Siegfried. The loving sympathy of the heroine for the hero’s plight, or “Noth,” is central to all of Wagner’s canonic stage works. #66’s significance as a motival symbol for Siegfried’s fear of the sleeping Bruennhilde is that, as some of our extracts from Wagner above suggest, Siegfried, preparing to wake Bruennhilde, has an intimation of the terrible fate to which Wotan condemns him by leaving him heir to the sleeping Bruennhilde and the horrific, unspoken secret she keeps.
Allen Dunning describes #137 as an independent chromatic motif, while Deryck Cooke saw it as a twisted variant of #81, which itself is a twisted, gnarly variant of Wotan’s Spear Motif #21. In V.3.3, #81B was heard in the context of Wotan’s intent to let Bruennhilde suffer the punishment which she brought on herself by living for love in the face of Wotan’s tragic awareness and his divine “Noth” (anguish - represented originally by #81A), which is caused by his knowledge that his quest for a hero freed from his egoism is futile. Later, #137 will evolve into #164, a motif most dramatically associated with Bruennhilde’s ultimate recognition that her blissful marriage to Siegfried was actually the very essence of Wotan’s punishment. I tend to favor Cooke’s thesis that #137 is a baroque variant of #81AB, not least because Wagner constantly presents these two motifs as a pair, the one, #81B, naturally evolving into #137 or #164. And #137 is specifically identified with Siegfried’s fear of the sleeping Bruennhilde. All in all, #66 and #137 here bespeak the anguish of falling heir to Wotan’s futile quest to redeem the gods from Alberich’s curse on the Ring. Siegfried and Bruennhilde, in other words, having become implicated in the gods’ self-deceit (Loge, being the architect of the gods’ self-deceit, is the Waelsung heroes’ archetype), will suffer the same fate as the gods, and in the event they both will eventually betray the love which was Wotan’s sole hope of redemption. These are the considerations which engender Siegfried’s fear of the sleeping Bruennhilde.
#66 is also emphasized as Siegfried calls on his mother to help him in this crisis. First and most obviously, his literal blood-mother is Sieglinde, who foretold that Siegfried would smile upon Bruennhilde someday. But Siegfried’s mother is also Erda, Mother Nature, who gave birth to Bruennhilde, whom, as we shall see, will be Siegfried’s surrogate mother, as art is his surrogate for reality (nature). Now Siegfried acknowledges that in order to end his fear (associated clearly at this point with #137), he must wake the maid. As Siegfried loudly calls out for Bruennhilde to wake, we hear #87, the Fate Motif, several times. And of course it is Bruennhilde who holds for Siegfried the knowledge of the world’s, and Siegfried’s, fate, which her mother Erda imparted to Wotan.
Then Siegfried introduces something new: as we hear the “Loveless Motif” #37 - a segment of #18, the motif first associated with the requirement that Alberich must renounce love in order to win the Ring’s power (i.e., that man must acquire symbolic consciousness to rise above and dominate the other animals bound by instinct) - he says that he must suck life from Bruennhilde’s lips, even should he die doing so. The symbolic meaning seems clear: in order to draw inspiration from Bruennhilde’s terrible, hidden knowledge that the world is loveless and irredeemable, Wotan’s unspoken secret, Siegfried must confront the true source of man’s existential fear, during unconscious inspiration, in order to produce a work of art which will preserve the veil of Maya, Loge’s ring of fire, which represses the terrible truth and sublimates it into tragic beauty. He must, in other words, take aesthetic possession of Wotan’s horror, and draw advantage from it as Loge’s cunning would, in this case through unconscious artistic inspiration, to produce a redemptive work of art in which our existential fear can be forgotten. Symbolically, Siegfried must die during unconscious confrontation with the terrible truth, the lovelessness of the world, in order to wake,
