in the morning light, (#20c:) it still lay lordless and (#20d:) nobly alluring before me (:#20d). (#19:) From morn until evening in toil and anguish [“Angst”] it wasn’t happily won (:#19)! (#57 embryo?:) Night draws on: from its envious [“Neid”] sway may it offer shelter now. ([[ #57ab: ]] very resolutely, as though seized by a grandiose idea: [[ #58a voc: ]]) Thus I salute the stronghold (:#58a), [[ #58b voc: ]] Safe from dread and dismay (:#58b). (#57ab) (He turns solemnly to Fricka: #20d) Follow me, wife: in Valhalla dwell with me! (#20a).
Fricka: (#20a:) What meaning lies in the name? Never, I think, have I heard it before (:#20a).
Wotan (#20a?:) What, mastering fear, my mind conceived, shall reveal its sense if it lives victorious (:#20a?)! [“Was, maechtig der Furcht mein Muth mir erfand, wenn siegend es lebt – leg’ es den Sinn dir dar!” – could this also be read to mean that Wotan’s fear inspired his courage or mind, or gave them the power, to conceive something?] (He takes Fricka by the hand and moves slowly with her towards the bridge; Froh, Freia, and Donner follow)
Wotan has proclaimed the essence of the gods’ newly won abode, Valhalla. It is man’s refuge from night’s (Alberich’s) envious sway, religious man’s refuge from the truth which Alberich wishes to raise up from the silent depths of Nibelheim’s night to the light of day. And Wotan gives voice to his grand idea, his sudden revelation that a way will be found to redeem the gods of Valhalla from the dread and dismay engendered by Wotan’s own skepticism about its dismal origins. We hear a loud proclamation on the trumpet of the new, and supremely important Motif #57ab, sometimes known as the Sword Motif (the sword Nothung which Wotan presumably makes so that his Waelsung heroes can wield it in their unwitting campaign to redeem the gods from Alberich’s curse on his Ring). It is also, correctly, known as the “Motif of Wotan’s Grand Idea,” i.e., his grand idea that he will create a race of heroes, the Waelsungs, who can free themselves from the gods’ laws and religious faith in order to retrieve Alberich’s Ring from Fafner (something Wotan is bound on oath, through the social contract, not to do), in order to forestall Alberich’s plot to regain its power. Wotan’s long-term plan will be that the Waelsungs can somehow redeem the gods from the fate Erda accurately and truly foretold, the twilight of the gods which must necessarily follow upon the birth of Alberich’s son Hagen. And this twilight of the gods is a metaphor for the inevitability that man will eventually outgrow his belief in gods, as he gradually, as Feuerbach says, substitutes objective knowledge of natural causes for phenomena previously attributed to the gods, and acknowledges the gods as merely man’s own invention.
This is a classic instance of Wagner’s concept of a musical motif of premonition, since it is not at all clear that Wotan is clearly conscious yet of his long-term plan to redeem the gods from Alberich’s curse. Furthermore, we do not actually physically see the sword whose motif sounds here without its proper accompanying object, until scene three of the first act of the following music-drama, The Valkyrie. We can grasp the Sword’s (or Wotan’s grand idea for redemption’s)
