Siegfried: (with increasing animation: #106?:) You see, what I used to ponder in vain – it now occurs to me, too: when I run off into the forest to leave you, how is it I still come home? (He leaps up.) First I must learn from you (:#106?) who are my father and mother!
Mime: (#105 vari [a very fast vari – perhaps as heard in S.1.3 when Siegfried, forging, thrusts the red-hot sword Nothung in the water to cool and stiffen it? It also seems to be part of the Nature mood music heard earlier?]) What father! What mother! Idle question! (:#105?)!
(Siegfried leaps at Mime and seizes him by the throat.)
Siegfried: (#104 >>>:) So I must seize you to find out anything: willingly I shall learn nothing! (#33b vari >>:) Thus have I had to force all things out of you: even speech I’d scarcely have mastered, had I not wrung it out of the rogue! Out with it, scurvy wretch! Who are my father and mother (:#104; :#33b vari >>)?
(Having nodded his head and made signs with his hands, Mime is released by Siegfried.)
Mime: (#102 hint?:) You’ll be the death of me yet! Let go! What you’re eager to know (:#102?) you shall learn just as I know it. (#41 duple vari [is this vari based on the syncopated figure associated with Fricka’s rams pulling her chariot?]) (#21 vari?: [or vari or frag of another motif!!!]) O thankless, wicked child (:#21 vari? [or vari or frag of another motif!!!])! (#41 duple vari [sounding like Fricka’s rams?]) now hear the reason you hate me! (#41 duple vari [like Fricka’s rams’ music?]) (#21 vari? [or some other motif?]) I’m neither your father nor any kinsman (:#21 vari? [or some other motif?]) – and yet you owe me everything! You’re a stranger to me, your only friend; out of pity alone I sheltered you here: what a rich reward have I now! (#102 vari?) What a fool I was to hope for thanks!
I have proposed that Mime actually represents the majority of men, the common man whose sole concern is his immediate physical needs, safety, security, and the little pleasures of life. This sort of man, whose breadth of consciousness is inherently incapable of reaching beyond his immediate practical concerns, never grasps the nature or special needs of the truly gifted, the genius, and generally instinctively feels threatened by more mentally and spiritually developed types. This is what Wagner means when he speaks of established society and its fear of the new and the unwonted, its suspicion of any truly independent, idiosyncratic form of personal expression which
