exclusive erotic love, whose nature and power she is now beginning to learn. (…) Her first intimations of sexuality seem to her to bespeak a frightening and dark world, to be contrasted with the lucid image that emerges with the introduction of the ‘Idyll’ theme.” [P. 161]
As a consequence of their obliviousness to the striking motival cross-references to Wotan’s outburst at work in Brünnhilde’s panic in the face of Siegfried’s sexual overtures, a virtual premonition of doom at the thought of consummating the sexual union with Siegfried to which she’d already reconciled herself in the finale of The Valkyrie, Kitcher and Schacht have absolutely nothing to say about the motifs at work expressing her fear. Wagner, by the way, shared his following observation about the causes for both Siegfried’s fear of waking Brünnhilde, and Brünnhilde’s fear of consummating her love with Siegfried, in Siegfried Act Three Scene Three, with Cosima: "A profound, indescribable impression; a wooing of the utmost beauty; Siegfried's fear, the fear of guilt through love, Brünnhilde's fear a premonition of the approaching doom; her virginal and pure love for Siegfried truly German." [801W - {7/18/71} CD Vol. I, p. 391]. Kitcher and Schacht instead advance a thesis, reasonable enough in their ignorance of the significance of the motifs in play, that Brünnhilde, as a formerly immortal and chaste goddess who previously only knew empathic love, naturally fears her first sexual union as a virtual extinction of her former identity. But Scruton in his The Ring of Truth was more attentive:
“Siegfried begs her to awaken again - to be a woman to him. Brünnhilde sinks into doubt and dread. The curse motif sounds in the orchestra, together with the motifs of Wotan’s revolt and Fricka’s moral judgment … - suggesting that Brünnhilde’s trouble now, on the verge of giving herself to a mortal, originated in the cosmic dilemma of Wotan, when in despair he bequeathed the world to Alberich’s son.” [Scruton, P. 114-115]
I provide here the text of Brünnhilde’s explosion of despair and fear of having sexual union with Siegfried (to which she finally reconciles, and embraces with joy), with its accompanying motifs:
“(H81 = #82:) Grieving darkness clouds my gaze; (H50 = #51 variant:) my eye grows dim, its light dies out: (H81 = #82:) night enfolds me; (H50 = #51:) from mist and dread a confusion of fear now writhes in its rage! (H78 = #79/H83 = #84:) Terror stalks and rears its head!”
H81 = #82, H50 = #51, and H78 = #79 are the three key motifs which reference Wotan’s original outburst of angst and self-doubt, to which Scruton alluded, heard here again expressing Brünnhilde’s fear of consummating sexual union with Siegfried. Another motif heard here but not during Wotan’s outburst is H83 = #84, one of Wotan’s two anger motifs, but which Wagner introduced during Wotan’s confession to Brünnhilde in The Valkyrie Act Two, Scene Two in association with Wotan’s self-lacerating acknowledgment that he finds with loathing only his corrupt self in all he tries to do to bring about redemption from Alberich’s Ring Curse through the agency of a free hero, and that Wotan is therefore incapable of creating or finding such a free hero. Kitcher and Schacht are right to say that the formerly chaste goddess Brünnhilde, now deprived of godhead, fears sexual union per se (they add that the only kind of love she previously knew was non-exclusive empathic love), and that her plea that Siegfried not force himself on her (set to two themes from Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll) reflects to some degree her wish to preserve the sanctity of her august past, but the motival cross-reference from Brünnhilde’s panic in the face of Siegfried’s urgent desire back to Wotan’s moment of decision which led him to confess a hoard of knowledge
