In the prologue of the Dusk of the Gods we find the Norns spinning in the dark near Brunnhilda's cave; the rope they are at work on breaks, and they learn that the end is near. They disappear; day breaks, and Siegfried and Brunnhilda enter. She is sending him to do heroic deeds, quite in the spirit of medieval chivalry; he presents her with the ring and goes, wearing her armour and taking her horse. He arrives at the hall of Gibichungs, where he finds Gunther, his sister Gutruna and Hagen, a son of Alberich. They give Siegfried a draught which takes away his memory; he falls in love with Gutruna, and when they propose that he should take Gunther's shape and win Brunnhilda for him, he agrees at once. In the meantime, Waltraute, a Valkyrie, knowing Wotan's need of the ring, has come and tried in vain to get it; Brunnhilda refuses to part with it. Presently Siegfried, wearing the tarnhelm, comes and claims her, and compels her to share his couch, placing his sword between them to keep faith with Gunther. The ring, however, he tears from her. She is overcome with dismay and grief. When, at the end of The Valkyrie, Wotan had pronounced her doom, it had seemed bad enough; but this is a thousand times worse, and she cannot understand the god's cruelty. Arrived at Gunther's home, she of course recognises Siegfried in his own shape, and knows by the ring that it was he, changed by the tarnhelm, and not Gunther, who had broken through the fire a second time. Her sorrow changes to fierce anger; she denounces him, and says he has not kept faith with Gunther; he does not remember anything that occurred previous to drinking the potion, knows he has been true to Gunther, and goes joyfully off with his new bride. Gunther thinks he has been dishonoured; Brunnhilda is furious at her betrayal; Hagen wants to get the ring; and the three decide that Siegfried must die. There can be no explaining away the draught. In Tristan it is not essential that the philtre is a true love-philtre, but here the case is different. If it symbolizes, as has been suggested, a sudden passion for Gutruna, then Siegfried is an out-and-out blackguard, and not the hero Wagner intended. Besides, if the loss of his memory leads to the sacrifice of Brunnhilda, afterwards its sudden return, due to another potion, leads immediately to his own death. We must accept these potions as part of the machinery. If we do not grumble at talking dragons, tarnhelms, flying horses and fires and magic swords, we need not boggle at a couple of glasses of magical liquid.
In the last act Siegfried, out hunting with the Gibichung tribe, finds himself alone by the riverside. The Rhine-maidens beg the ring from him; he refuses, and they tell him that this day he must die. The other hunters arrive, and Siegfried, drinking the second philtre, tells the story of how he first won Brunnhilda. That is Hagen's opportunity: to avenge Gunther he stabs Siegfried in the back. To the tremendous funeral march the body is carried over the hills. It is brought into the hall of the Gibichungs. Gunther has pangs of remorse, but Hagen, only half-human, has none; the pair fall out, and Gunther is killed. Gutruna wails, as a woman will when she loses her husband and brother within a quarter of an hour; Hagen goes to take the ring from Siegfried's finger, but the corpse raises its hand menacingly and all draw back aghast. Brunnhilda enters; all now has become clear to her, and she resolves that she, like Wotan, will renounce a loveless life—a life based on fraud and tyranny. She tells Gutruna that Siegfried has never belonged to her—is hers, Brunnhilda's; and on receiving this crushing blow, Gutruna creeps to her brother's side and lies there, miserable and hopeless. He is dead; but he was the list of her kin and only friend, and, robbed of even the memory of Siegfried, to be near his dead body seems better than nothing. Then Brunnhilda commands the funeral pyre to be built and the body of Siegfried placed on it; she chants her song in praise of love, mounts her horse Grani, and rides through the fire into the Rhine. Shouting "The ring!" Hagen dashes after her; the ring has returned to the maidens, and Loge, unchained, mounts up and Walhalla is consumed. So ends the third subsidiary drama of the Ring.
The music is the last Wagner wrote in his ripe period; when we get to Parsifal his powers were waning. In point of structure it is the same as that of Siegfried. It has less of springtime freshness than the Valkyrie, and the prevailing colour is sombre and tragic; but there are magnificent things. The Norns scene, the Journey of the Rhine, the Waltrante scene, the funeral march, and Brunnhilda's final speech, are Wagner in the full glory of his strength.
The complete Ring was given for the first time at the opening of the Bayreuth (Wagner) Theatre in 1876. The performance did not pay, and the expenses had to be covered by selling the dresses and scenery. Bayreuth was by no means in those days the fashionable summer resort it has since become. Nevertheless, the immediate effect felt throughout Europe was electric, stupendous. As a mere advertisement, it proved more effective than anything devised for pills and patent soaps. Hundreds who went to Bayreuth to pass the time, or at most in a spirit of intelligent curiosity, came away converted to the new faith; many who went to sponge remained to pay; and all preached the doctrine of Wagnerism wherever they went. Well they might. As I was an infant at the time, my recollections of the first performances and of Wagner's speech are not so vivid as those of some of my younger colleagues, who, like myself, were not there; but, according to all creditable accounts, the representations must have been a nearer approach to perfection in all respects, save the singing, than anything seen before. In one sense Wagner had attempted no revolution in stage-craft; but in another sense it was, perhaps, the best sort of revolution to secure the ablest men, and make them take care, pains, with their work. Anyhow, if tolerable operatic representations can now be seen in every country of Europe save Italy, the credit must go to Wagner, who first taught the impresarios what to aim at and how to achieve their aim, and gave the accursed star system a blow from which it is slowly dying. Carefully nursed though it is in New York and at Covent Garden, its convulsive shudders announce impending death, and already one hears the wail of those who mourn a departing order of things.
"PARSIFAL" (1882).
This disastrous and evil opera was written in Wagner's old age, under the influence of such a set of disagreeably immoral persons as has seldom if ever been gathered together in so small a town as Bayreuth. The whole drama consists in this: At Montsalvat there was a monastery, and the head became seriously ill because he had been seen with a lady. In the long-run he is saved by a young man—rightly called a "fool"—who cannot tolerate the sight of a woman. What it all means—the grotesque parody of the Last Supper, the death of the last woman in the world, the spear which has caused the Abbot's wound and then cures it—these are not matters to be entered into here. Some of the music is fine.