a hero freed from the gods’ rule (from religious faith), who could take possession of Alberich’s Ring and its Curse, and Wotan’s hoard of forbidden knowledge, aesthetically, through that art which the muse Brünnhilde would inspire, to preserve as feeling (in redemptive art, transfigured by music - Brünnhilde) what Wotan had had to renounce as thought, religious faith. Only in this way could post-religious man be redeemed from Alberich’s Ring Curse of consciousness, which was bringing religious faith, the gods, to an end. Brünnhilde’s interpretation of Wotan’s thought as her love for Siegfried is expressed as musical feeling in H143 = #134, the World-Inheritance Motif which was introduced in Siegfried Act Three Scene One when Wotan informed Erda that he no longer feared the twilight of the gods (the decline of religious faith) she’d foretold because Wotan hoped the essence of religion, man’s longing for transcendent value, would live on in the love of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, i.e., the inspired, redemptive secular art which the artist-hero Siegfried would, in union with his unconscious mind and muse of inspiration Brünnhilde, create. Brünnhilde’s world-redeeming act (which Wotan presumed would free the world from Alberich’s Ring Curse), on waking to Siegfried’s kiss, was to help Siegfried bring this redemptive work of art, the artwork of the future, the Wagnerian music-drama, the Ring, to birth. Wotan’s expression of this sentiment was, again, accompanied by H143 = #134.
It's no accident that in our passage above Wagner expresses Brünnhilde's remark that to her alone was Wotan's thought [his confession] revealed, the thought she could never name, with Motif H151 = #141, whose first significant conceptual association after it was introduced in S.3.3 was her remark that she is Siegfried's self if he loves her in her bliss, and that what he doesn't know she knows for him. In other words, H151 = #141 in this context is telling us that Wotan's confession to her holds the secret to Siegfried's identity (keeping in mind that he told Fafner in S.2.2 "... I still don't know who I am ... ."), and that, by virtue of being the repository and guardian of Wotan's confession, his unspoken secret, she knows for Siegfried what he doesn't know, his true identity as Wotan reincarnate. It’s also of supreme significance that as Brünnhilde is telling Siegfried that what he doesn’t know, she knows for him, we hear the Fate Motif H87 = #87, since Wotan confessed to Brünnhilde both the gods’ fate, their inevitable doom Erda foresaw, and also his true but hidden identity. Both Feuerbach and Wagner described a man’s fate as his identity.
Kitcher and Schacht remain, throughout their book, oblivious to these and numerous other similarly striking clues to the allegorical meaning of Wagner's Ring. As I've demonstrated in my online version of The Wound That Will Never Heal, Volume One, the Ring's highly developed, sophisticated allegory has nothing whatsoever to do with some vague, generic notion of Siegfried’s heroism and worthiness which Kitcher and Schacht invoke as a poor substitute for serious analysis of the words and music of Brünnhilde’s remark.
One last point about Kitcher’s and Schacht’s sketchy attempt to employ Wagner’s musical motifs in their Ring analysis, in the face of their ignorance of the allegorical role the artist-hero Siegfried plays in the Ring in relation to his prior incarnation as Wotan (religion), and to his muse of unconscious artistic inspiration Brünnhilde, is that they express confusion about Wagner’s overall strategy in employing his musical motifs of foreboding and reminiscence to embrace the entire Ring. This is largely because, having demoted Siegfried, they can’t make head or tail of almost the entirety of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, in which Wagner’s use of his musical motifs grows ever more sophisticated and complex. They seem at first to be flummoxed by the well known facts that not only did Wagner’s technical facility in musical composition increase as he worked his way
