The feebleness of Wotan here loses itself in a sea of infinite pathos. The power of the magic hand of Wagner in the creation of dramatic atmosphere is seen in the tumultuous storming of the Valkyrs through the inky air. "How now, ye secret black and midnight hags; what is't ye do?" The salutation of Macbeth to the witches pales before the lightnings of the winged steeds. Into the midst of this festival of the furies plunges the ill-assorted pair, Brünnhilde and Sieglinde.
Thundering upon their traces comes Wotan, the irate god, whose well-meant efforts to escape the complications wrought by his own misdeeds have been thwarted by the erring wish maiden. Hearken to the old scold berating his frightened daughters: "Out with ye, hussies. Your sister has been disobedient. Speak to her, and I'll whip ye, too."
Slinking away into the waning storm, they leave the father and the foolishly loving daughter together. The mighty seething of the musical sea subsides, leaving a deep underrunning swell of feeling. The billowing rush of the Valkyr theme gives way to the plaintive flow of the motive of Brünnhilde's pleading, one of the most poignantly expressive melodies ever conceived by Wagner. How it wells upward in the tender voices of the wood wind!
The stricken Valkyr grovels at the feet of the perplexed Wotan. What will he do with her? The two engage in a long and unnecessary wordy wrangle over the deed of the goddess. Wagner must talk, talk, talk. He is a German dramatist. His music alone saves him from perdition. Prate as he may of the organic union of the arts, the magic of melody and harmony is his wand of transformation.
With that he lifts the tiresome rehearsal of the incidents of "Rheingold" by Wotan to eloquence. With that he changes the hair-splitting of Tristan and Isolde to the most passionate of love duets. With that he makes almost a miracle of Siegfried's condensed narrative in the last act of "Götterdämmerung." The theory is a perfect one; Wagner's practice is wholly faulty. His music saves him. He is sometimes no better than an old-fashioned opera librettist, and writes long pages of bald text simply in order to clothe them with musical glory.
Brünnhilde complains: "Why are you angry at me, father?" He answers, "You know well enough what you've done." "You told me to do it," says she. "But afterward I told you not to do it," says he. "But you really didn't mean that. You wished me to protect Siegmund," declares Brünnhilde. "You made the other order because you were afraid of Fricka." And then Brünnhilde takes forty lines to tell Wotan what she did, which both he and we already know. Wotan takes just forty lines more to tell Brünnhilde that while he has been struggling with his problems she has had nothing to do but enjoy herself (how many mortal fathers talk thus to their daughters)! and that now he has no further use for her light soul.
Thus they bandy words till finally we come to Hecuba. Wotan tells her that she is to be put to sleep and that the man who awakens her shall have her. She begs for the protection of the magic fire, and this far-seeing god stares amazed and enraptured at the birth of a new idea. Glorious! He will commit this precious jewel of his soul to the guardianship of his arch enemy, Loge, the fire spirit, the treacherous, the shifty, the ultimate destroyer, not only of Brünnhilde, but of Walhalla and its futile brood.
Oh, Wagner, how much more prescient were the skalds than thou! But who thinks of all this while the performance is in progress? No one. The triumphant music swells to the very bursting point of emotional rhapsody. The entrance of the farewell of Wotan is one of the sublimest conceptions of the master craftsman in tone.
But there is a moment, a great, overmastering, torrential moment, in this scene, which is equalled only once or twice elsewhere in the trilogy. It is the moment when Brünnhilde and Wotan stand and gaze one upon the other, like the transformed Tristan and Isolde, and the plaintive, pitiful motive of the Valkyr's pleading rises into a tremendous, pealing burst of passionate yearning, which sets the whole orchestra reeling and rocking with the poignancy of its melody and wrings the tears from the eyes of the listener.
That is the climax of "Die Walküre." It is the victory of the child's love over the futile and disappearing All-Father. It is the last utterance of the majesty of Walhalla. Thenceforward godhood disappears not only from Brünnhilde, but from all Walhalla. The human hero is now to come, to see, and to command.