said that Alberich’s curse is powerless over Siegfried because Siegfried has never experienced fear. In truth, we have just witnessed Siegfried experiencing fear in the presence of the sleeping Bruennhilde. It would be truer to say that Alberich’s curse on his Ring, the curse of consciousness, is temporarily neutralized by Bruennhilde, Wotan’s and Siegfried’s unconscious mind, and that Alberich’s curse will not be reactivated unless and until Siegfried betrays his love for Bruennhilde and therefore betrays her unspoken secret, Wotan’s hoard of knowledge (represented now by Alberich’s Ring alone), by bringing it up from the silent depths to the light of day.
This entire passage, in which Siegfried confronts his unconscious mind Bruennhilde to seek inspiration for the first time, is one of the most sublime and ecstatic in all of Wagner’s art, a dramatic representation of Wagner’s paradise, his most exalted state of being, unconscious artistic inspiration. Wagner always said that for him, the greatest joy was in the original inspiration, not in the completion or the staging of his works. We are immediately introduced to two new motifs, #138 and #139. #138 is, according to Dunning, a chord evoking Siegfried’s calling up Bruennhilde from sleep, and is based on #53, a motif often identified with Bruennhilde’s mother Erda, but which at its inception is associated with Erda’s two key proclamations of the essence of her knowledge, one, that she knows all that was, is, and will be, and two, that everything that is, ends. In other words this motif evokes the passage of time, change, and natural necessity, the laws of motion in nature, its primal evolutionary creativity which lives on in the inspired artist Siegfried. The beautiful #139 evokes Siegfried’s waking of Bruennhilde, who was destined to wake only for him. In other words, only Siegfried, no other man, can woo the muse Bruennhilde, for he alone is an authentically inspired artistic genius, and therefore he alone is able to access man’s unconscious knowledge of the religious mysteries (i.e., the true, mundane origin of religious ecstasy), knowledge too dangerous for the common man to handle.
Upon waking Bruennhilde hails the light and the day, the gods, the world, and earth (Erda), accompanied by #138 and #139. As she recalls how long was her sleep, we hear several repetitions of the “Fate Motif” #87. The gods’ fate, as foreseen by Erda, is that they will end in irredeemable shame. But we may also surmise that Wotan’s proxies, whom he has implicated in his futile struggle to redeem the gods from fate (not only the Waelsung twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, but also the ultimate Waelsung hero Siegfried, and his muse Bruennhilde), will also succumb to Alberich’s curse. Not only did Siegfried fall heir to Alberich’s curse on the Ring by removing it from the dead Fafner’s cave, but furthermore, by waking Bruennhilde, Siegfried falls heir to Wotan’s repressed knowledge of the gods’ fate, which he confessed to Bruennhilde, a fate which is the consequence of Alberich’s curse on the Ring. So what is at stake here? Clearly, if - after experiencing fear and waking Bruennhilde - Siegfried fails to produce that redemptive work of art in which the fear which inspired it can be forgotten, then the fate which Erda foretold, the gods’ twilight, will not be long in coming. It is Siegfried’s unwitting, involuntary duty now to share with Bruennhilde the task of preserving Wotan’s secret. Alberich’s curse is the curse of consciousness. If Siegfried can remain unconscious of the truth, thanks to Bruennhilde’s protection, then as long as that is the case he has a temporary reprieve from suffering the Ring curse.
{{ After Bruennhilde invokes the resplendent earth we hear an orchestral explosion which sounds somewhat like that hybrid of #19 and #20a which will later express Bruennhilde’s joy in Siegfried’s love, represented for her by Alberich’s Ring, which Siegfried will give her in T.P.2 in token of their marriage troth, to keep its power safe. This needs to be checked in the score. }}
