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The strong Siegfried armed with the rejuvenated Sieges-schwert is a force having its impulse originally from him. At this moment, perhaps because the events immediately impending have cast their shadows across the sensitive consciousness of an at times prophet, he is in no uneasiness whatever with regard to the fate of the Ring. To Alberich's mystification, he actually rouses Fafner.
A column of vapour stands in his place. "Do you see me?" asks Alberich's disembodied voice. Mime looks around, astonished. "Where are you? I see you not!" "Then feel me!" cries the power-drunken tyrant, and Mime winces and cowers under blows from an unseen scourge, while Alberich's voice laughs.
Ha! the smoke of Alberich's kingdom shall smudge even your flowery mountain-sides and your sparkling rivers. Everybody shall be my slave! Beware of this black Nibelung, I say, for he shall rule the world!" Loki was very sly and cunning. While Alberich boasted, he was planning how he might trick the dwarf and take his gold. To Alberich he said: "Surely, you will be the mightiest of men.
Wotan without further discussion stretches out his hand and tears from Alberich's finger the ring, which gives once more, under this violence, the golden call, saddened and distorted. "Here, the ring! Your chattering does not establish your right to it!" Alberich drops to earth, felled. Wotan places the ring on his hand and stands in gratified contemplation of it.
"I hear you, harassed spirit; what message have you for my sleep?" Remember! remember! is the burden of Alberich's communication. Be true to the task for the purpose of which you were created. The old enemy, Wotan, is no longer to be feared; he has been made powerless by one of his own race.
He is in his turn questioning them, when he hears Alberich's bullying voice approaching. He runs hither and thither in terror and calls to the strangers to look to themselves, Alberich is coming! Wotan quietly seats himself on a stone to await him.
"If it is no good save for you to swim around, it is of small use to me!" is Alberich's dejected observation. As if their treasure had been disparaged, Woglinde informs him that he would hardly despise the gold if he knew all of its wonder!
The first scene of the Rhinegold is purely symphonic: even if Alberich's spasmodic, jerky exclamations seem to be written in to fit the nature of this being, his whole mode of speech harsh, unmusical renders the fact less glaring; and the tide of music flows steadily on, reaching climax upon climax, until the final crash when he disappears with the gold.
At his request they free his right hand; he touches the ring with his lips and murmurs the spell by which after a moment the swarm of little smoke-grimed Nibelungs arrives groaning and straining under the weight of the Hort; again they pile it in a heap, and at Alberich's command scurry home.
The strands of the coil become tangled between their fingers. One of them descries an angry face Alberich's floating before her; another becomes aware of an avenging curse gnawing at the threads of the coil. This suddenly snaps terrific omen! Appalled, with the cry that "eternal wisdom is at an end," they vanish in search of their mother, Erda, in the earth's depths. Day breaks.
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