:#97 [music depicting Siegfried reaching the peak of Bruennhilde’s mountain in S.3.3]): (#109 vari [very slow]) with the selfsame weapon he won for himself (more and more animatedly: #109?) I’ll easily clear him out of the way and attain to both ring and hoard (:#109).
Siegfried’s questioning Mime about the name of his father’s sword, and Siegfried’s smelting Nothung, introduce three new motifs, #119, #120, and #121. #119, significantly, is based on the octave drop introduced in Erda’s proclamation that all things that are, end, the drop occurring on “Endet.” This is also the first segment of the sword motif, namely #57a, which is followed by the Primal Nature Motif, #1, in the second segment, #57b. The meaning seems to be that as an agent of evolution, an original artist who introduces the “new” into cultural evolution, Siegfried is an instrument of that natural necessity, temporal processes, including the necessity of death, which Erda acclaimed as the essence of nature itself. This cosmic creativity embraces not only becoming, but perishing. In order to embrace it, both Feuerbach and Wagner call upon us to will the end, to will the necessary.
#120, which follows the general contours of #111, makes sense as a variant of that set of motifs which include #105 and #111, the first being Mime’s Starling Song concerning all that Siegfried owes to him, the second, #111, representing Siegfried’s quest to emancipate himself from that debt. The re-forging of his newly rediscovered sword Nothung, the link between his intellectual ancestors and his destiny as a newly forged genius, the self-made hero Wotan longed for, is a key step in this process of emancipation. It is a symbolic dramatisation of Wotan’s remark during his confession to Bruennhilde that the hero will have to make himself, because Wotan can only create serfs. But the genealogy of this set of motifs reminds us, always, that Siegfried can never escape his, and Wotan’s, debt to Alberich, whose forging of the Ring of human consciousness set the whole train of human cultural evolution in motion. #121 seems to be merely an expressive motif conveying an image of Siegfried fanning the flames with his bellows, which, I believe, is heard in this scene and nowhere else, {{ though a subtle variant may recur later as a musical pun representing Siegfried’s sexual (and therefore artistic) drive. }}
Mime has now come up with a new scheme. He can see clearly, from the vital force with which Siegfried, instinctively, is re-forging his father’s sword, that Siegfried will not learn fear from Fafner, will kill Fafner, and will win the Ring and Hoard. So Mime hopes to cheat the fate the Wanderer outlined for him by planning to mix an herbal potion which will plunge Siegfried into sleep if he agrees to drink it as refreshment after his hard battle with Fafner. Mime then plans to dispatch Siegfried with Nothung and take possession of the Ring and Hoard he’s won. But something very curious and interesting occurs in the play of motifs Wagner has chosen to accompany Mime’s machinations. We not only hear the Hoard Motif #46 (though Mime does not mention it in his discourse on treachery), but more importantly, we hear variants of #30b, and #97, as he describes how he’ll put Siegfried to sleep with this potion. These motival references do not merely come to the fore, in my view, simply because Mime mentions how he’ll plunge Siegfried into sleep, a sleep interrupted only by death, since Wagner would be exploiting the noble motif #97, which represents the sleep into which Wotan plunged his daughter Bruennhilde, merely to illustrate that Mime is, likewise, intending to plunge Siegfried into sleep, in order to kill him.
