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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: mechanically to fill up the pattern, an air being very like a
wall-paper design in this respect. Thus the second stave is
usually a perfectly obvious consequence of the first; and the
third and fourth an exact or very slightly varied repetition of
the first and second. For example, given the first line of Pop
Goes the Weasel or Yankee Doodle, any musical cobbler could
supply the remaining three. There is very little tune turning of
this kind in The Ring; and it is noteworthy that where it does
occur, as in Siegmund's spring song and Mimmy's croon, "Ein
zullendes Kind," the effect of the symmetrical staves, recurring
as a mere matter of form, is perceptibly poor and platitudinous
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