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The Scandinavian hegemony is expounded, and other matters are gracefully touched on; the only point is made when the last question is propounded and Mime cannot answer: Who is it shall forge the sword, slay Fafner, take the hoard, pass through the fire and take Brünnhilda for his wife?
Brunnhilda enters; all now has become clear to her, and she resolves that she, like Wotan, will renounce a loveless life a life based on fraud and tyranny. She tells Gutruna that Siegfried has never belonged to her is hers, Brunnhilda's; and on receiving this crushing blow, Gutruna creeps to her brother's side and lies there, miserable and hopeless.
All Brunnhilda's plaint is magnificent in its sweetness and pathos; and the sleep-music, with its caressing, lulling figure, is a thing by which a man's memory might well live for ever. This, the tragedy of Siegmund and Sieglinda and the punishment of Brunnhilda, is the first of the subsidiary dramas; the second, the finding of Brunnhilda by Siegfried, must now be considered.
He claims and seizes Brünnhilda, sends her into the sleeping-chamber, and, swearing truth to his new friend Günther, follows with his drawn sword ready to place between him and his bride. So the act closes. Brünnhilda's horror and shame are unspeakable; she cannot understand; Wotan had promised her the great hero, and this promise is broken and a last humiliation inflicted on her.
Music in all its branches, of course, it provides: so much I will concede to the late Herr Wagner. There are times, I confess, when my musical yearnings might shock the late Herr Wagner times when I feel unequal to following three distinct themes at one and the same instant. "Listen," whispers the Wagnerian enthusiast to me, "the cornet has now the Brunnhilda motive."
What we really feel in it is the harshness of the opening discords, the agitation, the power, all forming a fitting prelude to what we see when the curtain rises, the barren rocks, and Wotan, exultant, calling Brünnhilda. His phrases have, indeed, a glorious vigour, as have Brünnhilda's in her answer. Her war-whoop plays an important part in the Third Act.
There is an accent of passionate grief in Lohengrin's words to Elsa, and of remorse in Elsa's wailings; but the most touching thing in this final scene is the song in which he hands her his sword, horn and ring, to be given to her brother should he return. The note of regret, especially in the poignant "leb' wohl," reminds one irresistibly of Wotan's farewell to Brünnhilda.
The maidens tell her of the dark wood where the dragon hides, and Brunnhilda, chanting her hymn in praise of the love for which one surrenders all, gives her the fragments of the sword and bids her fly, awaiting with undaunted courage her own punishment. The god comes in bursting with rage, and declares that Brunnhilda shall be left on the mountain to wed the first man who finds her.
Siegfried and Günther are away, and Hagen watches by night; his father, Alberich, crawls up from the river and counsels him as to how to get possession of the Ring; then he disappears as dawn begins to show. The music is weird and sinister in Wagner's finest manner. To her amazement, Brünnhilda finds Siegfried there with his new bride, unmindful of her.
We must note the change to the beginning of Siegfried: a dark cave, and outside it the forest, green, fresh and bright; Second Act, the entrance to Hate-cave, time, night, long before dawn, and at the end a summer morning, with the sun shimmering on the grass and the trees gently murmuring in the wind; Third, a rocky ravine in the early morning, grey storm-clouds scudding past, the wind whistling; at the end, a mountain top, Brünnhilda sleeping, the peaceful trees, a horse quietly grazing, morning sunlight.
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