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There was a flash of Siegfried's blade, then a crash that echoed over mountains and valleys, and Siegfried had shattered Wotan's spear. It lay in splinters on the ground. Wotan stepped aside and sadly bowed his head upon his breast. He knew this meant the downfall of the giants. No longer would the earth be ruled from fair Valhalla's heights. Siegfried hurried up the mountain-side.
It may be, as I have said, that Wagner wanted to make each opera comprehensible in itself, without reference to the others; it may be that his artistic sense forced him to make it clearer and ever clearer that each tragedy as it happens is Wotan's tragedy; but, in any case, I, for one, never regret when the scene is somewhat shorn.
"Upon your hand, the ring that is the one! Listen to my counsel, for Wotan's sake cast it from you!" "The ring? Cast it from me?" "To the Rhine-daughters give it back!" "To the Rhine-daughters, I, this ring? Siegfried's love-token? Are you mad?" Brünnhilde is unshaken by Waltraute's insistence. Good or bad arguments have nothing to do with the case, as it stands in her feeling.
Mimmy can answer that: he knows the Volsungs, the race of heroes born of Wotan's infidelities to Fricka, and can tell the Wanderer the whole story of the twins and their son Siegfried. Wotan compliments him on his knowledge, and asks further with what sword Siegfried will slay Fafnir? Mimmy can answer that too: he has the whole history of the sword at his fingers' ends.
Then he turned and called to all the mountains and the valleys below: "Whoso dareth Wotan's spear, Whoso knoweth naught of fear, Let him burst these flames of war, Let him leap this fiery bar!" The cunning Mimi secretly longed to steal out into the world and find that magic ring. One night when all the other little Nibelungs were asleep, he slipped stealthily to his forge.
The curtain falls upon their laments, and the triumphant entrance of the gods into their new home. In "The Valkyrie," properly the first part of the cyclus, the human drama begins. Strong races of men have come into existence, and Wotan's Valkyres watch over them, leading those who fall in battle to Walhalla, where, in the gods' companionship, they are to pass a glorious life.
Fricka's music is royally imperious at first: such declamation had never been thought of in the world before; but there is rare beauty of an austere kind the beauty of holiness afterwards, as she momentarily drops her dignity and pleads her cause. She gains the day and departs, and after Wotan's tedious meditation comes the most magnificent music of all.
When the dwarf recovers, he is so daunted that he tells Siegfried the truth about his birth, and for testimony thereof produces the pieces of the sword that broke upon Wotan's spear.
Clinging in anguish to Wotan's knees, she has heard him mutter that were the ring returned to the daughters of the deep Rhine, both Gods and world would be redeemed from that stage curse off Alberic's in The Rhine Gold. On this she has rushed on her warhorse through the air to beg Brynhild to give the Rhine back its ring. But this is asking Woman to give up love for the sake of Church and State.
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 actors always fill up their idle intervals, and how he would beg them, in Wotan's name, rather to do nothing than do that.
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