Mime argues that Siegfried should be patient and just wait for Fafner to wake and pass by this spot on his way to get a drink. Once Siegfried learns fear from Fafner he’ll thank Mime for having brought him there, and acknowledge Mime’s love for him. {{ There is what sounds like a subtle foreshadowing of the motif #128b here, which is one of the birdsongs Siegfried will soon hear, whose conceptual meaning he’ll be able to grasp only after sucking the dead Fafner’s blood. If this motif’s presence here can be confirmed, it would be a remarkably subtle anticipation of the fact that it will be through his newfound ability to grasp the conceptual (but subliminal or unconscious) meaning behind the Woodbird’s music which allows Siegfried to see through Mime’s pretensions of love to him, and discern the egoism at the root of Mime’s hypocritical obsequiousness. }} Again, we hear music evoking the sleeping Bruennhilde as Mime speaks of Fafner: the point is that for Wagner his music-dramas - whose metaphor is the loving union of hero with heroine – are the modern secular substitute for lost religious faith, founded as it is on existential fear. Sexual love between man and woman, Wagner’s metaphor for the artist-hero’s gift, his ability to aesthetically transform woe into bliss, replaces religious man’s fear, in the modern secular world.
Siegfried, having had enough of Mime’s irritating and hypocritical protestations of his love and concern for Siegfried’s welfare, now brusquely dismisses Mime with total contempt, accompanied by #104. While this is going on #11 begins to sound in the orchestra, foreshadowing the peaceful forest murmurs which will lull Siegfried into a virtually clairvoyant state after Mime has left Siegfried in peace. This has the effect of a brief pastoral interlude, a restoration of the peace and innocence of the natural world after man’s corrupting influence has been purged from it.
[S.2.2: C]
Siegfried, now able to relax and meditate in freedom, stretches himself out under the trees and listens to the murmurs and the bird-songs which can now gradually be heard in the quiet forest. #2, the first variant of the original Nature Motif #1, now – Cooke notes - gives shape to the shimmering #11 as Siegfried reflects on the nobility and grace of his true parents, in contrast to the depravity of the repulsive foster father who had posed as his parents:
(Siegfried stretches out comfortably beneath the lime-tree and watches Mime go. #11)
Siegfried: (#11/#2 pattern:) That he is not my father – how happy I feel at that! Only now do the fresh woods delight me; only now does the day smile upon me in gladness now that the loathsome dwarf has left me and I’ll nevermore see him again. (He falls into a silent reverie. [forest murmurs: according to Cooke #11 now develops independently of the #2-based framework]) What must my father have looked like (:#11 – forest murmurs free-form)? Ha! – Of course, like me! (#41?:) If any son of Mime’s existed, (#41:) must he not look just like Mime? (#7/#41:) Just as filthy, fearful and
