Wotan: (#20a?: lost in contemplation of the ring on his finger) Don’t begrudge him his bilious pleasure!
A special variant of the Ring Motif #19 is heard as Alberich tells Wotan that no happy man shall profit from the Ring, which will be heard again at various points in the drama when Wagner wishes to remind us that the whole purpose of Alberich’s curse on his Ring is to punish those men whose happiness depends upon the self-deceptions of religion and art, i.e., those men who can’t bear to sacrifice love (feeling) for power. For Alberich is enraged that Wotan might, with the aid of Loge’s cunning, draw advantage from Alberich’s sacrifice of love, Alberich’s “Noth,” without also paying the price Alberich paid to forge his Ring. Thus, as Alberich says, the Ring’s (i.e., full consciousness’) owner will be wracked by care. This is the existential angst which is the price man pays for his gift of consciousness, a price religious faith and art are meant to ameliorate.
When Alberich adds that he who does not own the Ring will be ravaged by greed to possess it, some may be inclined to read this conventionally, as Wagner’s warning that those possessed by greed for money or property or even the political and/or economic power which naturally entails increase of money, property, and cache, will never be content with what they have. While that is surely true, Wagner is reaching for something even more universal and far-reaching here. He is saying that it is the very nature of the human mind, especially highly developed minds such as those of the genius, to be incapable of finding contentment in things as they are. In other words, Alberich’s curse on his Ring is the natural consequence of the nature of reflective consciousness. Man’s inherent inability to find satisfaction is both a source of anguish and a source of creativity, for it seeks new ways to satisfy man’s needs and desires and to assuage his fear, when man is thwarted in his quest to address these feelings. Furthermore, since I have said that possessing the Ring means possessing consciousness in its fullest sense, the insatiable greed of those who do not possess the Ring, to possess it, can also be construed as a poetical description of historical, collective man’s (Wotan’s – or Light-Alberich’s) quest for ever more knowledge of himself and his world, and the power which follows from it.
A new motif, #52, heard rarely in the Ring and evidently unrelated musically to any other motif, is introduced now as Alberich tells Wotan that the Ring’s owner, doomed to die, will be fettered by fear. This is actually Alberich’s premonition of what Erda, Mother Nature, will tell Wotan after he’s placed Alberich’s Ring on his finger and refused to yield it in payment to the Giants. For Erda will forewarn Wotan of the inevitable twilight of the gods which is coming, leaving him to meditate on the gods’ inevitable end in care and fear. Wotan will be virtually paralyzed into inaction by this foreknowledge, and will only be able to take action in his own (and the gods’) defence through his proxies the Waelsung heroes and his daughter Bruennhilde, who, unlike Wotan, will remain unconscious of the full implications of Alberich’s curse.
And this leads us into an even deeper reading of the intent of Alberich’s curse on his Ring. The conventional interpretation that his curse represents merely greed for money, property, and the political power which secures these worldly goods, will not get us very far in discerning the universal breadth of Wagner’s vision. I offer the following reading as a guide for us as we trace the consequences of Alberich’s curse on his Ring throughout the remainder of the drama. For I read man’s insatiable quest for power, the very essence of Alberich’s curse on the Ring, on the basis of
