Flosshilde: Darkness descends [“Es daemmert”] and a voice cries out! (…)
Woglinde and Wellgunde: [[ #5 embryo: ]] Ugh! The foul creature! (…)
Flosshilde: Look to the gold! Father warned against such a foe!
(The three Rhinedaughters gather round the central ledge) (…)
Alberich: Would it spoil your sport if I stood here in silent amazement? If you dived down here, how gladly the Nibelung would romp and tease you!
Woglinde: Would he join in our games? (…)
Alberich: How bright and comely you shine in the shimmering light! How I long to embrace just one of those slender creatures, if only she’d deign to slip down here!
Flosshilde: Now I laugh at my fear: the fiend is in love.
Wellgunde: The lecherous rogue!
Woglinde: Let’s teach him a lesson! (#6?: She lowers herself to the top of the rock the foot of which Alberich has reached.) (…)
The Motif #5’s Embryo is introduced here in association with the Rhinedaughters’ natural aversion for Alberich’s ugliness, an ugliness associated with his heightened consciousness and the feeling of unnaturalness which follows from it. #5 is associated here with Alberich’s growing awareness that he, as newly conscious man, can no longer live naturally guided by the spontaneity of instinct, but must forcibly think his way through life. #5 is directly linked with his growing awareness that there is no place for love in his world, that he can never find love within the real world. Even Wagner felt sympathy for Alberich’s plight:
“ … R. tells me that he once felt every sympathy for Alberich, who represents the ugly person’s longing for beauty. In Alberich the naivete of the non-Christian world … !” [907W-{3/2/78} CD Vol. II, p. 33]
