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IPPING my bitter black coffee at dawn in the corridor of the night-train from Berlin to Bayreuth, I watched the other Wagnerites come creeping out of their compartments. They still had the dry fixed stare, the look of desperate determination that people assume when they go to sleep knowing they must get up at an unheard-of hour in the morning. When we set an alarm-clock or caution a porter to wake us at five thirty sharp, we unconsciously prepare ourselves for the shock of that hideous clamor by lying rigid and ready through the long hours; to relax easily in our slumbers would be to expose ourselves to heart-failure when the summons comes. So here we were, of a summer morning in Bavaria, aching from fatigue, our nerves jagged and our faces pale, while the train jolted us toward a festival.

Near me were two middle-aged American women quarreling monotonously over the loss of a tin of crackers. They needed those crackers to fortify their strength. Each insisted that she had told the other to pack the precious cargo. "Parsifal" and the "Ring" were forgotten in that profitless sisterly bicker that quavered on and on.

A haggard unshaven man sidled

up to me and, in the tone of a fellow conspirator, asked me how much I had paid for my seats. Seven dollars and fifty cents a performance? So had he. Preposterous! He'd wager the Germans didn't pay anything like that. I hate to be talked to in the early morning; I'm afraid I showed it, too, for he wandered away disconsolately, snapped down one of those tricky wall-seats that abound in the corridors of European trains and hurled himself into it before it could betray its folding-bed ancestry by springing back again. Then he took out of his pocket a libretto of "Rheingold," a libretto with a gray cover upon which there posed a laurel-crowned woman in bulky Greek robes a figure as familiar to opera-goers of New York as the Statue of Liberty. For this was a Fred. Rullman libretto and must once have reposed on the table in the Broadway lobby of the Metropolitan. My friend was reading pages five, seven, nine and so on-in other words, the barbarous English translation. Pages four, six and eightthe German text-he left severely alone.

A door opened back of me and a woman's nose emerged, greedily sniffing the air. Coffee! She must have coffee. What she couldn't,

because she hadn't ordered it last night? How perfectly ridiculous! I hastily tossed off the last lukewarm drops in my own cup, fearing it might be snatched from me.

I was becoming apprehensive. Could it be that Bayreuth was going to prove as American as Paris in July? I was still deliberating the question when we reached the railroad station. My porter at least was an authentic Bavarian; I had half expected a colored red-cap with a Virginia drawl. I had followed him only about ten feet when I found myself face to face with a woman I recognized. She stopped short and shook a puzzled head at me. Where had we met before? It turned out that we'd never met, but had seen each other hundreds of times at the Metropolitan, between the acts in the smoke-wreathed atmosphere of the buffet on the grand-tier floor. In five minutes we were intimate friends; we had even found out that we knew the same people. "But I came here to get away from my countrymen," she admitted as she left me.

Oddly enough, hers was the last American voice I heard. By a stroke of good luck, the Post Hotel had been already booked up when I wrote for a room five months before. I was therefore handed over to a charming poverty-pinched noblewoman. My room was crammed with furniture so tightly upholstered that I was surprised the buttons didn't pop off, like Peggotty's. From the walls, fierce pictures of Bismarck and von Hindenburg glared down upon me of a morning while I sat sedately in a round tin tub of warm water upon a neat square of linoleum. I really felt

that I must move with caution in that big sunny bed-chamber, lest I be impaled on some general's bristling mustachios.

The place was immaculate, the service positively effusive. Great bouquets of roses and carnations graced my writing-desk and mantel. Every time I took off my shoes, a tiny maid-servant swooped upon them with a bird-like chirrup and bore them away to be polished. She was altogether adorable, that maida pretty clucking mite with the hands and arms of a stevedore. I couldn't even lift the tin tub; she handled it as if it had been the merest cockleshell.

