Fafner: [[ #33b embryo: ]] Most trusty brother, you see their deception now, you fool (:#33b embryo)?
Fasolt: (#orch pulses:) son of light, lightly swayed (:#orch pulses), [[ #27: ]] listen and beware: keep your faith with your contracts (:#27)! (#21 [in a new vari plus pulses] [[ #115 embryo: ]] What you are you are through contracts alone: your power, mark me well, is bound by sworn agreements (:#115 embryo). (#pulses:) Though you are wiser than we in our wits (:#pulses), you bound us freemen to keep the peace: I’ll curse all your wisdom, fly away from your close [[ #28: ]] if, openly, fairly and freely, you cannot keep faith with your contracts (:#28)! A dull-witted giant enjoins you thus: you witling, learn it of him! (#28).
Wotan: How cunning to take in earnest what was decided in jest! The lovely goddess, radiant and light, what use are her charms to you churls?
Fasolt: You jeer at us? Ha, how unjust! (#24:) You who rule through beauty, you augustly glittering race (:#24), how foolish to strive (#20a modulation?:) after towers of stone (:#20a modulation?), (#18 or #37?:) placing woman’s delights in pawn (:#18 or #37?) (#18 or #37?:) for the sake of castle and hall (:#18 or #37?)! (#26a:) We blunderheads toil away … (:#26a), (#24:) to win a wife (:#24) (#25:) who, fair and meek, would dwell with us poor creatures (:#25): - and you say that the deal is invalid? (#24, #25)
Fasolt introduces the first in a fascinating family of motifs described by Cooke, #27, which is the ultimate foundation for one of Loge’s Motifs, #36, and of the two motifs associated with Mime’s Scheming, #44 and #101. #27 is the motival embodiment of Fasolt’s doubt that the gods’ intentions are honorable, his doubt that they made their contract with the Giants in good faith. In other words, #27 bespeaks Fasolt’s intuition that through Loge’s cunning Wotan intends to break their contract. In fact, from this point onward throughout the Ring Wotan will only be able to redeem himself, the other gods, and his divine ideals from the truth, by breaking the contracts he has made, or depending upon proxies such as his daughter Bruennhilde and the Waelsung heroes (Siegmund and Siegfried) to break them for him.
As Fasolt reminds the gods that they are only gods by virtue of having made the social contract for man and honoring it, we also hear a new variant of #21 which, according to Cooke, is the embryo for what will much later become motif #115, known as the “Power of the Gods Motif.” This motif in Twilight of the Gods will eventually take on ironic power as the herald of the gods’ magnificent
