The pair have drunk mead together and stand looking at one another; the storm has died away; and from the orchestra come passages of wondrous delicacy, tenderness and freshness, scored by a perfect master.  Suddenly the clanking of a horse’s hoofs is heard; “Hunding!” exclaims Sieglinda; the door is again thrown open and the black, ferocious barbarian stalks in.  His theme is, figuratively, as black, gloomy, sinister and forbidding as himself; and the heavy, sullen tones of the battery of tubas which announces it intensify its effectiveness a hundredfold.  Hunding is no villain of the piece, but a simple, surly chief of a tribe of savage fighters, and Wagner’s music exactly describes him.  Save for Siegmund’s recital of his woes, the remainder of the scene remains sullen and gloomy; Siegmund, however, has some touching passages, and notably a phrase of unearthly strangeness when he tells how he came back to his hut and found his father gone, only a wolf-skin lying there; and a bit of the Valhalla motive in the orchestra thrills one with its suggestiveness.  One is carried into the dimmest recess of a forest where man has never been, far back in a period so old that it is ridiculous to call it ancient.  Throughout the music is in Wagner’s grandest manner; the vocal writing is perfect; and though there are plenty of theatrical strokes, they are done in a nobler way than the mere opera way of Tannhaeuser and Lohengrin.  In a word, the music is big:  the breadth and sweep are enormous:  the greatest Wagner has arrived, the Wagner who has gone far beyond the hesitations and littlenesses even of the Rhinegold.  Hunding is characterised more clearly and with more decisive strokes than Hagen in the last opera of the Ring, partly because there is more genuine inspiration in the Valkyrie, partly, perhaps, because Hunding is a much simpler personage.

That strange scene where Siegmund lies on the hearth again, and, realising his desperate situation, calls on his father the Volsung for aid, is musically and dramatically splendid in its colour and force.  As he thinks of Sieglinda a feeling of spring again comes into the music; thus is strengthened the beautiful music she is given; then comes the avowal of love, and the flying open of the door.  Outside, the trees are seen in the moonlight, the dripping green leaves glistening; and Siegmund sings a spring-song never to be beaten for freshness (though, as I have pointed out, not equal in musical significance to Walther’s song in the Mastersingers); there comes the magnificent scene of the plucking out of the Sword; the recognition of the two as brother and sister; and the final impassioned outburst which ends the scene as with a blaze of fire.