awn is now breaking of the end of the
gods! Thus do I hurl a burning brand into Walhalla's flaunting
citadel!" She sets fire with these words to the pyre, which rapidly
blazes up. Wotan's ravens are seen slowly flapping off toward the
horizon. Bruennhilde takes Grane from the young men holding him,
and, with all the joy now again in her voice, face, and words,
which illuminated the moment of her first union, long ago, with the
then so youthful and ingenuous Awakener, she rushes to be reunited
to him in death, springing with her jubilant Valkyrie-cry upon
Grane and with him plunging into the flames.

The fire flares doubly brilliant and high; the red glare of it
fills the whole scene. It becomes evident suddenly that the Hall of
the Gibichungen is burning. The people huddle together in terror.
When the funeral pile sinks to a heap, the Rhine is seen flooding in
upon the embers. Hagen, eagerly on the watch for his last chance,
beholds with the insanity of despair the Rhine-daughters rise from
the waves close beside the site of the pyre. Hurling from him shield
and spear, he dashes into the water to thrust them back. "Away
from the Ring!" Two of the jocose sisters for all reply entwine
their arms around his neck and draw him away and away with them
into the deep water. The third triumphantly holds up before his
eyes the recovered Ring.

As the fire dies among the blackened ruins of the Hall, and the
Rhine recedes into its boundaries, a red light breaks in the sky.
More and more brightly it glows, till Walhalla is discerned in its
central illumination, with its enthroned gods and heroes. Flames
are seen invading the stately hall. When the company of the Blessed
are completely wrapped in fire, the curtain falls.

The last word of the music is the exultant phrase by which Sieglinde
greeted the prophecy of Siegfried's birth. It has been woven all
through Bruennhilde's last ardently happy salutation to him, as
if in recognition of some mystical quality--in death--of birth.

So Wotan finds his rest, and the ill consequences at last end of
his unjust act--end with the reparation of the injustice, the return
of the gold to the Rhine. But has not the evil act been like the
Djinn of old, let out of the insignificant-looking urn, waxing
great, looming dark, and dictating hard terms! When Wotan in pride
of being committed it, against two simpletons, how could he have
divined that by this pin-point he set inexorable machinery mo