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Since all trace of the former Brünnhilde is wiped from his brain, he cannot remember his parting gift to her of the Ring. Certainly, he wrested a ring from this woman, in the twilight.... What became of it?... But the ring on his hand is indisputably a relic of the old days of the fight with the dragon. "I did not receive the ring from him," he replies.
At last the opportunity came, but it is not on record that the public clamored for its repetition or ranked her Casta diva with her singing of Isolde's Liebestod. Melba, one of the most exquisite of florid sopranos, once attempted Brünnhilde in Siegfried. One performance, and her good judgment came to her rescue.
"Oh, if you knew, joy of the world," Brünnhilde exposes her artless heart to the hero, "how I have loved you from all time! You were my care, the object of my solicitude! Before you were shaped, I nurtured you, before you were born, my shield concealed you, so long have I loved you, Siegfried!" He believes for a moment that his mother has not died but has been sleeping and now speaks to him.
Love teaches him the fear which he could not learn from Fafner. He awakens the sleeper, and would clasp her in his arms, but Brünnhilde, who fell asleep a goddess, knows not that she has awaked a woman. She flies from him, but his passion melts her, and, her godhead slipping from her, she yields to his embrace.
Her form stiffened suddenly and she threw off his grasp, springing forward and crouching: "You are Wotan and you are angry," she whispered, "The Brünnhilde is your child and she has sinned. You have threatened her, and now she is pleading: 'Wotan Father!" Her voice rose, and her form shook as though with sobs.
The cry came big and passionate as from the throat of a Walküre, without limit or strain. The Kapellmeister staggered and covered his eyes. "Gott!" he cried, "Am I dreaming? Where am I? Madame stop! Are you the Schultz, or are you ? I thought you were mad, stark mad; but it is I I! When I looked at you now, you were Brünnhilde alive your voice is the voice of the goddess herself!"
Hunding pierces his disarmed enemy, and he falls mortally wounded. Brünnhilde lifts the insensible Sieglinde upon her steed and rides away with her. Wotan, leaning upon his spear, gazes sorrowfully at the dying Volsung, and then turning to Hunding, so overcomes him with his contemptuous glance that he falls dead at his feet. "But Brünnhilde, woe to the traitor.
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 Brünnhilde is just now very beautiful and intensely pathetic, but it owes less to her art than her personality.
He sprang to the couch, gazing down at the sleeping Walküre, straight and still, covered with the shimmering steel of the buckler, the spear by her side and the helmet on her head, motionless, glittering in the flare of the flames. "Brünnhilde Brünnhilde!" Siegfried lifted his voice and sang to her he had taken the shield from her now and was bending lower, clasping his hands as if in ecstasy.
But we have had Materna and Niemann and Brandt and Fischer, and Alvary and Lehmann, who have given us correct ideas of the German vocal style. Surely no one can say, on listening to Lehmann's Brünnhilde, or Fischer's Hans Sachs, or Alvary's Siegfried, that the vocal part is inferior in beauty or importance to the orchestral.
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