The hunting party comes off duly. Siegfried strays from it and meets
the Rhine maidens, who almost succeed in coaxing the ring from him. He
pretends to be afraid of his wife; and they chaff him as to her beating
him and so forth; but when they add that the ring is accursed and will
bring death upon him, he discloses to them, as unconsciously as Julius
Caesar disclosed it long ago, that secret of heroism, never to let your
life be shaped by fear of its end. [*] So he keeps the ring; and they leave
him to his fate. The hunting party now finds him; and they all sit
down together to make a meal by the river side, Siegfried telling them
meanwhile the story of his adventures. When he approaches the subject of
Brynhild, as to whom his memory is a blank, Hagen pours an antidote
to the love philtre into his drinking horn, whereupon, his memory
returning, he proceeds to narrate the incident of the fiery mountain, to
Gunther's intense mortification. Hagen then plunges his spear into the
back of Siegfried, who falls dead on his shield, but gets up again,
after the old operatic custom, to sing about thirty bars to his love
before allowing himself to be finally carried off to the strains of the
famous Trauermarsch.
* "We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of
the word. The fear of the end is the source of all
lovelessness; and this fear is generated only when love
begins to wane. How came it that this loves the highest
blessedness to all things living, was so far lost sight of
by the human race that at last it came to this: all that
mankind did, ordered, and established, was conceived only in
fear of the end? My poem sets this forth."--Wagner to
Roeckel, 25th Jan. 1854.
The scene then changes to the hall of the Gibichungs by the Rhine. It is
night; and Gutrune, unable to sleep, and haunted by all sorts of vague
terrors, is waiting for the return of her husband, and wondering
whether a ghostly figure she has seen gliding down to the river bank is
Brynhild, whose room is empty. Then comes the cry of Hagen, returning
with the hunting party to announce the death of Siegfried by the tusk of
a wild boar. But Gutrune divines the truth; and Hagen does not deny it.
Siegfried's body is brought in; Gunther claims the ring; Hagen will
not suffer him to take it; they fight; and Gunther is slain. Hagen then
attempts to take it; but the dead man's hand closes on it and raises
itself threateningly. Then Brynhild comes; and a funeral pyre is raised
whilst she declaims a prolonged scene, extremely moving and imposing,
but yielding nothing to resolute intellectual criticism except a very
powerful and elevated exploitation of theatrical pathos, psychologically
identical with the scene of Cleopatra and the dead Antony in
Shakespeare's tragedy. Finally she flings a torch into the pyre, and
rides her war-horse into the flames. The hall of the Gibichungs catches
fire, as most halls would were a cremation attempted in the middle
of the floor (I permit myself this gibe purposely to emphasize the
excessive artificiality of the scene); but the Rhine overflows its
banks to allow the three Rhine maidens to take the ring from Siegfried's
finger, incidentally extinguishing the conflagration as it does so.
Hagen attempts to snatch the ring from the maidens, who promptly drown
him; and in the distant heavens the Gods and their castle are seen
perishing in the fires of Loki as the curtain falls.