couple of crucial moments in Siegfried Act Three Scene Three, they entirely misconstrued the meaning of Siegfried’s and Brünnhilde’s initial anxious confrontation with each other.
Here, for instance, Kitcher and Schacht sum up Wotan’s drastic, desperate response to the fact that his wife Fricka has forced him to acknowledge that his vaunted, allegedly free hero Siegmund (to whom Wotan looked for redemption from Alberich’s Ring Curse and from the twilight of the gods Alberich's Curse will bring to pass), isn’t free but merely a reflection of Wotan’s own fear and self-deception. Though his emotional outburst prompts Brünnhilde to beg Wotan to confide in her (which he does in his famous confession from The Valkyrie Act Two Scene Two, a confession Wagner described as the most important scene for the development of the drama), Kitcher and Schacht fail to cite the musical motifs which express Wotan’s explosion of despair:
“Wotan laments his lack of freedom, portraying himself as caught in his own toils; and when Brünnhilde questions him further, he breaks out in passionate grief. But his daughter’s devoted concern … prompts him to an extraordinary and lengthy revelation.” [P. 43]
If Kitcher and Schacht had taken a few moments to register the musical motifs in play during Wotan’s outburst (which one might fairly have expected them to do since Deryck Cooke made so much of Wotan’s outburst and the resonances of the motifs heard in the orchestra which express it musically [See Cooke, p. 66-73]), they would have discovered the following:
“(H50 = #51:; H81 = #82:) O righteous disgrace! O shameful sorrow! (H78 = #79:) God’s direst need! God’s direst distress! (H39 = #40:) Infinite fury! Grief neverending! (H35 = #37:) The saddest am I of all living things!”
The five motifs in play are H50 = #51 (Alberich’s Ring Curse), H81 = #82 (Wotan’s Revolt - introduced for the first time in this passage as a hallmark of Wotan’s confession in which Wotan responds to Brünnhilde’s compassionate plea to confide in her), H78 = #79 (Fricka’s reproach to Wotan about the threat the lawless Wälsungs he’s championed - Siegmund in particular - pose to the gods’ rule), H39 = #40 (Love in its tragic aspect), and H35 = #37 (the Loveless Motif derived from H16 = #18, the motif to which Alberich renounced love for the sake of the Ring’s power, and to which Siegmund embraced his tragic love for his sister-bride Sieglinde in preparation for pulling Wotan’s sword Nothung out of Hunding’s House-Ash).
Having failed to note the extraordinary motival resonances at play during Wotan’s outburst which precedes his confession to Brünnhilde, Kitcher and Schacht are inevitably unprepared to register the implications of this passage for that motivally analogous moment hours later (Siegfried Act Three Scene Three) in which Brünnhilde expresses her overwhelming fear of the potential consequences of consummating a sexual union with Siegfried (accompanied by H50 = #51, H81 = #82, and H78 = #79, a clear motival evocation of Wotan’s outburst from The Valkyrie Act Two Scene Two), though she’d previously expressed her acquiescence to such a union if it could be with the hero (Siegfried) who alone could fearlessly penetrate Loge’s protective ring of fire to wake and win her:
“[Siegfried’s] … overt advance prompts a startled and unreceptive Brünnhilde to reflect on love present and love past, and to confront the choice between open-ended empathic love and
