(:#174b vari – voc?; (:#@: e or f orch?) [#Motif of Remembrance; perhaps #139?])! (#128b?; #129?)
Siegfried: (#174a vari:) Since I’ve heard women (#129b:) singing, I’ve quite forgotten those songsters (:#174a vari; :#129b).
Hagen: Yet once, you knew what they said?
((#@: e or f?) = #Motif of Remembrance” orch [which is either #174b vari, or #139, the latter heard just after #134 as Siegfried was making a toast to his love for, and remembrance of, Bruennhilde, just before drinking Hagen’s love-and-forgetfulness potion in T.1.2?])
Siegfried: (turning animatedly to Gunther) Hey! Gunther, woebegone man! (#152 vari) (#41 vari:) If you’ll thank me for it, I’ll sing you tales about my boyhood days [“jungen Tagen” (:#41 vari). (#41 vari)
Gunther: (#41 vari:) I’d like to hear them (:#41 vari).
Since Wagner often compared Siegfried the redeemer with Christ the savior, as per our extract below, Siegfried’s remark to the assembled Gibichung hunting party that he is thirsty brings to mind Christ’s identical remark on the cross during his martyrdom at Calvary, that he is thirsty:
“In the German Folk survives the oldest lawful race of Kings in all the world: it issues from a son of God, called by his nearest kinsmen Siegfried, but Christ by the remaining nations of the earth … .” [372W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 289]
As Bruennhilde said, Siegfried is to be martyred to pay man’s debt for all the sins of the world. But in this case, the case of the secular artist-hero who has inherited Christ’s role in offering man redemption in an age dominated by science, in which religious faith is dying, Siegfried will not be atoning for the original sin of disobeying God’s ordinance not to break the taboo on partaking of divine knowledge of good and evil. Instead, his death will atone two antithetical sins: (1) Wotan’s (religious man’s) original sin of pessimistic world-renunciation (i.e., Wotan’s sin against all that was, is, and will be, which inspired artist-heroes like Siegfried have, perhaps unwittingly, perpetuated), and (2) Siegfried’s own personal sin, his betrayal of the religious mysteries, Wotan’s hoard of runes, the unspoken secret kept by Siegfried’s muse of inspiration and unconscious mind Bruennhilde, to the light of day, a sin in which Siegfried is fully, if nonetheless innocently, complicit. However, the only way to atone for the first, the greatest sin, Wotan’s sin, is to
