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She knows nothing of the future, and Wotan professes himself resigned to hand over his sovereignty to the youthful Siegfried, who shall deliver the world from Alberich's curse. Erda sinks once more into her cavern, and Siegfried appears, led by the faithful bird. Gaily singing, he passes up through the fire, and finds Brünnhilde asleep upon her rock.
The scene with Erda in the mountains is even more wonderful, so laden is the music with the Scandinavian emotional sense of the impenetrable mystery of things. The scene between Mime and Alberich, or Alberich and the Wanderer, gives us the old horror of the creeping maleficent things that crawled by night about the brooks and rock-holes.
With one blow of his sword Siegfried slays the treacherous dwarf, and, guided by his friendly bird, hastens away to the rock where Brünnhilde lies within the flaming rampart awaiting the hero who shall release her. The third act represents a wild landscape at the foot of Brünnhilde's rock. Wotan once more summons Erda, and bids her prophesy concerning the doom of the gods.
What a Fricka, Brangaene, Ortrud, Sieglinde, Erda, this clever girl might become! She was musical, she was dramatic in temperament he let his imagination run away with him. She only sang an Oberbayerische yodel, and, while her voice was not very high, she contrived a falsetto that made her English listener shiver.
The third act once more shows us the god Wotan still plunged in gloom. Gazing into a deep abyss, he summons Erda, who knows the destiny of all the world, to question her again as to the twilight of the gods. The mysterious figure appears at his bidding, but has nothing further to communicate. Their doom is certain.
The woman of the ages had come back again. Lilith and Eve and Isis and Venus, the foam-kissed, and Erda, the dreaming one.
From Erda was born to Wotan a daughter, so near to her father's heart that she seemed an incarnation of his most intimate wish, his very will embodied; so part of himself she knew his unspoken thought.
But they are of no use to him: what he seeks is some foreknowledge of the way of the Will in its perpetual strife with these helpless Fates who can only spin the net of circumstance and environment round the feet of men. Why not, says Erda then, go to the daughter I bore you, and take counsel with her?
He remains inflexible; but at last Erda, the ancient divinity, to whom all things are known, past, present and future, appears to Wotan and warns him to surrender the ring. She declares that all which exists will have an end, and that a night of gloom will come upon the gods. So long as he retains the ring a curse will follow it.
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