This Act will ever be accounted one of Wagner’s most magnificent and fully inspired.  The superb vocal writing, the beauty and sheer strength of the orchestral parts, the gorgeous colouring, and the human passion blent with the sense of the green yet fiery spring, all go to make up a thing unique in opera.  A tide of life rushes through it all; and the man’s technical accomplishment was so fine and complete that he found immediate incisive expression for every shade of emotion, or complex blend of emotions, and every sensation.  The jealous, savage ferocity of Hunding is there; Siegmund’s and Sieglinda’s despair, hope and final burst of ecstatic joy; and at the same time we seem to smell the fresh, wet earth and leaves and to see the sparkling moonlight.

III

The Second Act opens in a wild and rocky place amongst the mountains.  Siegmund and Sieglinda have fled; Hunding is in hot pursuit; and now Wotan stands, the mighty war-god, brandishing his spear, and calling his daughter Bruennhilda, the Valkyrie, to favour and aid Siegmund.  She joyfully assents and goes off, and Wotan exults.  He persists in deceiving himself:  Bruennhilda, his own daughter, was created to execute his purposes:  the Runes make him accountable for her actions, just as he is now for Siegmund’s and in the later operas for Siegfried’s.  As in the Rhinegold, Fricka instantly bids him remember what and how he is.  As the goddess of covenants, laws, she wants vengeance wreaked on Siegmund and Sieglinda:  they have broken the most sacred of all covenants in the eyes of a woman, the marriage covenant.  Vainly Wotan pleads that the Valkyrie works unaided:  she presses him, until at last he swears a sacred oath on his spear that Siegmund shall die.  Bruennhilda comes in, whooping her war-call, but her voice drops at the sight of Fricka.  Fricka, who thoroughly despises all the Valkyrie maidens as being born out of true wedlock, tells her to take her orders from Wotan, and goes off triumphant.  Wotan, deeply despondent, terrifies Bruennhilda with his grief; she casts down her spear and shield and kneels before him, imploring him to tell the cause.

Then follows a scene that is, and always will be, a stumbling-block:  Wotan seeks to explain his position in quasi-Schopenhauerian terminology and at immense length.  We know all about it:  it has been explained amply in the Rhinegold and in the scene we have just witnessed, and now he must needs go over the ground again—­with dreary and soporific effect.  Bruennhilda, as love incarnate, pleads for the man and woman whose only crime in her eyes is that they love (for laws are things pure love cannot understand).  Wotan cannot but be obdurate; he pronounces sentence on Siegmund and goes off in a storming rage.  Sadly Bruennhilda, comprehending nothing of the compulsion Wotan is subject to—­for how should love know aught of greed for power?—­picks up