Loge: (to Alberich) Slip away home! No snare still holds you: you’re free to go on your way!
Alberich: (raising himself: [[ #50: ]]) Am I free now? (laughing wildly: #50) Really free? – [[ #50: ]] Then let my freedom’s first greeting salute you (:#50)! – [[ #51: ]] Just as it came to me through a curse so shall this ring be accursed in turn; just as its gold once endowed me with might beyond measure, so shall its spell now deal death to whoever shall wear it (:#51)!
Alberich introduces here the first definitive version of Motif #50, sometimes known as the Greed, Grudge, Resentment, or Envy (Neid) Motif, as he asks rhetorically whether he is really free. Cooke noted #50 is basically #19’s (the Ring’s) harmony syncopated. #50 is emblematic of Alberich’s resentment at anyone claiming title to the Ring who has not paid Alberich’s price, his embrace of lovelessness, to obtain it. Alberich’s radical willingness to embrace lovelessness for the sake of objective power is his distinctive hallmark which sets him apart from all others. In V.2.2, when Wotan imparts to Bruennhilde, during his confession to her, what her mother (and his lover) Erda imparted to him, he is accompanied by #50 as he speaks of Alberich’s as yet unborn son Hagen, telling Bruennhilde that Alberich’s force of Envy (Neid), i.e., Hagen, stirs in a mortal woman’s womb. It is Hagen who will fulfill Alberich’s curse on his Ring, carrying out Erda’s prophecy, that the twilight of the gods will have dawned when a child is born to Alberich.
This places Alberich’s following curse on the Ring in a special light, for Hagen (and ultimately also Wotan’s hero Siegfried, whom Hagen manipulates) will be the agent of Alberich’s revenge, the embodiment of Alberich’s curse on his Ring. We hear #50 as Alberich launches his curse on his Ring by describing his curse as “freedom’s first greeting.” The orchestra introduces the famous Curse Motif #51 as Alberich declares that as the Ring came to him through a curse (his curse on love), his Ring shall now be cursed. #51, Cooke observed, is the inversion of #19a, the first segment of the Ring Motif #19. Then Alberich states the conditions of the curse.
Alberich first declares that just as the Ring gave him measureless power, its spell will now doom to death whoever wears it. Alberich has just pronounced the old conundrum of the gift of human consciousness, that the very property of the human mind which grants man seemingly limitless power to shape his world, the foresight which allows him to plan ahead and accumulate knowledge of the world, also grants man the troubling ability to foresee his inevitable death, and is therefore the basis for man’s existential fear. It is this fear of death, the fact of death as a problem, which Socrates said was the basis for philosophy, and Feuerbach described as the ultimate inspiration for religious belief. Man’s gift of foresight is the Fall. It is Wotan’s foresight of the inevitable end of the allegedly immortal gods (the inevitable victory of science over religious faith), granted him courtesy of Erda’s prophecy of the twilight of the gods, which paralyses him with existential fear. It is this existential fear, the product of foresight, which is behind the metaphor of Prometheus’s (“foresight’s”) unhealing wound, with which Zeus punishes Prometheus when he chains him to a mountaintop so that vultures can perpetually eat his liver. This is man’s punishment for hubris in drawing benefit from the allegedly divine gift of foreknowledge, of full, abstract, reflective consciousness, which would not have troubled man at all had he been immortal, as he imagines the gods to be.
