initially dreadful because Siegfried had a premonition of the danger inherent in Bruennhilde’s being the repository of Wotan’s unspoken secret, his hoard of abhorrent self-knowledge. {{ Evidently #139 will return in T.3.2 as the herald of Siegfried’s remembrance of Bruennhilde, as Hagen suggests to Siegfried he tell the assembled Gibichungs how he learned the meaning of Woodbirdsong. }} Both #134 and #139 will be heard there, as they are here, just before Hagen has given Siegfried a drink containing the antidote to his original potion of love/forgetfulness. As Siegfried drinks Hagen’s potion we hear, naturally enough, Hagen’s Potion Motif #154, which is in the family of motifs that includes Loge’s #35, its direct derivative #100, the Magic Fire Music, the two Tarnhelm Motifs #42 and #43, and, more distantly, the Serpent’s Motif #48, which represents existential fear of the truth. And now we understand: thanks to Hagen’s influence Siegfried is unwittingly preparing to betray Wotan’s unspoken secret - which Bruennhilde holds for Siegfried in order to protect him from suffering its unhealing wound - from the silent depths of his own unconscious to the light of day, by giving his muse Bruennhilde and her secrets away to Gunther (a metaphor for Siegfried the artist-hero’s audience), and by marrying the false muse Gutrune (a metaphor for the music-dramatist’s need to present his sacred work to a profane audience).
An important consideration is that both Hagen’s original potion of love/forgetfulness (#154), taking which Siegfried forgets Bruennhilde, and Hagen’s antidote to it (again represented by #154, which later, at just the right moment for Hagen’s machinations to bear fruit, allows Siegfried to remember Bruennhilde), are, taken together, the means through which Hagen manipulates Siegfried into revealing to his audience (Gunther and the Gibichungs) the secret of Siegfried’s unconscious artistic inspiration. Both the original potion which makes Siegfried forget Bruennhilde temporarily, and Hagen’s antidote to it, through which Hagen restores Siegfried’s memory of Bruennhilde, must be understood as one single potion, one single influence, whose sole purpose is that Wotan’s hoard of knowledge, his unspoken secret, will rise from the silent depths of the unconscious to the light of day, and thus be exposed to the objective, conscious mind. In this way Hagen hopes to explode the last of the religious mysteries, by exposing the Feuerbachian historical mechanism whereby religion (the gods of Valhalla) took refuge in musical feeling.
After drinking Hagen’s potion Siegfried is immediately overcome by a passion for Gutrune very much akin to the longing which he originally felt, in the finale of S.2.3, for the as yet unseen Bruennhilde, because it is accompanied by the same motif, #132, which originally (in S.2.3) expressed Siegfried’s longing for the sleeping woman whom the Woodbird suggested he wake and win for himself. {{ There also may be a hint of the #121 variant associated in S.1.3 with Siegfried’s re-forging of his father’s sword Nothung, particularly the music expressing Siegfried’s plunging the red-hot sword into the basin of water to cool. If this can be validated, it is an especially piquant use of motival material to make a pun, since plunging the red-hot sword into water is not only self-evidently a sexual image, but furthermore this image is repeated by Siegfried himself during the love duet when he exclaims to Bruennhilde that the fiery ring which protected her now burns within his breast, and he is desperate to cool his passion by plunging into the watery flood of union with Bruennhilde. }} Siegfried begs Gunther to tell him his sister’s name, and as Gunther answers: “Gutrune,” we hear an especially sinuous and provocative version, actually, the Definitive version, of her motif #156. Siegfried then urgently offers his hand in marriage to Gutrune, and we hear #51 (the Curse). Gutrune in her humility walks off into the interior of Gibichung Hall.
