I taught them to Siegfried, whom love I.” [382W-{10-11/48} Siegfried’s Death: PW Vol. VIII, p. 16]
But, most important of all, we have direct evidence from our own Ring text that Bruennhilde taught Siegfried, subliminally, the contents of Wotan’s confession, for in T.P.2 Bruennhilde tells Siegfried: “What gods have taught me I gave to you: a bountiful store [“Hort,” i.e., “Hoard”] of hallowed runes … .” And Siegfried’s response strongly suggests that the knowledge Bruennhilde imparted to him is in some sense subliminal, unconscious knowledge, because, as he says: “You gave me more, o wondrous woman, than I know how to cherish: chide me not if your teaching has left me untaught!” Her knowledge has left Siegfried untaught not merely because he decides not to use it, but because it never rises to consciousness within him. It was precisely in this sense that Siegfried in S.2.3 emerged from Fafner’s cave bearing Alberich’s Ring and Tarnhelm, having already forgotten their use, which the Woodbird had just taught him a moment before he entered Fafner’s cave.
There is one last piece of indirect evidence which actually is quite dramatic. Wagner was greatly influenced in his development of the character Bruennhilde by the play attributed to Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, presumed to be the first part of a Greek trilogy (the other two parts now presumably lost), like Wagner's model for the Ring, The Oresteia. It is part of the received wisdom of Wagner scholarship that Bruennhilde, like Prometheus, has been punished by the greatest of the gods (Wotan/Zeus) for striving to protect the Waelsungs/mortal man from the gods’ punishment, and, in Prometheus’ case at least, for granting mortal man what ought to be the gods’ privilege alone. This privilege is not only access to fire, as is often supposed, but the gift of foresight, or foreknowledge. In Greek, Prometheus means “foreknowledge.” In this latter instance Bruennhilde, being – by virtue of Wotan’s confession to her - the repository of the knowledge of the twilight of the gods which her mother Erda foretold to Wotan, holds foreknowledge of the gods’ end. It is this fearful foreknowledge of the gods’ end, which Wotan repressed into Bruennhilde, which is the hidden source of the fear which overcomes Siegfried just prior to waking Bruennhilde and falling heir to her hoard of knowledge. In Prometheus Bound Prometheus possesses secret knowledge of how the gods of Olympus will meet their doom, knowledge which Zeus tries, and fails, to obtain from Prometheus. Perhaps these considerations explain why Wagner described Prometheus Bound as the most pregnant of tragedies:
“To see the most pregnant of all tragedies, the ‘Prometheus’, came they; in this Titanic masterpiece to see the image of themselves, to read the riddle of their own actions … .” [402W-{6-8/49} Art and Revolution: PW Vol. I, p. 34]
Returning to our extract from the Ring, we find that during the initial onset of Siegfried’s fear of Bruennhilde we hear #132ab, a motif which when introduced near the end of S.2.3 expressed Siegfried’s intense longing to win Bruennhilde’s love. However, as Siegfried further analyses his new feeling of fear we hear #66, and finally a new motif #137. I have noted throughout our study that if one tallies all the contexts in which #66 recurs, to obtain what I call its “dramatic profile,” it seems to express the “Noth” or anguish to which Wotan has condemned his Waelsung race by choosing them as the martyrs who must confront and overcome the full force of Alberich’s curse on his Ring, so that the gods can be redeemed from it. But it also expresses their mutual sympathy as victims of this fate, as Cooke put it, and especially Sieglinde’s sympathy for both Siegmund and
