But Bruennhilde adds something of unusual interest. She says – {{ accompanied by what sounds very like a reference to music which in V.2.4 was associated with Siegmund’s refusal to accept the fate Bruennhilde had announced to him, and Bruennhilde’s subsequent decision to help Siegmund escape his fate, perhaps #88 and/or #90 – that the much-loved race has sunk far indeed that father’s such faint hearts as Gunther. If this musical reference can be verified, this would surely be one of the most striking examples of Wagner’s genius for employing music to suggest subliminally, in a flash of aesthetic intuition, something which could not be expressed succinctly in words, namely, that Gunther cannot hope to compare himself with true heroes like Siegmund, who was willing to sacrifice paradise for the sake of his earthly love for Sieglinde. }}
Overwhelmed with (Wotan’s) self-loathing and self-doubt, Gunther gives vent to his feeling of irredeemable impotence, just as Wotan did in the final moments of his confession to Bruennhilde in V.2.2 when he told her that he found, with loathing, always only himself in all that he undertook. Like Wotan, who admitted to Bruennhilde that in deceiving himself he had deceived the heroes he conscripted to defend Valhalla from Alberich’s threat, Gunther describes himself as both betrayer, and betrayed. As he says this he is accompanied by #164, the culminating form of the development of #81A (originally stemming from Wotan’s troubled, self-deceitful treaties recorded on his Spear, #21), the motif which was the primary motival mantra of Wotan’s confession of his own impotence, his admission that he could never produce a hero who would be freed from Wotan’s own most craven motive, his existential fear.
Having given up any hope for transcendent meaning in this life, his ideal hopes and dreams dashed without hope of recovery (just like Wotan when he cried out for the end of it all in his confession), Gunther now turns for redemption from his misery to, of all people, Hagen. Accompanied by #45 (the “Power of the Ring,” which expressed Alberich’s wielding of the Ring’s power to enslave his compatriots), Gunther asks Hagen to help his honor. Predicating life’s value on self-deceit had, of course, been man’s greatest dishonor, his dishonor toward the truth, toward Mother Nature, Erda. And #37 underlies Gunther’s request that Hagen also help Gunther’s mother, who bore Hagen too. The mother to which Gunther alludes is of course his blood-mother Grimhilde, but his reference is more universal. He is also speaking of the Mother of All, Erda, from whom man can acquire that knowledge which gives man power over nature and himself, if he consents to know her only objectively, that is, lovelessly.
Hagen says nothing can take away the stain of Gunther’s dishonor, the dishonor of basing life’s value on self-deception, but Siegfried’s death, i.e., by demolishing man’s entire heritage of religious faith and feeling, as expressed latterly in the morality of altruistic self-sacrifice, and inspired secular art. Only if man disavows this false source of value can he embrace the source of true, earthly, amoral power, Nature. But Gunther, having invested so much sentiment in his regard for the artist-hero Siegfried, is filled with horror at the thought of murdering him, especially in view of the fact that they swore an oath of blood-brotherhood. Hagen insists that only Siegfried’s death can purge Gunther’s shame, and that Siegfried must in any case atone with his life for breaking his bond with Gunther. I have already examined in considerable detail the subtleties of Siegfried’s bond with Gunther, that in a sense Siegfried had to break the bond in order to honor it, just as Wotan had to depend on proxies to break the laws engraved on his spear, in order to figuratively grant the gods a new lease on life. In any case, Gunther instinctively seems to grasp that Siegfried
