[The Rhinedaughters elude Alberich to the sounds of shrieking laughter. #4: He falls each time he’s nearly reached them]
(He finally stops, foaming with rage …, and shakes his clenched fist up at the girls) Alberich: [[ #10: ]] might this fist catch even one! (He remains where he is, speechless with rage, his gaze directed upwards where it is suddenly attracted and held by the following spectacle. [[ #12: ]] An increasingly bright glow penetrates the floodwaters from above, flaring up as it strikes a point high up on the central rock and gradually becoming a blinding and brightly beaming gleam of gold; a magical golden light streams through the water from this point: [[ #11: ]])
Woglinde: Look, sisters! The wakening sun smiles into the deep. (#12)
Wellgunde: Through the green billows she greets the glad sleeper. (#12)
Flosshilde: Now she kisses his eyelid that it may open. (#12)
Wellgunde: See how he smiles in the gleaming light.
Woglinde: Through the floodtide flows its glittering ray.
Alberich’s abject failure, and consciousness of its irrevocability, seems, of itself, to appear as a ray of the sun which lights up the previously invisible Rhinegold sitting on top of a jutting rock rising up from the Rhine’s floor. This produces two new motifs, #11, a shimmering motif which Cooke noted tends to be heard later as a premonition of magical moments (as when it heralds Siegfried’s Forest Murmurs and the Woodbirds’ songs), and #12, the Rhinegold Motif itself, which is in the same family of diatonic arpeggios as the Primal Nature Arpeggio #1. {{ #9 and #10 are purely descriptive motifs - #9 representing Alberich’s desperation to win a Rhinedaughters’ love against her will, and #10 being an embryonic form of #41 - which, I believe, are heard only here and no where else. They may well be eliminated from our motif list. }}
[R.1: J]
The three Rhinedaughters, in ecstasy at the lighting up of the Rhinegold, celebrate its beauty with song (i.e., poetry and music) and dance:
