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Table of Contents

Title Page
Dedication Page
General Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations for key references
Guide to abbreviations used in text
Allen Dunning's numbered Guide to the Ring's Musical Motifs
Detailed Table of Contents

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.

Bruennhilde: [[ #142 ]]/#98:) Ever was I, ever am I, ever beset by sweet-yearning bliss – but ever working for your own weal. (ardently, but tenderly: [[ #143 ]] O Siegfried! Glorious hero! Hoard [“Hort”] of the world! Life of the earth! Laughing hero! (#? [Possibly a basis for the Motif of Remembrance associated in T.3.2 with Hagen’s effort to get Siegfried to tell how he once learned the meaning of birdsong?]) Leave, oh leave me! Leave me be! (#142 or #143>>?) Do not draw near with your raging nearness! Do not constrain me with chafing constraint! Do not destroy a woman who’s dear to you! Did you see your face in the limpid brook? (#137 varis>>) Did it rejoice you, blithe hero? If you stirred the water into a wave, (#137>#164?) if the brook’s clear surface dissolved, (#98 or #121?) you’d see your own likeness no longer but only the billow’s eddying surge. [[ #143 Fragment ]] And so do not touch me, trouble me not: [[ #142/#143 ]]/#98>>) ever bright in your bliss you will smile a smile that passes from me to you, a hero blithe and happy! – Oh Siegfried! Light-bringing youth! (#87) Love but yourself, and let me be! (#98) Do not destroy what is yours!”

 

[[#143]] Bruennhilde calls upon Siegfried as the “Hoard of the World” (i.e., the heir to Alberich's and Wotan's - Light-Alberich's - hoard of  knowledge) to preserve its secret and not expose it to the light of day

(Cooke regarded #143 as a basis for #150, but Dunning disagrees. However, both #143 and #150 are directly associated with the crucial concept that Bruennhilde is imparting Wotan’s Hoard of Knowledge – i.e., his confession – to Siegfried, subliminally, so a musical kinship of these two motifs would not be surprising)

[See #142 for #143’s dramatic context]

 

[[#144]] Siegfried, aflame with Loge’s fire of artistic creation, longs to plunge into his surrogate Rhine, the floodtide of Bruennhilde’s music

(#144 is kin to the family of motifs Cooke called Motions of Nature, including #11 and #38)

“Siegfried: (#132 Varis; #66?; #137 [sounding like #164]; #121 Vari?) It is you that I love: if only you loved me. I no longer have myself: would that I might have you! (#137b) A glorious floodtide billows before me; with all my senses I see only it – the wondrously billowing wave: [[ #144 ]] though it shatter my likeness, I’m burning myself now to cool raging passion within the flood; I shall leap, as I am, straight into the stream: o that its billows (#98/#142 vari) engulf me in bliss and my longing be stilled in the flood! (#134; #140 Fragment) Awaken, Bruennhilde! Waken, you maid! (#141) Laugh and live, sweetest delight! Be mine! Be mine! Be mine!