Somehow, that commonplace thrifty establishment, so utterly Teutonic, struck me as the perfect setting for a man who had come on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the prodigious Richard. In Venice, looking up at the façade of the Palazzo Giustiniani, I had felt in closer touch with "Tristan" than ever before. Not that the Grand Canal suggested the Irish Sea; but I have always thought that the rich urbanity of Venice made Wagner for a time the complete unassailable aristocrat. Bayreuth is the place to appreciate the "Ring." It clears up for us many of the riddles connected with those four astounding scores. It explains the Rhine-daughters, certainly the bluffest, most jocund trio that ever haunted a stream; the descendants of Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde serve us our beer to-day in Bayreuth. Alberich and Mime reek more of the Bavarian soil than of the brimstone of Nibelheim. The Wagner who immortalized the Teutonic legends was the true provincial German, full

of loud clumsy good-humor, resorting without shame to the horse-play of the Biergarten, translating into music much of the homespun stuff his fellow-citizens were made of. Siegfried, thumbing his nose at Mime, straddling and spanking the bear, is as vulgar an enfant terrible as Peck's Bad Boy; and yet Siegfried cuffs his way into our affection, because he has the rank reality of folk-legend. Gargantua himself isn't more racily authentic. Poor Siegfried, of course, never gets his just dues on the stage; I can think of no other operatic hero who has been interpreted by so many colossal boors.

Go up from Bayreuth some sullen windy morning to the top of the Siegesturm; in particular if it's raining hard and the thunder rumbles and the sky is split open by lightning, don't miss that excursion. Looking out over the pine forest, you will understand Wagner in his darker moments, the heaven-storming Promethean rebel in all his naked grandeur. Above you, invisible but overwhelming, Wotan and his warrior-maids gallop among the clouds. Beneath you, Hunding's hounds have found the scent of Siegmund and Sieglinde. Under one of the fretfully whimpering pines the Wälsung is trying in vain to quiet his half-mad twin.

And when the storm is over and the thin sunshine washes over the scene again, you will catch sight of the Festspielhaus, the eternal symbol of Wagner the successful composer, the "smart" impresario; and everywhere in the town, you will see the clean brick chimneys of the brew

eries. For all I know, Wagner may have owned stock in those breweries, and Cosima and Siegfried may obtain fat dividends from them to-day.

Gigantic power; the ability to summon gods to do his bidding; a love of trumpeting pomp; a stout middle-class humor; sometimes a colossal bad taste that was Wagner. I think the great geniuses of all time are made that way. Shakspere, for example, and Rabelais and Balzac and Goethe and Ibsen!

It is wonderful, during a German festival, how the heroic ghosts of music stalk about one, not only in the isolation of a Siegesturm but through the busiest streets. Every time I went into the railroad station for my newspaper, I had a vision of Liszt with his head out of the window of a day-coach, chatting to his sonin-law on the platform. As I wandered in the gardens of the Schloss, I could see Wagner and Lilli Lehmann feeding the ducks and couldn't help smiling at the idea of the grizzled rogue wanting to adopt the abundantly beautiful sixteen-yearold girl. Going up the long hill to the Festspielhaus at three thirty in the afternoon I imagined Patti jingling along the road in a spanking carriage. Of all human institutions, operagoing in Germany is most thickly peopled with the glamorous dead.

However stodgy the performances may be, however mildewed by routine, the music drama has a genre quality, here on its native heath, that it possesses nowhere else. The spirit of the occasion permeates the whole countryside. Bayreuth seems to rise out of the ground once a year for the sole purpose of honoring Wagner; when the short season is

over, it sinks into the earth again perhaps, like Germelshausen. For one month out of the twelve, it livesbut only as a stage. That stage covers the entire district. It is not confined to the few feet of boards in the Festspielhaus upon which the singers tread so heavily; it extends for miles in all directions, right to the foot of the encircling hills. The visitor to Bayreuth is in thrall, a being under an enchantment every minute of the day and night. In New York, the "Follies" and the "Scandals" are just around the corner from the Metropolitan. In London, when you come out of Covent Garden, you see the taxis fighting their way up to the entrance of the Drury Lane Theatre a few hundred feet away. In Pariswell, in Paris, even when you're safely inside the opera-house and the performance is under way, you are listening to Wagner according to Massenet.

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In Bayreuth, it's simply Wagner all the day long. The morning is a solemn preparation; you spend it humming motifs. During most of the afternoon and the whole of the evening, you are in the sacred grove itself. When the performance is over, you go home to bed and hum the motifs again till you fall asleep. You don't hurl yourself upon a passing taxicab and shout at the driver the name of some raucous night-club.

