The Love Motive, impassioned, irresistible, sweeps through the harmonies--and Love and Spring are united. The Love Motive also pulsates through _Sieglinde's_ ecstatic reply after she has given herself fully up to _Siegmund_ in the Flight Motive--for before his coming her woes have fled as winter flies before the coming of spring. With _Siegmund's_ exclamation:
there rises from the orchestra like a vision of loveliness the Motive of Freia, the Venus of German mythology. In its embrace it folds this pulsating theme:
It throbs on like a love-kiss until it seemingly yields to the blandishments of this caressing phrase:
This throbbing, pulsating, caressing music is succeeded by a moment of repose. The woman again gazes searchingly into the man's features. She has seen his face before. When? Now she remembers. It is when she has seen her own reflection in a brook! And his voice? It seems to her like an echo of her own. And his glance; has it never before rested on her? She is sure it has, and she will tell him when.
She repeats how, while _Hunding_ and his kinsmen were feasting at her marriage, an aged man entered the hall and, drawing a sword, thrust it to the hilt in the ash-tree. The first to draw it out, to him it should belong. One after another the men strove to loosen the sword, but in vain. Once the aged man's glance rested on her and shone with the same light as now shines in his who has come to her through night and storm. He who thrust the sword into the tree was of her own race, the Wälsungs. Who is he?
"I, too, have seen that light, but in your eyes!" exclaimed the fugitive. "I, too, am of your race. I, too, am a Wälsung, my father none other than Wälse himself."
"Was Wälse your father?" she cries ecstatically. "For you, then, this sword was thrust in the tree! Let me name you, as I recall you from far back in my childhood, _Siegmund_--_Siegmund_--_Siegmund_!"
"Yes, I am _Siegmund_; and you, too, I now know well. You are _Sieglinde_. Fate has willed that we two of our unhappy race, shall meet again and save each other or perish together."
Then, leaping upon the table, he grasps the sword-hilt which protrudes from the trunk of the ash-tree where he has seen that strange glow in the light of the dying embers. A mighty tug, and he draws it from the tree as a blade from its scabbard. Brandishing it in triumph, he leaps to the floor and, clasping _Sieglinde_, rushes forth with her into the night.