The gorgeous journey to the mountain-top is resumed as Siegfried disappears amongst the rocks and Wotan goes off.  We are now done with him:  his last ineffectual stand for supremacy having collapsed, as he fore-knew it would, he returns to Valhalla to await the end.  There is darkness for a while; then light returns, and we find the scene that of the termination of the Valkyrie.  The mountain-top is sunlit; Bruennhilda’s horse Grani is contentedly at graze; Bruennhilda, covered with her shield, her spear by her side, sleeps, motionless.  Siegfried comes over some rocks at the back of the stage, gazes around him in wonder, finally discovers Bruennhilda, and with a kiss awakens her.  At first the godhood has not quite gone out of her, and “Woe! woe!” she cries, as she realises her fate.  But womanhood is strong within her; she yields; hails Siegfried as the highest hero of all the world, and the opera ends.

The music is nearly throughout the superb Wagner.  The long ascending violin passage which accompanies Siegfried’s amazed gazing at the wonders around him, chief amongst them Bruennhilda, is imagined with absolute truth; Bruennhilda’s Greeting to the sun is Wagner in the plenitude of his powers, blending music which depicts her outspread arms with human rapture in an incomparable way; Siegfried’s masterful and passionate entreaties are quite in the strain of Tristan, though the Scandinavian atmosphere prevails; Bruennhilda’s awe-stricken song, “O Siegfried, highest hero,” interprets the birth of love in a woman’s breast with, again, absolute truth; and that the man who had lately written Tristan could write such a finale is not the least astounding of Wagner’s feats.

The Siegfried Idyll, made of the Siegfried Themes, is, in a word, the most beautiful thing he ever wrote.

CHAPTER XVII

‘THE DUSK OF THE GODS’

I

This, the last of Wagner’s really great works, was composed in hot haste for the first Bayreuth festival.  True, the festival did not take place until some time after its completion; but at the moment Wagner anticipated an immediate performance.  There is nothing more pathetic, nothing sadder, than the picture of the mighty world-composer struggling against petty odds to complete what might have been a world-masterpiece, and failing because of his hurry.  He was sixty years of age; worn by constant combat; worried even then by stupid persecutions and the uncertainties of life; and he went on, if not joyfully, at least indomitably, unconquerably.  The result is a work gigantic in idea, but far too rapid and facile in the execution.  His pen seems to have run of its own accord; the scenes are spread out to a length positively appalling; pages on pages show no trace of inspiration.  Yet the Dusk of the Gods is an opera no other composer could have achieved; and with all its defects it will be a high and holy joy to generations not yet born.