with #153 seems akin to the musical mood associated with Venus’s attempt to persuade Tannhaeuser to remain in Venusberg with her, rather than to go out into the world to sing her praises in his art, in the paris 1860 version of Tannhaeuser, like the sensuous cello music at the end of the 1860 overture?]) as wanton alone you bound him (:#156; :#153). (#134:) His rightful wife am I, to whom he swore eternal vows (:#134) (#164 vari [cuts off #134 midstream!!!]) ere Siegfried ever saw you. (#19 vari? [agitated]; #5 or #170a?)
Gutrune: (breaking out in sudden despair: #154 >>:) Accursed Hagen! (#153?; #154:) That you counseled the poison that robbed her of her husband (:#153?; :#154)! Ah, sorrow! How swiftly I see it now: (#156b:) Bruennhilde was his one true love, whom the philtre made him forget (:#156b).
(Filled with shame, she turns away from Siegfried and, dying, bends over Gunther’s body, where she remains motionless until the end. #87/#3 vari: = (#@: c or d?); [#66’s tail or #81’s grace-note twist as heard when Wotan chastised Siegfried for disrespect, and said that if Siegfried knew Wotan he wouldn’t treat him this way?] Leaning defiantly on his spear, Hagen stands deep in sombre thought at the other side of the stage. #87? [including drums: “Crisis”?]; #87?)
Having conferred with the Rhinedaughters and having reflected upon her lifetime of experience (the entire scope of collective, historical man’s, Wotan’s, experience), Bruennhilde now grasps how inextricably her fate, Siegfried’s fate, and the gods’ fate were linked. She is willing the necessity of Siegfried’s death, her death, their betrayal of each other, their implication in Alberich’s curse and the gods’ fateful destiny, and the twilight of the gods. Therefore we hear #54 (Twilight of the Gods) and #2 (the second variant of the Original Nature Motif, which can stand in for its variant, #53) as Bruennhilde steps forward and calls upon the Gibichungs to silence their grief. Bruennhilde says that she herself has been betrayed by all of them, and she comes for vengeance. But her vengeance, her punishment even of herself, will be the destruction of the entire world of illusion of which Bruennhilde and her lover Siegfried, the Gibichung society, and Valhalla’s gods were a part. Thus we hear #87, Fate, apprising us of the evolutionary inevitability that the truth would rise to consciousness, that Bruennhilde would wake forever and become, as a knowing woman, indistinguishable from her mother Erda, whose daughters the Norns wove the web of Fate.
Accompanied now by #87 (Fate) and #88 (Bruennhilde’s annunciation of doom to Siegmund, a fate both he and Bruennhilde defied, but which is the hallmark of all heroes unwittingly martyred in the service of Wotan’s futile quest for redemption from the truth), Bruennhilde castigates all present for not making an outcry of lament worthy of the greatest of heroes, Siegfried. But Gutrune, with what we now know are merely petty concerns predicated on Gutrune’s ignorance of the true situation, confronts Bruennhilde, saying that grieved by her grudge (“Neid”) Bruennhilde brought
