Gaily singing, he passes up through the fire,
and finds Bruennhilde asleep upon her rock. Love teaches him the fear
which he could not learn from Fafner. He awakens the sleeper, and would
clasp her in his arms, but Bruennhilde, who fell asleep a goddess, knows
not that she has awaked a woman. She flies from him, but his passion
melts her, and, her godhead slipping from her, she yields to his
embrace.
'Siegfried,' as has been happily observed, is the scherzo of the great
Nibelung symphony. After the sin and sorrow of 'Die Walkuere' the change
to the free life of the forest and the boyish innocence of the youthful
hero is doubly refreshing. 'Siegfried' is steeped in the spirit of
youth. There breathes through it the freshness of the early world.
Wagner loved it best of his works. He called it 'the most beautiful of
my life's dreams.' Though less stirring in incident than 'Die Walkuere,'
it is certainly more sustained in power. It is singularly free from
those lapses into musical aridity which occasionally mar the beauty of
the earlier work. If the poem from time to time sinks to an inferior
level, the music is instinct with so much resource and beauty that there
can be no question of dulness. In 'Siegfried,' in fact, Wagner's genius
reaches its zenith. In power, picturesqueness, and command of orchestral
colour and resource, he never surpassed such scenes as the opening of
the third act, or Siegfried's scaling of Bruennhilde's rock.
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