It's all so leisurely and staid and punctual. If the curtain is scheduled to rise at four, it does. Even before three thirty, the road to the Festspielhaus is full of an unhurried company of pilgrims. At quarter to four, when the trumpets sound their preliminary warning, the entire au

dience is assembled. By four sharp, every seat is taken. The lights fade slowly and with them all human sounds die away. The first notes of the prelude, even if they are a mere cobweb thread of tone, are startlingly audible to an American who has been brought up to expect a stampede in the aisle and breathless sibilant confidences from the row in back, about the frightful congestion of the cross-town traffic. In New York, the perfect Wagnerite hisses like a serpent at such interruptions; in Germany, no one needs to hiss, because from time time immemorial the silence has never been broken. Fidgeting and coughing, too, are unknown. Occasionally some one does drop off to sleep. But it's always a gentle quiet-breathing slumber, the slumber of the spellbound. When the curtain comes down on an act, an audience outside of Germany breaks immediately into polite handclapping; a German audience knows that there are still four bars or seven bars of music to be played and keeps its solemn hush till the very last note has dwindled to silence. Then comes the applause.

The intermissions are long-fifty minutes, usually-and they add something to the ample ruminative charm of the proceedings. During the first entr'acte, the sun sets and the dusk thickens; after the second act, everybody wanders about under the stars in the spacious grounds. If it's raining, one can sit on the wide veranda of the restaurant among the trees and eat a good meal without indecent haste. A fanfare of trumpets calls one back at last to the theater. It is cool outdoors and even cooler in the Festspielhaus.

As I write, I look forward with dread to the intermissions at the Metropolitan-those hideous periods when the parched music-lovers line up before the lily-cup rack, push irritably through the mob at the door of the buffet, smoke their futile comfortless cigarettes and, at the spiteful ring of the electric bell, jostle and push their way back to the suffocating steam-heated red-plush auditorium.

The mood means so much in music. How under the sun can we prepare ourselves for the crushing demands of the last act of "Götterdämmerung" when we have been breathing poisonous air for three hours and must begin to plan, the moment Hagen stabs Siegfried, the quickest way to catch a taxi-driver's eye after the immolation scene is over?

I shall never forget the last entr'acte of "Götterdämmerung" in Bayreuth. For a long time I had been leaning over the stone balustrade that marks the boundary of the hill on which the Festspielhaus stands. Far away below me the lights of the town winked. The sky was spawning myriads of new stars every minute, till the fixed constellations seemed all tangled up with smaller heavenly bodies, a shimmering network of them, like the fireflies in the fields of Lombardy; and over the whole remote starscape was flung a thick powdery dust, a sort of celestial pollen. Suddenly, down from the top balcony of the Festspielhaus there floated solemnly, meditatively, the notes of the Valhalla motif. For the moment, I half believed I was being summoned to my own doom by the trump of a saddened Gabriel with pity in his

heart. I felt utterly alone in the world and yet exalted. For the first time in my life I was actually listening to the music of the spheres. I leave it to the reader to judge whether I was in the proper mood for the dusk of the Gods!

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And the performances themselves in that enchanted Festspielhaus— what about them?

Most of the honors went to the orchestra this summer; it played magnificently throughout. I suppose the old, old question of how much is gained and how much is lost by having your orchestra under the stage, will never be settled. To me, the Bayreuth way is the better way. Music that comes from nowhere and yet from everywhere has a magical effect upon me. Milton anticipated the astonishing feat-or "stunt" as some critics call it-when he wrote of strains that stole into the air like "a steam of rich distilled perfumes." More humdrum than Milton, I can't help thinking of the warm full-bodied sound as of something "mellowed in the wood." It is true, of course, that, in that complicated soundingbox where the musicians play, a certain muted quality makes itself felt. There's a manifest danger of monotony. The crescendos lack the tidal sweep; in the terrific climaxes, the volcano just fails to blow its head off. Then, too, in the general ripe sweetness, the instruments lose their sharp individuality; and many music-lovers insist that, in perfect ensemble playing, it is still possible to get an added thrill from the sounds in the raw that together make up the tone-poem-the peculiar varnished squeak of even the most exquisitely