mutters in her
dream, the Valkyrie's call is heard encouraging Siegmund, the crash as
the Sword is splintered, and then an awful silence. The action has
been long delayed, but the catastrophe arrives with appalling
swiftness at the end, and the music is equal to the opportunity. It is
not wholly theatre music: that passage in the bass, galloping up and
down the scale against a _tremolando_ accompaniment, is in itself fine
music; even Hunding's rough cow-horn makes a musical effect. When
Wotan's fury breaks forth and he rides off in godlike wrath--even here
the music is glorious, taken simply as music. Had all the _Ring_ been
done with the superb mastery of this and the preceding Act, we should
have an art creation to be set above every other art achievement in
the world--above anything done by AEschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare.

V

Like the First Act, the Third begins with a storm of rain, wind,
thunder and lightning; like First and Second, it opens with a display
of energy before which all listeners are as leaves in the wind. As
panoramic displays translated into music all the three introductions
are likely enough to be misunderstood; so at the outset let us
carefully bear in mind Wagner's intention at the beginning of the last
Act of the _Valkyrie_--to show, with unequalled force and splendour,
the strength of the god, soon to be shown as nothing before the
strength of Bruennhilda. Bruennhilda, let us always remember, stands for
human love, affection--not love in the _Tristan_ sense--but that love
of which Goldsmith sang that He "loved us into being"; the love of
human being for human being so strong that not for so many thousands a
year as a judge, so many pitiable hundreds a year as a magistrate,
immortality as an omnipotent ruler or a Wotan, will it perpetuate or
permit a wrong on a human being. To win omnipotence Wotan has
inflicted wrong upon wrong--wrong upon wrong on those he had created
for his purpose, on those the fine part of his nature loved. The fine
part of his nature revolts and conquers him. He struggles on, shorn of
nine-tenths of his strength, and it is not until the Third Act of
_Siegfried_ that he sees himself beaten and acknowledges it; but the
ending of the gods, which really began with Wotan's first grasp at
universal power, is first in this last Act of the _Valkyrie_ clearly
foretold. Wotan comes on clothed in thunders and lightnings to punish
Bruennhilda because she fought on the side