To Richard Wagner's tremendous Siegfried's Funeral March the body of Siegfried is carried over the hills, after he was stabbed in the back by Hagen. It is brought into the hall of the Gibichungs. Gunther has pangs of remorse, but Hagen, only half-human, has none; the pair fall out, and Gunther is killed. Gutruna wails, as a woman will when she loses her husband and brother within a quarter of an hour; Hagen goes to take the ring from Siegfried's finger, but the corpse raises its hand menacingly and all draw back aghast.
Brunnhilde enters; all now has become clear to her, and she resolves that she, like Wotan, will renounce a loveless life — a life based on fraud and tyranny. She tells Gutruna that Siegfried has never belonged to her — is hers, Brunnhilde's; and on receiving this crushing blow, Gutruna creeps to her brother's side and lies there, miserable and hopeless. He is dead; but he was the last of her kin and only friend, and, robbed of even the memory of Siegfried, to be near his dead body seems better than nothing.
Then Brunnhilde commands the funeral pyre to be built and the body of Siegfried placed on it; she chants her song in praise of love, mounts her horse Grani, and rides through the fire into the Rhine. Shouting "The ring!" Hagen dashes after her; the ring has returned to the maidens, and Loge, unchained, mounts up and Walhalla is consumed. So ends the third subsidiary drama of the Ring.
The music is the last Wagner wrote in his ripe period; when we get to Parsifal his powers were waning. In point of structure it is the same as that of Siegfried. It has less of springtime freshness than the Valkyrie, and the prevailing colour is sombre and tragic; but there are magnificent things. The Norns scene, the Journey of the Rhine, the Waltraute scene, the funeral march, and Brunnhilde's final speech, are Richard Wagner in the full glory of his strength.
The complete Ring was given for the first time at the opening of the Bayreuth (Wagner) Theatre in 1876. The performance did not pay, and the expenses had to be covered by selling the dresses and scenery.
Bayreuth was by no means in those days the fashionable summer resort it has since become. Nevertheless, the immediate effect felt throughout Europe was electric, stupendous.
As a mere advertisement, it proved more effective than anything devised for pills and patent soaps. Hundreds who went to Bayreuth to pass the time, or at most in a spirit of intelligent curiosity, came away converted to the new faith; many who went to sponge remained to pay; and all preached the doctrine of Wagnerism wherever they went.
Well they might. As I was an infant at the time, my recollections of the first performances and of Wagner's speech are not so vivid as those of some of my younger colleagues, who, like myself, were not there; but, according to all creditable accounts, the representations must have been a nearer approach to perfection in all respects, save the singing, than anything seen before.
In one sense Wagner had attempted no revolution in stage-craft; but in another sense it was, perhaps, the best sort of revolution to secure the ablest men, and make them take care, pains, with their work. Anyhow, if tolerable operatic representations can now be seen in every country of Europe save Italy, the credit must go to Wagner, who first taught the impresarios what to aim at and how to achieve their aim, and gave the accursed star system a blow from which it is slowly dying.
Carefully nursed though it is in New York and at Covent Garden, its convulsive shudders announce impending death, and already one hears the wail of those who mourn a departing order of things.
Richard Wagner's final opera Parsifal.
