds, pages of this kind become rarer: the orchestra thrusts itself more and more to the centre of the picture. It would be impossible to make the tissue of the _Rhinegold_ intelligible without the voices: but the orchestral part of the _Götterdämmerung_ would flow on with hardly a break if the vocal part were omitted; so also would large sections of _Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_. It was inevitable that under these circumstances the vocal writing should occasionally become a little perfunctory. It is frequently said that the balance between the vocal and orchestral parts is most perfectly maintained in _Tristan_; but the most cursory examination of the score shows that even there Wagner could not always find, or would not take the trouble to find, a vocal line of equal melodic interest with that of the orchestra, in the opening scene, for instance, it is transparently clear that the really expressive voice is the orchestra, and that the vocal parts have been inserted, sometimes rather carelessly and unskilfully, after the orchestral tissue has been completed. The vocal writing in _Tristan_ falls into four main categories. The first is that to which I have already referred; wholly absorbed in the orchestral working out of a theme, Wagner seems to pay the minimum of attention to the vocal line, which sometimes has as little real relevance to the music as a whole as if it had been added by another person. As a specimen of this kind of writing we may cite the music to the words of Brangaene at the commencement of the opera--