had inspired him to perform. The fact that Siegfried, under the influence of Hagen’s Potion (the influence of Wagner’s own “Wonder,” represented by #35>#42>#43>#154), eventually refused to seek redemptive union with Bruennhilde, but ruthlessly abducted his own muse to give her away to his audience, Gunther, so that Siegfried could marry the false muse, Gutrune, represents instead the inevitability that in Wagner’s own most consummate music-drama, he would betray to the light of day what his muse, man’s collective unconscious, had long kept silent, man’s true identity, history, and fate.
Bruennhilde’s judgment against all the Gibichungs for betraying her, their collective unconscious, is her indictment of mankind for succumbing to the natural necessity that all things that are unconscious will attain consciousness in man. She judges, and yet the crime was inevitable, its inevitability well known to Erda, Bruennhilde’s mother. But Bruennhilde, as a true daughter of Erda, is now reconciled to this supposed crime, and acknowledges the role Bruennhilde herself played, however unwittingly, in perpetrating it. We have Valentina Serova’s following testimony that Wagner more or less conceded this point with respect to his beloved Bruennhilde. He records that Wagner said the following on 7/8/69:
“ ‘… evil always prevails over good. Alberich’s powers are invincible: he is the spirit of evil who pursues his dark ends with a grim, unflinching determination. And he passes on this resolve to his son Hagen. One woman alone, Bruennhilde, is able to redeem the evil through her heroic action and to reconcile us at last to the crimes and intrigues of humanity. Those elements which lend dignity to our faults are concentrated in the arms of this loving woman.’ “ [752W-{7/8/69} Valentina Serova’s reminiscence of a visit to Tribschen on 7/8/69: WR, p. 203]
Gutrune now holds herself in contempt for having let Hagen persuade herself and her brother Gunther to engineer Siegfried’s betrayal of his true love Bruennhilde, a betrayal in which all men are complicit. That we hear #154 (“Hagen’s Potion Motif”) as she blames Hagen for this tragedy reminds us again that it was in the very nature of the Wagnerian Wonder, the miracle of Wagner’s art, to reveal the secret of Wagner’s profoundest aim through the musical motifs, in which the entirety of the drama and all its force is condensed and made available for contemplation through aesthetic intuition, or feeling. Though he betrayed his muse of unconscious artistic inspiration, Bruennhilde, under Hagen’s influence, it was nonetheless Siegfried himself who revealed the meaning hidden within the Woodbird’s Songs, i.e., the meaning (of man’s existential fear) hidden within Wagner’s musical motifs, within the context of his own authentically inspired artwork, Siegfried’s narrative of how he came to understand the meaning of Birdsong, Wagner’s Ring in miniature, the story relating how Wagner came to be Wagner.
[T.3.3: E]
Hagen, somber, sullen, neutralized and temporarily impotent (he will raise himself to action one last time before the end), leans defiantly on his spear as we hear the portentous motif #87, Fate, again. Bruennhilde is left alone in center stage, where she will now pass her judgment on Wotan’s and the gods’ crime, her indictment of Wotan’s exploitation of the unwitting hero Siegfried by making him the instrument of Wotan’s futile quest for transcendent value, which predestined Siegfried (the allegedly “free” artist-hero) to succumb to the same curse which destroyed Wotan and the gods (religious faith):
