Libretto & Synopsis - EMI Classics

a drink which contains an antidote to Gutrune’s potion. Now Siegfried can remember how he heard about Brünnhilde [11], how
he passed through the fire, and awakened and held her in his arms. Gunther is shocked [12]. Hagen asks if Siegfried can
understand the language of the ravens who suddenly fly up over him, and stabs him in the back with his spear, claiming that he
has punished falsehood. Dying, Siegfried imagines that he is reawakening Brünnhilde [13]. Gunther orders the vassals to carry
Siegfried’s body home [14]. For Wagner the funeral march that follows was both a tribute to, and an attempt to go one better
than, the Funeral March of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony. The musical material reviews the lineage and life of Siegfried with references
to the Volsungs, Sieglinde’s love, the sword Nothung, the youthful Siegfried, his horn call and Brünnhilde.
Scene Three
The Hall of the Gibichungs, as in the opening act.
Gutrune waits for Siegfried to return from the hunt [15]. She has had nightmares and cannot sleep. Grane was neighing and
Brünnhilde left her room to go down to the Rhine. She hears Hagen calling out for lights to welcome the hunting party and
Siegfried home [16]. When the corpse is brought in, Gutrune panics [17], but then turns in fury on her brother. Gunther reveals
that Hagen, not a wild boar, killed Siegfried. Hagen justifies his action (Siegfried was a perjurer) and claims the ring by ‘the
sacred right of conquest’. Gunther protests. Hagen kills him and reaches for the ring, but Siegfried’s hand ‘raises itself
threateningly’.
The dead hand raising up against the criminal is common in both Parisian Grand Opera and mythological epics. In the
Nibelungenlied a dead hero’s wounds bleed afresh in the presence of his murderer. The music of this family confrontation around
the body looks forward to Parsifal in its light, luminous orchestration and avoidance of the melodramatic – compare the
unmasking of Titurel’s coffin in the later opera’s Act III.
Brünnhilde silences the Gibichs’ squabbling [18]. Gutrune is made to see that she has no real claim on Siegfried and the
hero’s funeral pyre is ordered to be built on the shore of the Rhine [19]. Brünnhilde longs to join him in death [20], but first she
tells Wotan that now he can rest [21]. Drawing the ring from Siegfried’s finger she places it on her own [22], telling the
Rhinedaughters to take it from her ashes, when it has been cleansed by fire.Then she orders the ravens back to Valhalla [23],
and to take Loge with them to set fire to the gods’ home. Together with her horse, Grane [24], she leaps into the flames of the
pyre to meet Siegfried as his wife. The flames rise and the Hall of the Gibichungs is destroyed.
The Völuspá says: ‘The star turns black, the earth sinks below the sea [compare the flooding of the Rhine]/… flames leap the
length of the world tree [compare the heroes’ bonfire described by the Norns]/fire strikes against the very sky [compare the
stage directions about the burning of Valhalla]’.
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