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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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#149: He lowers her fainting body on to the stone terrace outside the rocky chamber. #42 End Fragment.)

 

Siegfried: (#42 End Fragment; #154) Now you are mine! Bruennhilde, Gunther’s bride, (#153 Fragment) allow me to enter your chamber!

 

Bruennhilde: (staring impotently ahead of her, weakly: #50; #149) How could you stop him, woman most wretched?

 

(Siegfried drives her away with a gesture of command. #151b, #50; #164; #50; #164; [[ #165 ]]; #21/#57: Siegfried draws his sword.)

 

Siegfried: (in his natural voice) Now Nothung, (#155) attest that I wooed her chastely: (#156) (#160) keeping faith with my brother, (#156; #57) keep me apart from his bride! [[ #165 ]] (#42 End Fragment; #154; #149; [[ #165 ]]; #42 End Fragment)”

 

[[#166]] The anguish of being Hagen: Hagen complains to his father Alberich that by virtue of being heir to Alberich's intent to undermine man's consoling illusions with the bitter truth, Hagen is doomed to a life of melancholy lovelessness

Hagen’s poor compensation for being Alberich’s son is that thanks to his Hagen’s heroic, Nietzschean martyrdom for the sake of honoring the bitter truth, which envies the cheap happiness of the ignorant but has too much intellectual integrity to be capable of sharing it, Hagen can discredit man’s consoling illusions, which have historically taken man’s reason, his objective mind, prisoner, and supplant them with the will to power, worldly power which can only be attained by those men brave enough and ruthless enough to discard the illusion of love for the sake of objective knowledge of man and nature

(#166’s motival links, if any, not yet ascertained; but Dunning detects a #37 influence)

“Alberich: (softly: #50 vari >>) Are you sleeping, Hagen, my son? You’re asleep and do not hear me, whom rest and sleep betrayed?

 

Hagen: ([[ #166 End Fragment ]]: softly, without moving, so that he still seems to be asleep, even though there is a glassy state in his permanently open eyes.) I hear you, evil elf: What do you have to tell my sleep? (#161)

 

Alberich: (#19 Vari; #13 Vari) Be mindful of the power that you’ll command if you’re as mettlesome (#37) as the mother who gave you birth. [[ #166 End Fragment ]]