Alberich’s curse on the Ring, the curse of consciousness. Siegfried the artist-hero thus seems to have been freed to act spontaneously upon his artistic impulses and inspiration, living solely in the present. Siegfried is thus – unlike Wotan – not troubled by ruminating over a corrupt past nor paralyzed into immobility through fearing the fateful future. Siegfried, in other words, thanks to Bruennhilde, seems childlike and guiltless and, in his apparent innocence, naive:
[P. 305] “Through the fullest application of this legacy of our great masters [Wotan grants his legacy, Bruennhilde, man’s collective unconscious and womb of music, to the artist-hero Siegfried, who is freer than Wotan, the God] we have arrived at uniting Music so completely with the Drama’s action, that this very marriage enables the action itself to gain that ideal freedom – i.e. release from all necessity of appealing to abstract reflection … .
[P. 306] By incessantly revealing to us the inmost motives of the action, in their widest ramifications, Music at like time makes it possible to display that action itself in drastic definition: as the characters no longer need to tell us of their impulses [or ‘grounds of action’ – Beweggruende] in terms of the reflecting consciousness, their dialogue thereby gains that naïve pointedness (Praezision) which constitutes the very life of Drama.” [842W-{2/73} Prologue to a Reading of Twilight of the Gods: PW Vol. V, p. 305-306]
It is through Wotan’s imparting his motives to Bruennhilde that they can remain unconscious and hidden, yet secretly inspire Siegfried to act in Wotan’s behalf unaware of the true source of his inspiration. In this way Wotan has fulfilled his desire, expressed in his confession to Bruennhilde, to find a hero who would be free of Wotan’s influence yet, of his own need, do what Wotan desires.
Wotan has said something rather strange, on the face of it. He’s told Erda that Alberich’s curse is powerless over Siegfried because fear remains unknown to him. Though it is true that Siegfried did not learn the meaning of fear (Wotan’s fear) from Fafner, he will soon learn it from Bruennhilde. In fact, Siegfried told the Woodbird in the final moments of S.2.3 that he was longing to learn the meaning of fear from her, and after all, this was the whole point of Wagner’s continual intermixture of #48, the Serpent Motif which represents the fear Mime led Siegfried to Fafner to learn, with #98 (the motif introduced in V.3.3 when Bruennhilde begged Wotan to protect her vulnerable sleep with terrors from all men except an authentic hero) and the various motifs which represent the ring of protective fire Loge made, at Wotan’s and Bruennhilde’s behest, around Bruennhilde. Pursuing this question, how it comes about that Wotan can find, in Siegfried, the free, fearless hero to whom he can safely grant his heritage as heir, we noted previously Feuerbach’s observation that the imagination of the artist is free in a way that religious belief is not, because religion makes the practical though false promise, which assuages fear of death and infinitely satisfies desire, that man in paradise will be immortal, whereas the artist makes no practical claims of any kind, no claim to the power of truth whatsoever. [See 269F and 202F] It is precisely in this sense that Wotan proclaims to Erda that Siegfried’s fearlessness (his living solely in the present thanks to Bruennhilde, Siegfried’s unconscious mind) makes him invulnerable to Alberich’s curse on his Ring, the curse of consciousness.
Just as Siegfried learned the use he could make of Alberich’s Tarnhelm and Ring and then immediately forgot their use, so Siegfried in S.3.3 will learn the meaning of fear from Bruennhilde indeed, but will immediately forget that fear. What Wagner is telling us is simply that Wotan’s fearful hoard of knowledge, an unspoken secret kept for Siegfried by his muse Bruennhilde, will
