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Table of Contents

Title Page
Dedication Page
General Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations for key references
Guide to abbreviations used in text
Allen Dunning's numbered Guide to the Ring's Musical Motifs
Detailed Table of Contents

The Ring

Introduction


References
Appendix I
Appendix I I

Key Colour Coding

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I would be grateful for donations of any size, small or large, to help defray the cost (1) of maintaining this website, (2) and to finance my past and present research which produced my book posted here, Volume One of "The Wound That Will Never Heal," and my forthcoming revision of Volume One (to be submitted for publication), and completion of Volume Two on Wagner's six other canonic operas and music-dramas. I sacrificed at least seven years of paid employment and incurred debts to complete this project, and am currently unemployed, so I thank you in advance for any financial help you can provide. Your friend, Paul Heise.

fearful secret, which he can’t bear to say aloud. His unspoken secret is his repressed knowledge that religious faith is predestined to destruction by man’s advancement in knowledge, and can only live on as feeling, in secular art, the Wagnerian music-drama. It is this secret which Bruennhilde will subliminally, musically, impart to her lover Siegfried.

(#98, being pentatonic, seems most closely related to the family of motifs, the so-called Voices of Nature, which includes #4, #128ab, #129ab, and #174abc)

[[#99]] Wotan expresses his deep love and affection to Bruennhilde, in parting from her forever

Wotan will leave his unconscious mind, the repository for his unspoken secret, Bruennhilde, to a man freer than the god, the secular artist-hero Siegfried. Siegfried is freer than the god Wotan because, as a secular artist-hero, Siegfried is free from the constraint of religious belief, which stakes a claim to the power of the truth (the Ring) which - because religious faith is self-deception - can’t be sustained in the face of man’s advancement in knowledge.

(#99’s motival links, if any, not yet ascertained; Dunning believes #99 may be related to #106. Does any of the accompaniment for #99 generate #163?)

[[#100]] Loge’s Protective Ring of “Magic Fire” with which Wotan protects Bruennhilde from all wooers except the fearless Siegfried

Loge’s protective ring of fire around Bruennhilde represents the veil of Maya (illusion), or Wahn, with which man in the mytho-poetic phase of human history (the religious phase) hides the unbearable truth from himself (that he is merely a product of nature, subject to its laws and to egoistic impulse, with no divine spark), and substitutes for this truth the illusion that he has transcendent value, an illusion held to be the truth

(#100 is a variant of #35; it is thus from the family of #35-generated motifs which include #42, #43, #154, and related to #48 and #49)