thing that the score indicates is done, and not, as generally happens at Covent Garden, the reverse thing.  The colours of the scenery are likewise as intolerably German as ever—­the greens coarse and rank, the yellows bilious, the blues tinged with a sickly green, the reds as violent as the dress of the average German frau.  On the other hand, many of the effects are wonderful—­the mountain gorge where Wotan calls up Erda, Mime’s cave, the depths of the Rhine, the burning of the hall of the Gibichungs.  But the most astounding and lovely effects in the setting of the drama will not avail for long without true, finished, and beautiful art in the singing and acting; and, with a few exceptions, the singers do not give us anything approaching true, finished, and beautiful art.  The exceptions are Van Rooy, Brema, Gulbranson, Brema, and Schumann-Heink.  Van Rooy has a noble voice, admirably suited to Wotan, and he both sings and acts the part with a majesty and pathos beyond anything dreamed of by any other Wotan I have heard.  He appears to have been the success of the Festival; and certainly so strong and exquisite an artist deserves all the success he can gain in Bayreuth.  Brema’s Fricka is noble and full of charm; Schumann-Heink sings the music of Erda with some sense of its mystery and of Waltraute in “Siegfried” with considerable passion; and Gulbranson has vastly improved her impersonation of Bruennhilde since last year.  She is still unmistakably a student, but no one can doubt that she will develop into a really grand artist if she avoids ruining her fine voice by continually using it in a wrong way.  Her Bruennhilde is just now very beautiful and intensely pathetic, but it owes less to her art than her personality.  She does not interpret Bruennhilde—­rather she uses the part as a vehicle for her private emotions; to an inordinate degree she reads into it her real or imaginary experience; and she has not learnt the trick of turning her feelings into the proper channels provided, so to say, by the part—­of so directing them that Gulbranson disappears behind Bruennhilde.  Still, it is a great thing to find an artist of such force and passion and at the same time such rare delicacy; and I expect to come here in 1899 and hear an almost perfect rendering of Bruennhilde.  As for the rest of the singers, the less said about most of them the better.  They have no voices worth the mentioning; the little they do possess they have no notion of using rightly; and their acting is of the most rudimentary sort.  We hear so much of the fine acting which is supposed to cover the vocal sins of Bayreuth that it cannot be insisted on too strongly that the acting here is not fine.  I can easily imagine how Wagner, endeavouring to get his new notion into the heads of the stupid singers who are still permitted to ruin his music because they are now veterans, would fume and rage at the Italian “business”—­the laying of the left hand on the heart and of the right on the pit of the stomach—­with which incompetent