Nevertheless, those that knew nothing of acting would have vowed that Styr’s brain was suffocated by Brynhildr’s. To-night when Siegfried and Gedrun had gone, and, alone with Gunther and Hagen, she stood staring before her, an immense horror in her eyes, her lips slightly parted, her arms limp, as if on the edge of the world watching it sink into the black void of space, Ordham involuntarily glanced behind him at the King. He had hitched his chair forward, his arms were pressing the rail, his hat was on the back of his head, his eyes flamed with light. He looked like a lost immortal, long straying from star to star, who at last sees the distant gates of Valhalla open, and awaiting him. Ordham wondered why this poor idealist had never sought out Styr, hoping to find in her the embodiment of his unearthly dreams; wondered again if it were because of the knowledge that his mortal career had made it impossible for him to find the goddess in any woman. His eyes were filmed with more than common weakness, his senses drugged, dead; he could but dream of some tier of heaven reserved for great souls like his, which came to their own only when free of the flesh. But there was no doubt that Styr in such scenes as this gave him immortal moments.
Brünhilde came out of her stupor, and after a fruitless lament for the lost arts of her godhood, with which, woman-like, she fancied she might have held Siegfried against the wiles of a younger woman, deliberately sentenced him to death. As she described the only vulnerable part of the mighty Siegfried, that fearless back which he would never show to any foe, her calm was far more awful than her wrath had been. During her long meditation, she had divined the trick which had been played upon the warrior, but that light by no means mitigated the evil; if she could not possess him neither should Gedrun. It was the primitive woman’s method of revenge that modern woman has not disdained to follow, but so grand was her portrayal of a woman conscious that she had once been the mighty daughter of Wotan, that never for a second did she descend to the level of Earthians. She was Brünhilde acting according to her lights, and the lights of her day must have been as blinding as an electric storm caught in an underground cavern.
The scene shifted. Siegfried drank from the horn into which the ever malignant Hagen had squeezed the restorative herb, and sang of Brünhilde, forgetting Gedrun and all that had happened since he left the rock. With the enchanting strains of the love music of the last act of the third opera of the tetralogy embracing him—tender and ecstatic—followed by the slowly unwinding Brünhilde motif, coming as it did after so much misery, wickedness, and violence, and preceding crime and the final disaster, Ordham dropped his face into his hands and gave up his thoughts to the bliss he anticipated. He was recalled by the deepest sigh he had ever heard. It came down upon him like a gust of death, dulling the almost excruciating sweetness of the music. He raised his head and thanked God that he was not Ludwig, King of Bavaria. For him there was a future on Earth.
The Trauermarsch, in which all the dead of not only Earth, but of the Universe, seem to rise and tramp across the bridge of oblivion, was finished. Brünhilde entered the hall of the Gibichungs to find Gedrun wailing over Siegfried’s body, Gunther slain by Hagen. Of late Styr had played the character consistently through to the end as a woman. But to-night she appeared to defer once more to Wagner—possibly to the King—and to be about to symbolize the “negation of the will to live,” the eternal sacrifice of woman, the immolation of self; although she had contended, and for that reason sang no more at Bayreuth, that such an interpretation was absurd as a finale for Brünhilde, no matter what its beauty and truth in the abstract. The gods were doomed, her renouncement of life did not save them, and as for the sacrifice of woman to man, that she had accomplished twice over. Brünhilde died as other women had died since, and doubtless before, in the hope of uniting with the spirit of her man, and because life was become abhorrent.
To-night, as she entered the hall, she was so still, so majestic, that she no longer looked a woman at all, save in so far as her slain womanhood may have risen to feed the purpose of the daughter of Wotan—calm, inexorable, the personification of Will. As she stood by the bier and ordered the funeral pyre built and began that great dirge which expresses the end of all things mortal, her face was expressionless, as fixed as that of the beautiful Medusa in the Glyptothek of Munich. Her head, her body, might have been an organ out of which rolled such notes as no other audience had ever heard. Ordham almost stood up, the voice was so sublime, so unearthly; he wondered if his brain, his senses, had been so unmercifully beaten upon during the long hours of the opera that he was suffering from delusion. He had not known that even Styr could sing like that. So must the heroines of the old Sagas have sung when Europe was still the battleground of gods and men, so may Brynhildr’s voice have gone up in its mighty swan song before Valhalla flamed and fell to ashes.
Never on any stage has there been such a picture as Styr always made, when, standing before the funeral pyre on whose summit lay the body of Siegfried, with her flaming torch held high in her right hand and her hair streaming behind her, looking even taller than her own majestic height, she sang:
“Flieght heim, ihr Raben
raun’t es euren Herrn
was hier am Rhein irh gehört!”
and to-night, as she sang that magnificent pæan to death, she fairly filled the stage, as if some power of the soul literally permitted her body to grow to the heroic proportions of that old daughter of the gods.