in V.2.2 during Wotan’s confession, when he told Bruennhilde of his need for a free hero who by fighting the gods would redeem them:) rise from the darkness and see – bright as the sun shines the day (:#134; :#83 voc?)!
Bruennhilde: (in the utmost dismay) Bright as the sun shines the day of my shame! (#96 >>:) O Siegfried! siegfried! Behold my fear [“Angst”] (:#96)! (#80 or #79 on clarinet?)
Mother Nature, Erda, Bruennhilde’s mother, has now, in her incarnation as Bruennhilde, become what Wagner called the artist’s “bashful bride”:
“… Nature has … had her share in the birth of Art … . Her share, however, was this: that she abandoned Man, the creator of Art, to the conditions which must necessarily spur him on to self-gained consciousness [as the Rhinedaughters rejected Alberich’s bid for love, so he was forced to rise from feeling to thinking, and forged the Ring, the conscious power of thought] … . From the over-tender mother [Erda, whose warning to Wotan in R.4 to yield the Ring to the Giants displayed her sympathy], she became to him a bashful bride [Bruennhilde, fearful of sexual union with Siegfried], whom he [the artist] now must win by vigour and love-worthiness for his – endlessly enhanced – fruition; a bride who, vanquished thus by mind and valour, made offering of herself to Love’s embraces.” [448W-{2/50} Art and Climate: PW Vol. I, p. 253]
But why is Bruennhilde fearful of consummating sexual union – i.e., unconscious artistic inspiration – with Siegfried? In this case the music tells all. During the onset of her doubt and fear, as she complains that Siegfried has cut away her maidenly defenses with Nothung, we hear a halting motif combination which expresses her rising doubt. This includes fragments of #77, representing her former life as a chaste Valkyrie, #81, recalling Wotan’s rising consciousness of the futility of seeking to create a free hero, and #40, best described as a tragic variant of the basic love motif #25, and #37, the motif expressing the sadness of a loveless world. It is of course impossible to encompass in a verbal description all the subtle emotions and conceptual references evoked by such a conjuncture of motifs, but suffice it to say that Bruennhilde not only finds herself confronted for the first time with the practical consequences which follow from Wotan’s depriving her of her status as a chaste Valkyrie and forcing her to become a hero’s wife, but most importantly, she has a premonition of what Wotan told her during his confession and during his chastisement of her in V.3.3, that she will bring upon herself the punishment Wotan meant to mete out to her, by living for love, oblivious to the contradictions which Wotan’s conscious mind had to suffer, oblivious to his hidden anguish (“Noth”), which he conveyed to her in his confession.
Accordingly, Siegfried’s increasingly urgent desire for Bruennhilde, and her equally urgent evasions, call up both #137 and #34. #137 is of course a baroque variant of #81B, the motif representing the punishment Bruennhilde would suffer for not heeding Wotan’s declaration that his longing for a free hero is futile, which, just moments ago, became the musical embodiment of Siegfried’s fear of the sleeping Bruennhilde, i.e., his fear of waking remembrance of Wotan’s confession, Wotan’s unspoken secret, which Bruennhilde keeps. Siegfried cries out that Loge’s ring of fire (represented here by #34), which protected Bruennhilde’s sleep, the veil of illusion which
