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The piece opens with the blustering music of a storm, whose violence is rapidly dying down. The curtain rises upon the interior of Hunding's very primitive dwelling, built about a great ash-tree whose trunk stands in view. Siegmund, predestined to be ever at strife with his fellow-man, in circumstances of peculiar distress seeks the shelter of Hunding's roof.
The motif of the Wälsungen well expresses the nobility in misfortune of these poor children of Wälse. Siegmund returns quietly to the hearth: "Wehwalt is my name for myself. I will await Hunding." Hunding's horn is heard. Hunding appears in the doorway, a dark figure, in helmet, shield and spear. At sight of the stranger, he questions his wife with a look.
She was feeling the same loneliness and yearning that Sigmund felt in Hunding's hovel. Without a family, without a home, wandering over the world, she longed for someone to lean on, someone to clasp tenderly to her heart! And it was she who unconsciously, instinctively, had drawn closer to Rafael, and placed her hand in his. She was ill.
At last, in attempting to rescue a maiden from some raiders, he is forced to fly. As he runs through the depths of an unknown forest a storm breaks upon him, and he takes shelter, utterly exhausted, in the house of Hunding. At this point the curtain rises. The scene is the inside of Hunding's dwelling, built round a great ash-tree; on the right the fire burns on the hearth.
Hunding promises him hospitality, but challenges him to combat on the morrow, for the victims of Siegmund's wrath were Hunding's friends. As Sieglinde retires at Hunding's bidding, she casts a despairing, passionate look at Siegmund, and tries to direct his attention to a sword sticking in the ash-tree, but in vain.
When this sacrifice to Wagner's scepticism as to the reality of any appeal to an audience that is not made through their bodily sense is omitted, the association of the theme with the sword is not formed until that point in the first act of The Valkyries at which Siegmund is left alone by Hunding's hearth, weaponless, with the assurance that he will have to fight for his life at dawn with his host.
Where Sieglinde lives, in bliss or blight, there Siegmund will also tarry," and he raises his sword over his unconscious sister. Moved by his great love and sorrow, Brünnhilde for the first time is swayed by human emotions, and exultantly declares, "I will protect thee." Hunding's horn sounds in the distance, and soon is heard his defiant challenge to battle.
He starts up; she has put a sleeping-powder in Hunding's cup, and they are safe; and thus begins the greatest love-duet, next to the Tristan, in the world.
Consider the scenery of the two operas: First Act of the Valkyrie, Hunding's hut with the smouldering fire; Second, a rocky defile in the mountains and no particular weather; Third, storm round the Valkyries' rock, black flying clouds, the pines tossing their branches to the tempest, and, at the end, a peaceful evening sky and then the yellow flames shooting up against it.
Sigmund, dying, left the fragments of the sword to be given to his unborn son, and Sigurd's fosterfather Regin forged them anew for the future dragon-slayer. But Sigurd's first deed was to avenge on Hunding's race the death of his father and his mother's father. Völsunga tells this story first of Helgi and Sinfjötli, then of Sigurd, to whom the poems also attribute the deed.
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