Alberich: (softly: #50 vari >>:) Are you sleeping, Hagen, my son? (#50>>:; #19 voc?:) You’re asleep and do not hear me whom rest and sleep betrayed (:#50; :#19 voc?). (#166 end frag [a two note figure associated with Hagen’s sadness &/or servitude to egoism?])
Hagen: (softly, without moving, so that he still seems to be asleep, even though there is a glassy stare in his permanently open eyes) I hear you, evil elf [“schlimmer Albe”]: (#51?) (#voc?: [perhaps a musical reference to Alberich’s remark to Wotan in R.4, after he cursed his ring: “… in direst need (‘hoechster Noth’) the Nibelung blesses his ring.”?]) what do you have to tell my sleep (:#voc? – Alberich reference from R.4?) (#161 [not #45?])
Alberich: (#13 vari:) Be mindful of the power that you’ll command (#19 vari [starting to sound a bit like #16 or #17?]) if you’re as mettlesome (#37 voc?:) as the mother who gave you birth (:#13 vari; :#19 vari; :#37 voc?). (#37?; #166 end frag? [Hagen’s characteristically sad two-note figure])
Hagen: (as before: [[ #166: ]] [definitive form, plus #Norn pulses?]) Though my mother gave me mettle, I’ve no reason to be thankful (#37: [is there any 50?]) that she yielded to your cunning: (#50?:) old too early, pale and wan (:#166 [plus #norn pulses?]), (#50?:; #37:) I hate the happy, am never glad [“hass’ ich die Frohen, freue mich nie!”] (:#50?; :#37)!
The Prelude to this act introduces a new motif, #166, which expresses Hagen’s anguish at being who he is, a lonely heir to Alberich’s loveless weltanschauung, who must stand for the objective, bitter truth even if this forever precludes happiness and contentment. He is someone we might describe, loosely, as a Nietzschean hero. Dunning detects an element of #37, the “Loveless Motif,” in #166. Ultimately, the meaning of #37 is that the objective truth is not only at variance with beauty and goodness, it is antithetical to these values, incommensurable with them. It represents man’s irrevocable fall from grace with his prior preconscious innocence. A #15 Variant is heard which reminds us that Bruennhilde’s magical love, her surrogate Rhine, protects Siegfried temporarily from the wounds of consciousness and the existential fear which Wotan’s foresight of the end engendered, and therefore neutralizes Alberich’s curse on the Ring for a time. {{ However, we hear a #19 Variant which (I believe) was previously associated - during Alberich’s Curse on the Ring - with his remark to Wotan: “No joyful man will have joy of it.” It may also have been associated with Alberich’s complaint in R.4, just prior to his curse, that the hypocrite Wotan hopes to co-opt the power of Alberich’s Ring without paying its price. }}
The first thing we see clearly are altars to the various gods, telling us that the Gibichungs still honor the gods (much, perhaps, as modern secular society, and the State, accommodates a large percentage of the public who are religious and who make practical decisions based on their belief in
