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Title Page
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Guide to abbreviations used in text
Allen Dunning's numbered Guide to the Ring's Musical Motifs
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The Ring

Introduction


References
Appendix I
Appendix I I

Key Colour Coding

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I would be grateful for donations of any size, small or large, to help defray the cost (1) of maintaining this website, (2) and to finance my past and present research which produced my book posted here, Volume One of "The Wound That Will Never Heal," and my forthcoming revision of Volume One (to be submitted for publication), and completion of Volume Two on Wagner's six other canonic operas and music-dramas. I sacrificed at least seven years of paid employment and incurred debts to complete this project, and am currently unemployed, so I thank you in advance for any financial help you can provide. Your friend, Paul Heise.

[[#98]] Bruennhilde’s plea to Wotan to protect her vulnerable sleep with hideous terrors, so only a fearless hero (the Waelsung Siegfried) can win her love

Only an authentically unconsciously inspired artist-hero, such as Siegfried, ought to have access to Wotan’s fearful secret, which he can’t bear to say aloud. His unspoken secret is his repressed knowledge that religious faith is predestined to destruction by man’s advancement in knowledge, and can only live on as feeling, in secular art, the Wagnerian music-drama. It is this secret which Bruennhilde will subliminally, musically, impart to her lover Siegfried.

(#98, being pentatonic, seems most closely related to the family of motifs, the so-called Voices of Nature, which includes #4, #128ab, #129ab, and #174abc)

[See #97 for #98’s dramatic context]

 

[[#99]] Wotan expresses his deep love and affection to Bruennhilde, in parting for her forever

Wotan will leave his unconscious mind, the repository for his unspoken secret, Bruennhilde, to a man freer than the god, the secular artist-hero Siegfried. Siegfried is freer than the god Wotan because, as a secular artist-hero, Siegfried is free from the constraint of religious belief, which stakes a claim to the power of the truth (the Ring) which - because religious faith is self-deception - can’t be sustained in the face of man’s advancement in knowledge.

(#99’s motival links, if any, not yet ascertained; Dunning believes #99 may be related to #106. Does any of the accompaniment for #99 generate #163?)

“Wotan: (#Independent aria plus #98) That radiant pair of eyes which I often caressed with a smile …: (#98) this glittering pair of eyes which often glistened on me in the storm (#98) when the yearning for hope would sear my heart and I wished for worldly delights amidst wildly weaving fears: (#98 Orch; [[ #99 Voc ]] for one last time let them joy me today (#98) with this valediction’s final kiss! On a happier man (#98) their star shall shine: (#98) On the hapless immortal they close in parting. (#87: He takes her head in both hands) (#18) And so – the god turns away from you: (#37) so he kisses your godhead away.

 

(#98: He lingeringly kisses both her eyes. #97: She sinks back, with eyes closed, into his arms, as consciousness gently slips away. He leads her tenderly to a low mossy bank, beneath a broad-branched fir-tree. He gazes at her, then closes her helmet: his eye then rests on the form of the sleeping woman, which he now covers