motifs, so Wotan could be reborn as the ahistorical, mythic Siegfried purified through music of all that Wotan loathed in his own nature. This is music through which Brünnhilde can know for Siegfried what he doesn’t know, Wotan’s confession, but impart it to Siegfried feelingly through her love. How many audience members consciously register the profound musico-dramatic fact, on which a significant aspect of the allegorical meaning I’ve discovered in Wagner’s Ring turns, that Wotan introduced this same Motif H143 = #134 when describing to Erda how he’d made Siegfried his heir, and that through Siegfried’s and Brünnhilde’s love the world would be redeemed from Alberich’s Ring Curse? My point is, the transcendent “feeling” we experience during performances of the Ring, of being lifted above ourselves and the world, and also the profound threat to that feeling those who're sufficiently attentive can’t help registering, which haunts Wagner’s drama even in its most ecstatic moments, depend on thousands of interlinked details of the kind I just described, which rarely reach consciousness, but which, once teased out and grasped in their ultimate significance, reveal an astonishingly sophisticated, stirring, and poignant allegorical master-blueprint for the Ring which my interpretation has brought to view for contemplation for the first time.
I’ve given one example of a motival cross-reference, among hundreds, which Wagner’s audience generally overlooks or at least never attempts to grasp conceptually, though a large part of the Ring’s power and charm surely derives from the overall impact of hundreds of such examples in the aggregate. A few other examples of this kind taken from some brief libretto passages (some with associated motifs), which are generally overlooked in spite of their crucial importance, will also illustrate my point. How many members of Wagner’s audience ever consciously note the following equation Wagner made between Alberich’s accusation against Wotan in The Rhinegold, Scene Four, in which Alberich tells him “If ever I sinned, I sinned freely against myself: but you, you immortal, will sin against all that was, is and shall be - if you brazenly wrest the ring from me now!,” and Erda’s declaration to Wotan, also in The Rhinegold, Scene Four, “How all things were - I know; how all things are, how all things will be, I see as well … ”? How many members of Wagner’s audience ever ask themselves what implications follow from this verbal parallel? And by the same token, who ever notices Wagner’s distant echo of these two passages (which together convey the concept that Wotan renounces Erda’s objective world which exists in time and space, and strives to forget the fear of the end Erda taught him) in Siegfried’s following challenge to Brünnhilde in Siegfried Act Three Scene Three: “What you will be, be today! As my arm enfolds you, I hold you fast; as my heart beats wildly against your own, as our glances ignite and breath feeds on breath, eye to eye and mouth to mouth, (H143 = #134:) then, to me, you must be what, fearful, you were and will be!”? The concept expressed here, as construed allegorically in my interpretation, is that in Siegfried’s ecstatic unconscious artistic inspiration by his muse and lover Brünnhilde, the fear Wotan, religious man, experienced in the face of the objective world’s finitude, its limitation by time, space, and inevitable death (including the twilight of the gods Erda foresees, which expresses her ur-law that all things that are, end), is overcome through Wagner’s redemptive artwork of the future. This artwork is the product of Siegfried’s loving union with Brünnhilde, in which the “Wonder” of Wagner’s musical motifs of reminiscence and foreboding allow us, his audience, to feel as if we’ve transcended the limits of time, space, and fearful death, and even fate itself, making all that's distant in space and time present to us, here and now. Is it any wonder that Wagner said the following of both Siegfried and Brünnhilde?: "Siegfried lives entirely in the present, he is the hero, the finest gift of the will." [820W - {3/12/72} CD Vol. I, p. 466]. We need only remember that Brünnhilde called herself Wotan’s “Will” in order to grasp that
