The Valkyrie is the second of the four nights of The Ring. Much of the opera concerns a subplot in Wagner’s tale. This story within a story brings together Siegmund and Sieglinde, two of Wotan’s numerous children, a brother and sister separated in early childhood. Their irresistible attraction to each other results in an incestuous union (at the end of Act I), doubly illicit since Sieglinde is already married to Hunding. In Act II, Hunding fights a duel with Siegmund. Wotan, for reasons stemming from his fateful involvement with the ring, is powerless to intervene to help his son, and Siegmund is killed — another playing out of the gold’s curse. Sieglinde escapes, however, to bear their child: the hero Siegfried, protagonist of the last two nights of The Ring.

The first scene of Act I shows us the meeting of Siegmund and Sieglinde. He stumbles into her dwelling, worn to exhaustion by a pack of enemies pursuing him in a raging thunderstorm. (The storm is depicted by the orchestral prelude that opens the work.) Siegmund collapses on the hearth to the sound of a leitmotiv we quickly come to associate with him, a descending scale that is a transformed version of the theme of the storm. This musical connection shows us that the storm is in Siegmund’s soul as much as it is out in the elements.

Sieglinde enters from the back room and is startled to find a stranger unconscious on her floor. As she bends over him, concerned, the violins sound her leitmotiv — it rises up gently and falls back — while cellos underneath continue to play Siegmund’s. Wagner’s orchestral music has already joined the two characters.

What follows is one of the great portrayals of love at first sight in all of opera. Or nearly at first sight: Siegmund and Sieglinde’s attentions are riveted to each other almost from the moment he regains consciousness, but the intensity of their emotional connection grows quickly during this scene.

General Features Along the way the audience witnesses the primary features of Wagner’s revolutionary music drama.

The First Drink As Sieglinde leans over him, Siegmund awakes and cries out for a drink. She hurries outside to fill a drinking horn for him. While she does so the orchestra takes over, building to a miniature climax before falling back; in its music we still hear Siegmund’s and Sieglinde’s leitmotivs. Siegmund drinks, and his eyes fix on Sieglinde for the first time. A new melody grows in the orchestra, warmly scored for solo cello and other low strings, and richly harmonized. It is the leitmotiv of their blossoming love:

Now the characters exchange information, for their benefit and the audience’s. Sieglinde tells him that she is Hunding’s wife; he tells her how he came to her home, and of the relief from his misery she has brought him: “Now the sun smiles on me anew.”

The Second Drink At this, Sieglinde spontaneously hurries to her storeroom to fill a horn with mead (a fermented honey drink) for him. This action, parallel to her fetching water earlier, summons from the orchestra an intensified version of its earlier climax. (See the Listen box, first and second orchestral climaxes.)

The lovers share the mead, their eyes now fixed on each other, and the love motive sounding in the orchestra also wells up — until Siegmund rouses himself with a deep sigh accompanied in the orchestra by a loud dissonant chord. He is ill-fated; misfortune follows wherever he goes (Wagner sets the crucial, repeated word Misswende to additional dissonant chords); and he would not for the world bring such misery on her (Love motive) — he must leave. Sieglinde cannot let him go. She stops him in his tracks with an impulsive admission: She is as ill-fated as he!

Communion At Sieglinde’s last word a hesitant new, warm melody begins low in the orchestra; we immediately hear it as an affirmation of the deep empathy they already feel for each other. It is played first in sequence — a favorite of Wagner’s techniques for developing his leitmotivs. Then, when Siegmund announces he will stay, the orchestra cannot restrain itself; it pours forth a lush, Romantic harmonization of the new melody, the soon-to-be lovers gazing at each other all the while. In the midst of this beautiful passage, other leitmotivs are heard: first Sieglinde’s, later the Love motive, and finally Siegmund’s drooping scale.

The passage comes to no cadence — another favorite trick of Wagner’s — but is cut off by a new, ominous leitmotiv in the low brasses. Hunding has returned, and the second scene begins.

Wagner’s drama often moves at a ponderous, slow pace, and it has sometimes been criticized for this. (And lampooned, too; there is a Bugs Bunny cartoon that takes on The Ring.) In the first scene of The Valkyrie we have the sense that searching looks and sighs are stretched out to exaggerated length. Other than Sieglinde’s fetching two drinks for Siegmund, there is little stage action. At the same time, however, especially because of his orchestra with its leitmotivs, Wagner manages to pack a lot into the minimal gestures of his characters. By the end of scene i, barely a quarter hour into the drama, we have been introduced to two protagonists and gained knowledge of their history and a subtle sense of their emotional lives. And, before our eyes and ears, their love has burgeoned.