At this point Siegfried and Bruennhilde exchange lines and duet together for the first time to a new motif, #140, which Cooke says is in the family of love motifs which includes #25, #39, #40, #64b, #80b, #133, and possibly #145, etc. This brief duet reaches its climax in an orgiastic, ecstatic orchestral explosion based partly on #66, and primarily another new motif, #141, heard as Siegfried and Bruennhilde stare in wonderment and awe into each others’ eyes. Neither Cooke nor Dunning have placed #141 in any of the motif families.
Thanks to the fact that Bruennhilde protects Siegfried from consciousness of the sin he inherited from Wotan, Siegfried’s and Bruennhilde’s love seems sinless, as if the preconscious innocence of man’s animal ancestors – represented by the three Rhinedaughters’ joy in the Rhinegold, experiencing the “present” in a pure way reflective humans cannot - had been restored:
“He then plays Siegfried’s awakening of Bruennhilde, is pleased with the character of this work, its trueness to Nature: ‘Like two animals,’ he says of Br. and Sieg. ‘Here there is no doubt, no sin,’ he continues … .” [1134W-{9/5/82} CD Vol. II, p. 907]
Thanks to Wagner’s theoretical writings, particularly Opera and Drama, and thanks especially to an observation by Cosima reproduced below, we know that Wagner conceived of Siegfried as a metaphor for the poet-dramatist, and Bruennhilde as a metaphor for the music Siegfried embraces to produce that unique union of word, action, and music, the Wagnerian music-drama:
“We speak also about my last conversation with Herr Levi. He does not seem to fully understand ‘Parsifal,’ and I tell him that R.’s [Wagner’s] article theoretically bears almost the same relationship to the poem as his words on music (the loving woman) and on drama (the man) in ‘Opera and Drama’ bear to Bruennhilde and Siegfried.” [933W-{8/2/78}CD Vol. II, p. 128]
The implications of this key metaphor for grasping Wagner’s mature music-dramas and major theoretical writings was explored by Jean-Jacques Nattiez in his Wagner Androgyne (published in the original French in 1990, and in an English translation by Stewart Spencer for Cambridge University Press in 1993). I anticipated several important insights in this book – especially the notion that Siegfried is Wagner’s metaphor for the music-dramatist Wagner, and Siegfried’s loving union with his muse Bruennhilde the means by which he gives birth to the Wagnerian music-drama - in college papers written in 1974 (Franklin and Marshall College) and 1976 (Southern Illinois University at Carbondale), as well as essays copyrighted at the Library of Congress in 1981 (In Dedication To Claude Levi-Strauss) and 1983. The latter paper, entitled The Doctrine of the Ring (which presented my thesis that Wagner’s four music-dramas – i.e., the Ring, Tristan, Mastersingers, and Parsifal, can best be understood by treating the four as one single artwork), I hand-delivered to Nattiez at a conference, Wagner in Retrospect - A Centennial Reappraisal, held in 11/83 at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus. At this conference Nattiez presented this idea (which he developed independently), in a paper entitled The ‘Ring’ as a Metaphorical History of Music. I mention this because Nattiez’s book, which I discovered long after having worked out most of my interpretation of the Ring, helped me to further solidify my interpretation of Bruennhilde as Siegfried’s muse of unconscious artistic inspiration, by showing me just how far the concept that Bruennhilde is a metaphor for Wagner’s special kind of music can be taken. Nattiez’s independent findings have been a great aid to me in working out
