Brünnhilde returns to his side only to learn the story of her sire's grief. He tells her the history of the rape of the gold, of the endless scheming of Alberich for the downfall of the gods, of his own plan to fill Walhalla with defenders, of his search for Erda, and her becoming Brünnhilde's mother. If Alberich recovers the ring Walhalla is lost, for only he who forswore love can work evil with the circlet of Rhine gold. The ring must be taken from Fafner, but Wotan dare not take it himself because to do so would be a violation of faith and bring more suffering upon him. Only the free hero can accomplish this end. But Fricka has unmasked the truth. Siegmund is but the slave of Wotan's will. And in his final outburst of grief and impotent rage the god sums up his misery:
How Wagner builds upon his material! Hagen, the hatred-born son of Alberich, offspring of gold, shall cause the downfall of the gods. He, the child of evil, shall be the instrument of law! And all this is original with Wagner. To mere hints in the sources he adds the details of a complete poetic story, and always the development of the fundamental ethical thought on which the whole tragedy rests is his. Yet these scenes, in which the god is revealed to us as so intensely human, are the ones to which the average attendant at Wagner performances give the least thought. Wagner was much concerned about this scene, and indeed about the whole act. On October 3, 1855, he sent the first two acts to Liszt and wrote to him thus:
"I am anxious for the weighty second act; it contains two catastrophes, so important and powerful that there would be sufficient matter for two acts; but then they are so interdependent and the one implies the other so immediately, that it was impossible to separate them. If it is represented exactly as I intend, and if my intentions are perfectly understood, the effect must be beyond anything that has hitherto been in existence. Of course it is written only for people who can stand something (perhaps in reality for nobody). That incapable and weak persons will complain cannot in any way move me. You must decide whether everything has succeeded according to my own intentions. I cannot do it otherwise. At times, when I was timid and sobered down, I was chiefly anxious about the great scene of Wotan, especially when he discloses the decrees of Fate to Brünnhilde, and in London I was once on the point of rejecting the whole scene. In order to come to a decision I took up the sketch and recited the scene with proper expression, when fortunately I discovered that my spleen was unjustified, and that, if properly represented, the scene would have a grand effect even in a purely musical sense."
The remainder of the drama is taken up with the development of what has been prepared. Brünnhilde's mind is distracted. She feels that Wotan, against his own inclinations, is about to sacrifice Siegmund to the wrath of Fricka. Presently the fleeing and guilty lovers approach. Sieglinde, overcome with shame and terrified at the prospect of Hunding's attack, sinks senseless in the arms of Siegmund. Brünnhilde appears, and in the beautiful scene, usually named by its German title, the "Todesverkündigung," announces to Siegmund his coming death. He passionately refuses to die or to go to Walhalla without his bride, and Brünnhilde, overcome by his pleading, promises to aid him in the fight. She does so, and Wotan thrusts his spear between the combatants, so that Siegmund's sword is shattered upon it. Hunding slays Siegmund and is himself stricken to death by the sword of Wotan. Brünnhilde flees to the Valkyr's rock with Sieglinde, gives her the pieces of the broken sword, foretells the birth of a son, whom she names Siegfried, and sends Sieglinde to secrete herself in the forest to the eastward, where Fafner lies brooding on the hoard. Wotan arrives in hot pursuit of his disobedient daughter, drives off her frightened, pleading sisters, and sentences her, as already told. And all this Wagner has evolved from a few scattered lines in the saga. The marvellous beauty of the scene between Wotan and his beloved child cannot be described.
But let the reader remember that the punishment inflicted on her is not solely because of her disobedience of a command, but also and chiefly because the salvation of Siegmund would have violated Wotan's oath to Fricka and thus have increased the burden of guilt already upon the conscience of this unfortunate and very human god. Again the ethical basis of the tragedy comes to the front, and the moral law, operating as Fate, demands a victim. Brünnhilde becomes the Sleeping Beauty, so familiar to us in the fairy tales, and waits for her prince to wake her, a prince who shall be without fear, and who shall see no terrors in the point of All-Father's dread spear. This hero will be free, "freer than I, the god," as Wotan tells us, while the majestic pealing of the young hero's motive by the orchestra reveals, what the text does not, that Siegfried will be the awakener.
None of the sagas or legends in any way connect Brünnhilde with the fate of Siegfried's parents or the birth of the hero. Wagner's invention is here truly dramatic. He has welded separate incidents into a sequence of beautiful poetry and immense dramatic significance. In doing so he has greatly increased the splendour of the character of Brünnhilde. He has enlarged the aspect of her divinity, and has painted with the hand of a master the strange commingling in her of godhood and womanhood. Her sympathy with the doomed pair is wholly womanly, and it leads to her becoming entirely a woman when Wotan, in the enforcement of the demands of law, kisses the godhood from her. None of the old poems suggest such a Brünnhilde as Wagner's. She is a creation as distinct as Shakespeare's Juliet, as great as his Hamlet. In all dramatic literature there is no more majestic female figure than the Brünnhilde of "Die Walküre" and "Siegfried." In the final drama she diminishes in stature, by reason of the loss of her virginity. Then she is only a weak woman, except in the last scene, when she rises once more on the wings of grief to the proudest heights of self-sacrifice.
And so we pass to the next drama of the trilogy, the second act of the tragedy. The story of this is simple. Few ethical questions arise. All is concerned with the acts of the free hero, working without knowledge of Wotan, while the Nibelungs vainly strive to divert the results of the action to their own benefit. Again we meet with the warring forces,—gods, giants, and dwarfs,—but the gods are passive. Wotan, disguised as a wanderer, watches the progress of events, but does not interfere in it. The first act takes place in the cavern occupied as home and smithy by Mime,[43] no longer subject to his crafty brother, but now in business for himself and scheming to make the young Siegfried his instrument for the recovery of the gold and the ring. Sieglinde died in childbirth in Mime's cavern, and the dwarf, knowing well who she was, has taken good care of her son. Mime is an infinitely more picturesque character than the Regin of the saga, and the cavern a far more romantic home for the nurture of a forest hero than the Court of the Danish King. Wagner keeps clear of historical surroundings and conventionalities and presents to us a primal, elementary youth, a being whom we cannot fail to love. For Siegfried is the free, untrammelled youth of all time, the young man rejoicing in the strength of his youth, and arriving at the fundamental laws of life and love by observation, introspection, and the mighty workings of natural passion. He is a type, freed from every convention of clothes-philosophy and custom, from every condition of time or place. Siegfried is Young Manhood. His every utterance demands of the impersonator a largeness of conception far and away beyond the requirements of the ordinary operatic rôles. These are the petty puppets of libretto machinists, who cut and fit more or less dramatic stories according to the specifications of the Meyerbeerian plan. But Siegfried must be conceived along the lines of Brünnhilde's apostrophe:
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"O Siegfried! Herrlicher! Hort der Welt! Leben der Erde, Lachender Held!" |