The last act opens on a high hill, where stands the Valkyries’ rock, and amidst thunder, lightning, and rain we get the Ride.  Brunnhilda rushes in to her sisters with Sieglinda, tells what she has done, and begs for help.  All are aghast and refuse.  Sieglinda herself asks no aid; Siegmund is dead, and she has nothing to live for.  Brunnhilda tells her she carries within her the seed of the world’s mightiest hero, and in a moment her mood changes, and she begs to be sheltered.  Her ecstatic outburst is due to a mother’s instinctive joy and to the hope of having someone or something to care for, and no more to be utterly forsaken and purposeless.  The maidens tell her of the dark wood where the dragon hides, and Brunnhilda, chanting her hymn in praise of the love for which one surrenders all, gives her the fragments of the sword and bids her fly, awaiting with undaunted courage her own punishment.  The god comes in bursting with rage, and declares that Brunnhilda shall be left on the mountain to wed the first man who finds her.  The other maidens fly in horror; she alone remains to make an appeal to Wotan, as Siegmund had appealed to her.  At first he is obdurate, but she begs him to spare her that frightful disgrace, and to surround her with a wall of fire through which only a great hero will dare to pass.  He yields, taking her godhood, her limited immortality, away from her, putting her to sleep, calling up the fire, and swearing that only a hero who has no fear of his spear shall pass through, and so the drama ends.  Wotan has definitely renounced love.  The moment at which he can renounce life rather than endure life without love has not yet come.  The old Adam, the biological bias, the will to live, is strong in us all.

When Liszt read the score of The Valkyrie, he wrote to Wagner that he wanted to cry, like the chorus on the miraculous arrival of Lohengrin, “Wunderschoen! wunderschoen!” No man can cry otherwise to-day when he hears the last act.  The summit of artistic achievement seemed to be reached in the second act, but we are now carried still higher.  After the Ride, with its unequalled painting of tempest amongst the rocks and pines, there comes Brunnhilda’s glorious chant as she sends off Sieglinda, then her long supplication to Wotan, and finally the sleep and fire-music and Wotan’s Farewell.  The black storm gradually subsides, the deep-blue night comes on, and against it we see the swirling, crackling flames as the fire mounts, forming an impassable barrier that cuts off Brunnhilda from the everyday, busy world.  All Brunnhilda’s plaint is magnificent in its sweetness and pathos; and the sleep-music, with its caressing, lulling figure, is a thing by which a man’s memory might well live for ever.