Who bound me erewhile.
Rather than be
Thus blindly engulfed,
Even were they of gods the most godlike."
No Walhalla for the free spirit of flame, but liberty and the ultimate destruction of these pitiful children of the light. Wagner might have let the glittering chromatics of the fire theme rise just once into a peal of majestic power in the end of "Götterdämmerung," when Wotan and all his hosts sat helpless amid the blazing of Walhalla. It is Loge's triumph, is it not? Oh, yes, of course, it is the stupendous immolation of Brünnhilde, with the unutterable thought behind it and the regeneration of the earth before it. But Loge would have seen in it nothing but the victory of the eternal principle of destruction, which Wagner epitomized even better than he knew in his musical characterization of the fire-fiend.
What was really in Wagner's mind when he wrote that extraordinarily beautiful passage of song for Loge in the first scene of "Das Rheingold"?
"Where life ebbeth and floweth
In flood and earth and air,
All asked I,