Waltraute: (#97/#79 [or is #79 here actually #58b as heard in R.4 when Wotan saluted the fortress Valhalla: “… safe from dread and dismay!” or as heard in V.1.3 when Siegmund sang of the sword (Nothung) which Waelse (Wotan) once promised him: “I’d find it one day in my time of hoechste Noth!”?]; #5?:) Alas! [“Wehe!”] (:#5?)! (#79 or #58b?) (#5?:) Alas (:5?)! Woe betide you, sister (:#97/#79)! (#161:; #77?:) Woe betide Valhalla’s gods (:#161; :#77?)!
(#78b; #77/#78a >>>: She rushes away. A stormcloud can soon be seen rising from the pinewood. [is there any #84 or #85 here?])
The most striking aspect of Waltraute’s parting indictment of Bruennhilde is that its motival accompaniment is more or less the same set of motifs to which Wotan’s original explosion of despair over his divine “Noth” was set in V.2.2, just prior to his confession to Bruennhilde, namely, #82, #51, and #79. As this is the set of motifs which heralded Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde of his unspoken secret, which he dared not say aloud (consciously) to himself in words, their recurrence here informs us that his unspoken secret is now at risk of being compromised by Siegfried’s imminent assault upon Bruennhilde. The last time this set of motifs was heard (one of, I believe, only four times in the entire Ring) was when Bruennhilde had a premonition of danger in granting Siegfried her sexual favors, i.e., a premonition of the risk she would be taking that Wotan’s unspoken secret might be revealed, his hoard of forbidden runes dredged up - from the silent depths to the light of day - by the hero with whom Bruennhilde must share those runes in order that he might draw unconscious artistic inspiration from them.
Of course, this is not the only meaning we can assign to these motifs. Another related one is called to mind by Alberich’s prophecy in R.3 (set to the embryo of motif #82, namely #47) that he would one day force his lust upon the gods’ women, and that just as he had once forsworn love for the sake of gold, so all the living, and especially the gods, will. Alberich also foresaw that he would turn Wotan’s heroes against him. All of Alberich’s prophecies are fulfilled figuratively in Siegfried’s betrayal of his love for Bruennhilde and his brutalization of her (see T.1.3.2), in unwitting service to Hagen’s intent to regain the power of his father Alberich’s Ring, after Waltraute’s exit. But Siegfried’s prospective brutalization of Bruennhilde is not a mere rape: its sole true purpose is to force the Ring from her protective hands and hand it over to Hagen. In other words, since Bruennhilde is the repository for Wotan’s unspoken secret, his repressed hoard of forbidden knowledge of the inevitability of Alberich’s victory over the gods and their proxies, in giving his muse Bruennhilde away to Gunther (Siegfried’s audience), and forcibly taking the Ring from her whose power she’d kept safe (thereby protecting Siegfried and his audience from suffering the curse Alberich placed on it), Siegfried is effectively making the hidden processes and contents of his own unconscious mind available to the general public, allowing the light to expose what heretofore was the forbidden womb of the religious mysteries.
And this is the ultimate fulfillment of Alberich’s curse on the Ring (#51), a curse whose motive was to punish religio-artistic man (the gods and all those humans who predicate the meaning of life on the illusion of man’s transcendent value) for co-opting the Ring’s (conscious thought’s) power,
