in the world.  Sieglinda tells how when she, full of grief, was wedded to Hunding, a grey old man, with one eye, clad in a blue cloak, came in uninvited, drove the sword Nothung into the ash-tree, and said that it should belong to the hero strong enough to draw it out.  From all parts warriors came, but none could move it.  Sieglinda feels that the appointed man has come; Siegmund grasps the weapon and triumphantly pulls it out.  Then they reveal their names, and recognise one another as brother and sister, and the Act ends.

This is the first step towards Wotan’s discomfiture.  The significance of the Sword theme in the Rhinegold at the moment when he has the Master-idea will now be apparent.  The sword was so endowed by Wotan that only a fearless hero could use it; therefore, when Siegmund draws it from the wood, Wotan, watching from Valhalla, knows he has succeeded in raising up the hero he needed.  Siegmund had been tested by all manner of misfortune; no harder life could have been his; Wotan had never aided him, but thrown disasters in his path; and had he failed or succumbed Wotan’s device would have failed.  But freely, independently, with no help from the god, he had come through all, and now his own strength enabled him to take the sword to—­to what?—­to work Wotan’s will!  That is, in creating Siegmund, even in testing him, in preparing for him a weapon that none could stand against, Wotan, far from successfully accomplishing his purpose, was accomplishing his ruin.  Disillusionment comes swiftly.  The first deed of his hero is to break two of the most sacred laws of heaven—­laws binding on Wotan until he gets the Ring—­for he carries off another man’s wife, who is, moreover, his own sister.  The punishment for that is matter for the next Act.  At the end of the first we have seen that Wotan’s Master-idea is a delusion.  He might as well go and kill Fafner himself and take the Ring as breed a hero to do it for him with the aid of a magic sword.  If he did so it would be by virtue of the power conferred on him by the runes on the Spear; and by those runes—­those laws—­Siegmund must be, and is, promptly judged and punished.

II

Before the rising of the curtain we have the first and one of the greatest of the ear-pictures of the Valkyrie.  There is no preamble; at once the strings begin in repeated quavers to sustain (virtually) a long D, while the basses start off with a figure many times repeated—­a figure which is simply a bold variant of the bass figure in Schubert’s Erl-king.  So, for that matter, is the long D. Schubert drew a fine picture of storm in black wood; but he was limited by the form he wrote in and the instruments he wrote for.  The energy, superhuman energy, of the thing is amazing:  the storm throbs in the forest:  one feels the pulse of the storm-god; the sforzando shocks and shrieks add to the terrific wildness of the scene.  Pitilessly, ever