Hagen: I’ll offer him rest. (#51; #153?)
Siegfried: (turning to Hagen: #51) You called me Siegfried: (#92:) have you seen me before (:#92)? (#92?)
Hagen: (#92:) I knew you only by your strength (:#92).
Siegfried: (handing over the horse to Hagen: #91) (#149?:; #91:) Take good care of Grane! (#149/#91 >>:) You never held (:#149?) the bridle (#150 >>:; #77?:) of a horse of nobler breed.
(#150 vari/#91: [in the bass] [Some music also illustrates Grane’s negative reaction to Hagen, pulling against the reins.] Hagen leads the horse away. While Siegfried gazes thoughtfully after him, the latter, unnoticed by Siegfried, gestures to Gutrune, who withdraws to her chamber through a door on the right.)
Siegfried offers a traditional challenge to his potential host Gunther, who hails Siegfried not as foe, but friend. Then Siegfried asks, significantly, where he can shelter his horse. Hagen offers to take Grane and offer him rest. If Grane’s ability to fly is indeed a metaphor for Bruennhilde as the embodiment of music, Hagen’s offer is ominous indeed: he is effectively capturing Siegfried’s wings of poetical inspiration, in a sense, as in fact Hagen will literally do when he manipulates Siegfried to unwittingly give away his own true love Bruennhilde to Gunther. We now hear #51 (Alberich’s Ring Curse) again, as Siegfried asks Hagen how he came to know Siegfried’s name, and Hagen answers, plausibly enough, that he knew Siegfried by his strength (i.e., by his perpetuation of Wotan’s sin against the real, natural world, for, just as Wotan wanders the world, as he told Siegfried, against the wind, Siegfried poled his boat up the Rhine, against its natural current). Reassured, Siegfried hands Grane over to Hagen, and, accompanied by the two primary T.P.2 love-duet motifs, #149 (representing Bruennhilde’s unconscious inspiration of Siegfried’s art), and #150 (representing Wotan’s hoard of forbidden knowledge, with which Bruennhilde inspires Siegfried’s art subliminally), tells Hagen he never held the bridle of a nobler breed. As Hagen tethers Grane it seems as if Alberich had actually captured the Rhinedaughters and forced his will upon them. We hear a struggle in the orchestra representing Grane’s instinctive repulsion toward Hagen. As they enter the Gibichung Hall together, Hagen gestures to Gutrune to go and retrieve the love-and-forgetfulness potion.
Siegfried has now entered society as man and artist, and as he begins to sober up from the drunkenness of his unconscious artistic inspiration, Siegfried will start to wake up, becoming too conscious of who he is, ultimately too conscious of the processes underlying his own inspiration to draw any longer upon his unconscious muse, Bruennhilde, for inspiration. This is the meaning of all that is about to transpire. Hagen represents not merely the scientific, secular, skeptical and ultimately cynical spirit of the modern world, which finds no room for man’s traditional self-
