Ordham never made any attempt to follow the motives in an overture; that was not his idea of enjoying music, which he estimated as a gift bestowed on brains like Wagner’s that the intellect of the hearer might be awakened and excited only so far as was necessary to liberate the senses. Nevertheless, to-night he was aware as never before of that deep undertone of fate below the solemn joy and halleluja of the music of Götterdämmerung. And fate was personified in the first dark scene, where the three grey Norns sat weaving their ropes and gloomily foretelling the death of gods too confident and ambitious. But when the hideous trio disappeared and Brünhilde and Siegfried came forth from the cave where they had passed their long honeymoon, it needed only Styr’s first love notes, piercingly sweet, while her eyes deliberately sought the spot where she knew Ordham must be, to shake him from head to foot with the reassurance that whatever she might resolve in her cooler moments, love meant all to her that it had meant to this fallen goddess.
Styr may or may not have read the volumes of criticism devoted to the heroine of the Niebelungenlied, but it is probable that in any case she would have penetrated the mists of antiquity and seen the Brynhildr who reigned there, with her own eyes. In Die Walküre she made her alternately the jubilant sexless favourite of Wotan, shadowed subtly with her impending womanhood, and the goddess of aloof and immutable calm, Will personified, even when moved to pity. In Götterdämmerung, particularly of late, she had portrayed her as woman epitomized, arguing that all great women had the ichor of the goddess in their veins, and that primal woman was but the mother of a sex modified (sometimes) but not remade. In the last act of Siegfried her voice was wholly dramatic and expressed her delight at coming into her woman’s inheritance in ecstatic cries, almost shouts, which were never to be forgotten by any that heard them, and stirred the primal inheritance in the veriest butterfly of the court. In this beautiful love scene of Götterdämmerung, the last of the tetralogy, her voice was lyric, rich and round and full, as her voice must always be, but stripped of its darker quality; and while by no means angelic, a character with which she could invest it when portraying the virgin Elizabeth, was as sweet and clear and triumphant as if bent upon giving the final expression to the first love of woman alloyed with knowledge.
Ordham had heard her in the rôle many times, and he soon appreciated that she had never made as much of this scene as she did to-night, realized she meant to convey that Brynhildr, with some echo in her brain of her old gift of prophecy, took advantage of this last hour of happiness to gratify her woman’s nature to the core. She was tender, ineffably so, doubtful, charming, full of fears, superbly passionate. Her great tones were like golden apples filled with the sharp delicious juices of her bridal memories; and she was the epitome of the helpmate, the apotheosis of exalted womanhood when she bade her man go forth and conquer new worlds, exercise his supreme gifts of strength and courage as a man should, instead of dallying too long in these flowery meadows of love. Ordham, watching her through his glass, wondered that even she could be so beautiful, for her face was illuminated as he had never seen it before. He had not the least doubt that she kept her word and sang to him, and when she cried: “Oh, heavenly powers, holy protectors, view with delight our devotion and love. Apart, who can divide us? Divided, still we are one!” she bent her head from Siegfried’s neck and looked once more full at the spot where, it may be, Ordham’s face made a white blur on the dark.
He paid slight attention to the next scene, although the picturesque hall of the Gibichungs on the Rhine, with the sinister plot hatched there, had always delighted him; but his uneasiness recurred, for in retrospect Styr’s voice and acting were charged with a significance he felt but could not define. His confidence returned, however, during her scene with Waltraute, when he could not doubt that her incredulity at the demand of the gods to give up her bridal ring, and the magnificent scorn with which she announced herself woman, not that pitiful half-remembered thing, a demigoddess, were addressed, not to Valhalla, but to the harrowing demands of an art that still fought for its rights.
“Siegfried loves me! . . . The ring bides with me. . . . get hence to the gods. . . . Sooner to ruins Valhalla’s splendour may crash,” sang Brünhilde, much as Styr, if too hard pressed, might have cried: “To the devil with Art and the world!”
Ordham smiled, then sank the man in the spectator once more as the hapless Brünhilde repulsed and struggled with the disguised and unmemoried Siegfried, for here there could be no message; no mortal would ever come between himself and her; and perhaps that profound knowledge and faith, at the same time devoid of the subtle sting of regret for the loss of a suspense always piquant, was the final proof that, whatever his faults and lacks, as a man he was at least able to love greatly.
As Brünhilde was driven by the fraudulent Gunther into the cave, she looked as if the very bones had gone out of her, primitive woman beaten and captured by the victorious male, bewildered, helpless, sick with disgust and horror, but too broken, too conscious of the futility of revolt even to appeal to the relentless brute force behind her. Ordham recalled Styr’s initiation, and reflected that, although methods had changed since the primordial era, man had not. And while there was no resemblance whatever between himself and that prosaic seducer of an ignorant and beautiful child, bred in a filthy mining town, save in their common sex, still would he, impelled by that imperious call in his blood of man for his mate, have resorted to kidnapping, strategy, bribery, violence, any device old or new, to force this woman into an indissoluble bond with himself.
By the King’s command, there was a pause of but three minutes between the first act—close upon an hour and a half in length—and the second. Ordham’s mind wandered to the morrow until the boat came down the Rhine with Gunther and his prey. Then, once more he was ready to sink Styr in Brünhilde, for he had never been able to decide which was the greatest piece of acting on the world’s stage, Styr’s Isolde in the first act of Tristan, or her Brünhilde in this tremendous scene, where she invoked the supernormal birthright of the goddess to intensify the fury and indignation of the outraged woman.
As she stepped from the boat, hanging her head before the throng awaiting the bride Gunther had ravished from the fire-girt rock, she looked so forlorn, so beaten, so wholly womanly that Ordham felt tears in his eyes. Oddly enough his thoughts flew to the lonely coffin in Brompton Cemetery. Mabel, dead in her youth, was mercifully spared the maturer suffering of woman. Not that she ever could have reached the heights and depths so fatally accessible to this woman, but she symbolized youth, whose unhappiness is but a phase of its egotistical pleasures, and was gone before she had lived long enough to suffer with a mind stripped of illusions.
There was no controversy of doubt over Styr’s interpretation of Brünhilde in this act. She let loose every passion of which her sex when scorned has yet conceived. After her vain appeal to Siegfried, standing fatuously beside the Gedrun whose magic potion has bewitched him (more than ever Ordham wondered that Brünhilde could have given her affections to this great child), when those long moments of staring incredulity were over, she burst into such a madness of rage that her voice seemed to darken visibly, to take on strange tones, as deep and crude as colour may have been in that morning of the world when goddesses went to sleep on rocks surrounded by fire and Siegfrieds fought dragons and walked through flames protected by tarnhelm and ring. When she screamed, her voice pierced to the marrow, affrighting as that of a wild beast in a jungle at night. The whole scene was almost unbearable in its intensity; but never did those beautiful arms make an ungraceful movement, the hand that clutched the heart as if to tear it out never rose an inch too high or low. Her audience might be racked and unbreathed, but Styr was always the absolute artist, vivified but never distracted by the furnace within.