It ought to be self-evident to anyone with an authentic experience of the Ring that it’s patently absurd to dismiss the Woodbird’s metaphysical, fateful advice that Siegfried should seek out Brünnhilde, whom he was fated to wake and win, as a “… merest suggestion … ,” and to fault Siegfried as “… ridiculously obtuse … “ for following the Woodbird’s advice. This advice he could only obtain, after all, through his greatest heroic feat performed unwittingly in Wotan’s behalf, the killing of Fafner, the taste of whose blood grants Siegfried clairvoyance in understanding the Woodbird’s song. Kitcher and Schacht neglect the crucial facts that the Woodbird also instructed Siegfried to take possession of Alberich’s Hoard, Tarnhelm, and Ring (precisely what Wotan intended for Siegfried), and warned him against Mime’s treachery. By the same token it requires considerable ignorance of what’s at stake in the Ring to suggest that the Wanderer’s (Wotan’s) confrontation with Siegfried lacks persuasive cogency because Wotan “… is a complete stranger to him …,” or to describe Siegfried’s shock and fear in the presence of the sleeping Brünnhilde when he’s about to wake and win her as reacting with “… laughably silly surprise … .” In flat contradiction to their claim, the Wanderer Wotan doesn't second the Woodbird's advice that Siegfried should seek out Brünnhilde, but tries instead to stop Siegfried from doing so, though it’s Wotan’s hidden intention that Siegfried should wake and win her. And as I explained in my online Ring book, and as strongly suggested by a key musical motif associated with it (H147A = #137a), Siegfried’s fear of waking Brünnhilde is his premonition that in winning her love he’s about to take possession of the dangerous, forbidden hoard of knowledge which Wotan confessed to her, which was so frightful that Wotan feared to say it aloud to himself, a confession in which Wotan expressed his hope that in Brünnhilde’s safekeeping his secret hoard of unbearable knowledge of the truth would remain forever unspoken in words.
Is it any wonder that authors so wholly out of touch with the Ring’s deepest strains of meaning could say:
“To view him [Siegfried] as the centerpiece of the drama in its final form is to distort it … .” [P. 191]
Kitcher and Schacht attempt to justify their confusion respecting Siegfried’s true, essential importance to the Ring by repeating the old canard that Wagner outgrew his original raison d’être for creating the Ring, his attempt to dramatize the death of Siegfried the hero, suggesting instead that as Wagner realized the deeper implications of the Ring plot (which grew from one music-drama to four in reverse order, but for which he then composed the music in chronological order) he acknowledged that Siegfried’s original heroic destiny was no longer central, that instead all focus should be on what they suggest Wagner came to regard as the far more substantial characters of Wotan and his daughter Brünnhilde, and their relationship:
“The Siegfried we see on the stage is, in a sense, a fossil, remaining from an earlier version of Wagner’s project in a final version in which he and his life and death are no longer central.” [P. 190]
It’s a strange thing, indeed, in light of Kitcher’s and Schacht’s glib demotion of Siegfried, that Brünnhilde says the following of Siegfried in the Ring’s finale in Twilight of the Gods Act Three Scene Three: complaining to the assembled Gibichungs that they haven’t risen to the cosmic occasion of Siegfried’s death to properly mourn him, she says “I heard children whimpering
