The Rhinedaughters’ strategy with Siegfried – to inspire him with fear of the Ring curse so he’ll be prompted by a practical motive to grant them his Ring – is bound to backfire, just as their original strategy, in R.1, to discourage Alberich from stealing the gold and forging a ring from it, by telling him he’ll have to renounce his bid for the love they’d just finished rejecting, inevitably backfired, because they left Alberich with nothing to lose. Similarly, employing fear to prompt the fearless hero Siegfried to act on their request to restore the Ring to them is unwise, being likely to prick Siegfried’s pride. This suggests that something else is at stake here: Alberich’s renunciation of love, under those circumstances, was just as inevitable as Siegfried’s refusal to respond to the Rhinedaughters’ appeal to his egoism and self-preservation instinct to prompt him to give them the Ring. Both are instances of natural necessity, and the Rhinedaughters’ futile efforts are rhetorical. Evidently the Ring curse can only end, i.e., the Rhinedaughters can only dissolve it within the Rhine’s redemptive waters, after Siegfried’s death, by virtue of Siegfried’s death. When we consider that Alberich cursed the Ring to punish man’s religious pessimism, i.e., to punish religious man’s tendency to renounce this world in favor of an illusory but consoling world of the spirit, that punishment can only end when man no longer posits transcendent value, especially in its last refuge, secular art, and in particular the Wagnerian music-drama. All must go down to destruction, a twilight of the gods (man’s hubris in positing his transcendent value), before man can release himself from the insufferable burden of predicating life on a lie.
As the Rhinedaughters tell Siegfried to hold onto the Ring until he learns the great benefit they will confer on him by taking it and its curse away (when they could easily, so it seems, have had it for the taking), we hear #12, reminding us of the Rhinegold of which the Ring was composed, which once existed in joyous innocence, followed by a #19 variant (the Ring, representing the corruption of the gold, the stuff of nature, by human consciousness) and #37 (the “Loveless Motif”). At this point Siegfried puts the Ring back on his finger and asks them what they know. They then tell him of Alberich’s curse on the Ring, which he laid on it till the furthest time (“in fernster Zeit”), and that Siegfried will die if he keeps it, just as he felled the serpent (Fafner), this very day. Their original song of lament #59 is heard as they describe how only the Rhine’s flood can atone for the curse, i.e., that only through life’s return to animal preconsciousness can the curse of human reflective consciousness end. #54, the “Twilight of the Gods Motif,” is heard as they describe how the Rhine alone can resolve the curse. As Erda herself originally proclaimed, ending the curse does not spare the gods the shameful end she taught Wotan to fear; rather, the twilight of the gods (including their proxies, Siegfried and Bruennhilde) is a precondition for the return of the Ring to the Rhine and the end of Alberich’s curse.
[T.3.1: D]
Siegfried now proclaims his immunity both to their initial flattery, and their current threats, as we hear #54 again:
Siegfried: (#174c >>:; #?: [perhaps a reference to the musical phrase to which Siegfried made fun of Fafner’s teeth from S.2.2: “That’s an elegant gizzard you’re showing me there: grinning teeth in a gourmet’s mouth”?]) you crafty women, (#54:) have done (:#? [perhaps a reference to Siegfried
