and that when Alberich’s hoard (now embodied in Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde) rises from the silent depths to the light of day, his host of night will storm Valhalla and bring about the twilight of the gods. In S.1.3.2, Siegfried, under Hagen’s influence, and therefore tantamount to being Alberich’s host of night, will in fact storm the New Valhalla, Bruennhilde, and forcibly take Alberich’s Ring from her safekeeping, thus exposing the forbidden Hoard to the light of day.
Siegfried again calls up #134 as he consolingly suggests to Bruennhilde that while night (i.e., fear of how Alberich’s machinations in Nibelheim will overthrow Valhalla, both the old and the new) encloses eyes that are bound, with her fetters gone Bruennhilde’s gloomy dread will fade. He asks her therefore to rise from the darkness and see that bright as the sun shines the day. We are reminded of Tristan and Isolde’s fear of day, which nonetheless gives way to their insistence on exposing their secret love-bond to the light of day at the end of Tristan act two. Siegfried is effectively, though unwittingly, asking Bruennhilde to impart her knowledge to him so that he can draw upon it for unconscious inspiration to produce his art, which, though it originates in Bruennhilde’s silent depths, is to be presented by Siegfried, to a public, in the light of day. In other words, only by granting Siegfried unconscious artistic inspiration can Wotan’s confession of the inevitability of Alberich’s victory over the gods safely rise to consciousness, sublimated into artistic form. Siegfried is saying that he has taken aesthetic possession of Alberich’s Ring and Hoard, and can neutralize Alberich’s curse, only if Bruennhilde offers him her love, i.e., only if she risks exposing her secret, the very source of their love, to daylight. Bruennhilde’s initial answer is that the sunlight will only expose her shame (as indeed it will in Twilight of the Gods). Accompanied by #96, the motif recalling the argument through which she persuaded Wotan to grant her in marriage only to an authentic hero (i.e., an authentically inspired artist), Bruennhilde asks Siegfried to behold her fear sympathetically.
[S.3.3: H]
With this we come to one of the most impressive yet unusual musico-dramatic moments in the Ring, for Bruennhilde’s following appeal to Siegfried, to respect and honor her and not coerce her love with a force which will damage both of them, is sung to a series of motifs which seem independent of the genealogically inter-related motifs of the Ring, drawn as they are from Wagner’s composition, the Siegfried Idyll. Heinrich Porges, Wagner’s recording secretary during the rehearsals for the Ring in 1876, provided the following insight into this scene in general, and this Siegfried Idyll interlude in particular, in a passage which presumably owes something to opinions Wagner made public during these rehearsals. Porges suggested the extract from the Ring libretto which follows below is Bruennhilde’s nostalgic look back at her former life as a Valkyrie, a life now forever lost to her, who must seek a new happiness with her new god, the mortal Siegfried:
[P. 111] “The psychological turning-point of the scene, after Siegfried’s comment, ‘Wie Wunder toent, was wonnig du singst, doch dunkel duenkt mich der Sinn’ [“Wondrous it sounds what you blissfully sing; yet its meaning seems obscure to me.”], Wagner defined by the statement: ‘Up to this point Siegfried and Bruennhilde have been carried away, as though in the realm of the gods; now they begin to face each other as two persons.’ Bruennhilde is still ‘sublimely innocent’, but in Siegfried the blood of the Waelsungs is stirring … . [P. 112] … the tone of Siegfried’s utterances must alter: he no longer exudes a high-spirited freedom, for now he is under the compulsion of an
