#4/#178 = #93/#3; #20a [rising] From the ruins of the fallen hall, the men and women watch moved to the very depths of their being, as the glow from the fire grows in the sky. As it finally reaches its greatest intensity, the hall of Valhalla comes into view, with the gods and heroes assembled as in Waltraute’s description in act one. #20a [in a glorious vari]; #115 [as if on the verge of destruction, both repeated and developed]; #59 (abd?); #100?; #92(abc?). Bright flames seem to flare up in the hall of the gods #54 [as heard in T.2.3 when Hagen, the herald for the double wedding, called upon the Gibichung vassals to come armed because “Noth is here!”], finally hiding them from sight completely. The curtain falls. (#178 = #93; #?: [in the bass, perhaps #20d?]; #174a; #59(abd?)/#5 [develop]; #100: [sounding like the Magic Fire Music with harps, somewhat like the finale of V.3.3 when Wotan left Bruennhilde surrounded by Loge’s ring of fire, though now missing #87)
Siegfried’s funeral pyre expands to embrace the earthly Valhalla, Gibichung Hall, as the Gibichungs witness the destruction of their old world. We hear #97, the Motif commonly known as “Bruennhilde’s Magic Sleep” (introduced in V.3.2 as Wotan told Bruennhilde he would punish her disobedience with sleep, so that she will be left vulnerable to any man to find, wake, and wed her, and heard again as he took her godhead away), and #98, the motif associated with Bruennhilde’s desperate request that Wotan protect her sleep (now that, as the newly mortal recipient of Wotan’s confession, she was the repository of the religious mysteries) from all but worthy, fearless heroes (authentically inspired secular artist-heroes). These motifs solidify our understanding that the destiny of the gods and their proxies, the Waelsung heroes and their muses, is one and the same, inspired secular art being merely covert religious faith. Truly, Valhalla, religion, lived on as a new religion, the new Valhalla, in the love of hero and heroine.
Accompanied by #59 chords (the Rhinedaughters’ original lament for the lost gold from R.4) and #3 (the Rhine’s Motion), the Rhine overflows its banks, putting out the fire. Seeing the Rhinedaughters hovering over Bruennhilde’s ashes, Hagen suddenly remembers his father Alberich’s warning that if Bruennhilde ever persuaded Siegfried to return his Ring to them, no cunning would ever regain it, so Hagen desperately jumps into the flood after them. The last words of the Ring are his frantic exclamation: “Get back from the Ring!” But the Rhinedaughters twine their arms around him and descend with him into the depths. This, presumably, is Wagner’s metaphor for the ultimate incapacity of scientific inquiry and technological advancement to master its very precondition, Nature, which yet presents us the image of man’s obsessive yet wholly natural quest to do so. Accordingly, the Rhinedaughters retrieve the Ring he so desperately sought to reclaim, and carry him in triumph with them into the deeps. We hear a fragmented version of #51 (the Ring Curse) as they carry him along with them.
We are left to wonder, right through the end of the Ring, what became of Hagen’s father Alberich, the founder of this Ring drama. All we can say for certain is that in one of Wagner’s prose sketches for Siegfried’s Death, an earlier version of Twilight of the Gods, Alberich called upon his son Hagen to rescue the Ring from Siegfried’s funeral pyre, and Hagen jumped into the flames after it. When the Rhinedaughters retrieved the Tarnhelm and Ring from the dying embers of the fire,
