Man’s original sin, understood in its Feuerbachian sense, was religious man’s world-renunciation, renunciation of Mother Nature, which Feuerbach described as figurative matricide. This is why Siegfried, like Wotan before him, succumbed to Alberich’s Ring Curse, the curse of consciousness: both Wotan (religious faith) and Siegfried (lost faith’s heir, redemptive secular art) were equally guilty of the sin against truth of which Alberich accused Wotan when he told Wotan he’d be sinning against all that was, is, and will be if Wotan coopted Alberich’s Ring power. As I'll demonstrate in Volume Two of The Wound That Will Never Heal, Wagner devoted his final music-drama Parsifal to dramatizing this scenario, in which the formerly unconsciously inspired secular artist Parsifal, whose former muse Kundry knows for him what he doesn’t know, finally attains full consciousness of how he's unwittingly perpetuated this sin when he recognizes Kundry’s proffer of redemption through loving union with her as this sin itself, and refuses to seek temporary redemption through loving union with his muse Kundry. He ultimately renounces seeking redemption through either religious belief or secular art anymore, and embraces Mother Nature’s truth. In this way Parsifal redeems himself and all men retroactively for having committed and perpetuated the sin of religious faith in repudiating Mother Nature and replacing her with an illusory alternative in religion and art. Parsifal’s greatest guilt was in having killed his mother Herzeleide (Wagner’s figure for Mother Nature, Erda) through neglect, and now he’s atoned for this, restoring Mother Nature’s rights. Parsifal’s former muse of unconscious artistic inspiration Kundry, having forever lost her function, dies redeemed from perpetuating this sin against truth. In light of Parsifal's feeling of guilt towards his mother, it’s of course no accident that both Siegfried and Tristan become aware that their mother died giving them birth, and die after having betrayed their love for their muses of inspiration by giving them and the secrets they kept away to another man (Wagner’s audience, represented by Gunther and Marke).
Kitcher’s and Schacht’s inability to grasp Siegfried and all parts of the Ring tetralogy that relate to him, or in which he plays a role, carries over into their neglect of crucial cross-references between the music and libretto Wagner creates by associating specific musical motifs of reminiscence and foreboding with specific elements in the drama. For this reason they offer faulty interpretations of the motives behind some of the key characters’ actions and words, especially Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Though acknowledging their book isn’t a musicological study of Wagner’s Ring, nevertheless Kitcher and Schacht promised to be attentive to Wagner’s employment of music, and musical motifs in particular, in relation to the text:
“Often it is the suggestions of the music, rather than the words, that carry most weight. … we take our claims to rest not on a mere reading of words but on careful listening to Wagner’s extraordinary melding of text and music. Those claims should be evaluated by their fit with the combined textual, musical, and dramatic resonances of the passages to which we point.” [P. 10-11]
But their attentiveness to such musical/motival details failed them in the following instances which have a bearing on how we should interpret the relationship between Siegfried, Brünnhilde, and Wotan. I offer a few examples below in which, because they ignored the musical motifs in play (whether through being merely inattentive to the motifs, or through inability to grasp their conceptual/referential significance, only they can say) that could otherwise have tipped them off to the ultimate source of the motives behind Siegfried’s and Brünnhilde’s words and actions at a
