venom, jumps closer and stands to one side of the dragon. #103. Fafner tries to reach him with his tail. Siegfried, whom Fafner has almost reached, (#48, #103) jumps over him in a single bound and wounds him in the tail. Fafner roars, draws his tail back violently and raises the front half of his body in order to throw his full weight down on Siegfried; [#81 in the bass at some point following?:] in doing so he exposes his breast to the latter; Siegfried quickly notes the position of the heart and thrusts in his sword as far as the hilt. Fafner rears up even higher in his pain and sinks down on the wound, as Siegfried releases the sword and leaps to one side. #126 tympani, #109)
Siegfried: Lie there, (#126 tympani) you spiteful [“neidischer”] churl! Nothung is lodged in your heart.
(#126/#50; #? [a peculiar four note figure repeated, at each repeat preceded by the glissando from #26a?])
Instead of performing imitations of the Woodbird’s tunes #128ab and #129, Siegfried has played his own personal melodies, his Youthful Horn Call #103, #92, the motif which more than any other reflects his heroic fearlessness and true identity, #57, representing his sword Nothung and Wotan’s grand idea for redemption from Alberich’s curse on the Ring, and even #109, a synthesis of #57 and #103 which was first heard when Siegfried learned from Mime about the legacy left to him by his mother, the pieces of his father’s sword. The boon companion Siegfried has futilely been seeking all this time by playing his characteristic motifs on his wooing horn, by the way, is the muse of art.
We have already been conditioned by Wagner’s extensive employment of motifs evoking the sleeping Bruennhilde and her protective ring of fire, in conjunction with Fafner’s Serpent Motif #48 (a link which stems from the fact that the fear Siegfried doesn’t learn from Fafner he will learn from Bruennhilde), to see Bruennhilde as in some sense closely related to Fafner. In fact, near the end of Siegfried’s and Bruennhilde’s love-duet in the finale of S.3.3, Fafner’s Serpent Motif #48 will be heard as Bruennhilde asks Siegfried whether he is blinded by her gaze, now that she has succumbed to his love, and moments later she will ask him whether he fears her. The link between Fafner and Bruennhilde is quite simple but perhaps not so obvious. Bruennhilde, representing the unconscious mind and its special language, music (in which the music-dramatist Siegfried – i.e., Wagner - will instinctively attempt to repress dangerous knowledge which is rising to consciousness within us, and particularly within him), will be the secular artist’s substitute for lost religious faith. As such, it will be the artist’s substitute for the fear of knowledge, the basis of faith, which protected the faithful from examining the religious mysteries which, as Feuerbach expressed so well, they had involuntarily and unconsciously invented in the first place. Since the music-dramatist Siegfried is going to unwittingly deliver the death blow to religious faith (Fafner), in taking responsibility for guarding the Ring, Tarnhelm, and Hoard which Siegfried will soon inherit, he must also take responsibility for keeping Wotan’s unspoken secret. What is most interesting
