At first Wotan will scarcely hear her; gradually he relents.  But he cannot go back on his oath, on the sentence he has pronounced; and in the end he yields her this much—­that she shall lie guarded by a wall of fire, only to be claimed by a hero who, not fearing his spear, will pass through the fire.  Then he bids her an everlasting farewell; lays her to sleep in her armour, covered by her shield, her weapon by her side; calls up the fire, and casting a last sad look on her, his favourite child, goes slowly off as the curtain falls.

The drama here is of the most poignant kind; the scenic surroundings are of the sort Wagner so greatly loved—­tempest amidst black pine-woods, with wild, flying clouds, the dying down of the storm, the saffron evening light melting into shadowy night, the calm deep-blue sky with the stars peeping out, then the bright flames shooting up; and the two elements, the dramatic and the pictorial, drew out of him some pages as splendid as any even he ever wrote.  The opening, “the Ride of the Valkyries,” is a piece of storm-music without a parallel.  There is no need here for Donner with his hammer:  the All-father himself is abroad in wrath and majesty, and his daughters laugh and rejoice in the riot.  There is nothing uncanny in the music:  we have that delight in the sheer force of the elements which we inherit from our earliest ancestors:  the joy of nature fiercely at work which is echoed in our hearts from time immemorial.  The shrilling of the wind, the hubbub, the calls of the Valkyries to one another, the galloping of the horses, form a picture which for splendour, wild energy and wilder beauty can never be matched.

Technically, this Ride is a miracle built up of many of the conventional figurations of the older music.  There is the continuous shake, handed on from instrument to instrument, the slashing figure of the upper strings, the kind of basso ostinato, conventionally indicating the galloping of horses, and the chief melody, a mere bugle-call, altered by a change of rhythm into a thing of superb strength.  The only part of the music that ever so remotely suggests extravagance is the Valkyrie’s call; and it, after all, is only a jodel put to sublime uses.  Out of these commonplace elements, elements that one might almost call prosaic, Wagner wrought his picture of storm, with its terror, power, joyous laughter of the storm’s daughters—­storm as it must have seemed to the first poets of our race.  The counterpoint is not so obviously wonderful as in Tristan and the Mastersingers, but only a contrapuntist equal to Bach and Handel could have written such counterpoint.  We may gain a clearer idea of what this means if we compare, not to the disadvantage of one or the other, this Ride with Berlioz’s “Ride to the Abyss.”  At first sight, Berlioz seems the more daring.  He trusts to a persistent rhythm and to orchestral effects.  There is no inner structure—­the separate parts, or batteries of parts, have no individuality: