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Updated: May 29, 2025
He craved back his liberty, and, as the Norn tells us later in Goetterdaemmerung, "tried to free himself by gnawing at the runes on the shaft of the spear."
Having accomplished this to its evident satisfaction, the audience proceeded, like the closing phrase of the "Goetterdaemmerung" Dead March, to become exceedingly quiet then expectant. This expectancy lasted fully three minutes. Then there were some impatient handclappings. A few persons whispered: "Why is he late?" "Why doesn't he come?"
Once in driving through rich, lush, storied Warwickshire on the way to Stratford-on-Avon once in a great Parisian restaurant where the refinement, brilliancy, and luxury of the world seemed crushed into epitome once at a stupendous performance of Goetterdaemmerung at Munich once while standing on the shores of a lovely New Hampshire lake looking up at a mountain round which, as Emerson says, the Spirit of Mystery hovers and broods but these are only remembered high points of a constant dread of not being able to meet my needs and undertakings.
Thus in Die Walkuere, in Wotan's long speech to Bruennhilde in Act II., he sketches the main events of Das Rheingold. In Siegfried the amusing riddle scene, a reminiscence of the Eddic Alvismal, seems intended to relate events which have gone before. In Goetterdaemmerung it is Siegfried who just before his death tells the story of the preceding evening.
There is likewise less need in the case of this opera than, I think, any other of Wagner's, to be familiar beforehand with the argument. Any one seeing the Rhine-gold unprepared would probably not understand anything whatever, as far as the story is concerned. The same is in some degree true of Walkuere and Goetterdaemmerung; even of Parsifal one need to know the inwardness of the plot.
The orchestral accompaniment, beginning quietly, gradually swells into a torrent of music quite unrivalled among Wagner's great finales. The end of Goetterdaemmerung is impressive because of the wonderful gathering together of the musical motives of Siegfried's life, but as a musical composition it cannot compare with the end of Tristan.
Siegmund carrying off his sister sang a tenor drawing-room song. Siegfried and Bruennhilde, like respectable German married people, in the Goetterdaemmerung laid bare before each other, especially for the benefit of the audience, their pompous and voluble conjugal passion.
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