of gods (:#87)! (#96) By the (#87:) bravest of (#96:) deeds (:#87; :#96), (#96) which (#87?:) you dearly desired (:#87?), (#96/#87>>:) you doomed him (:#96) (#96?) (#87?:) who wrought it to suffer (:#87?) (#96:) the curse to which you in turn succumbed (:#96): - it was I whom the purest man (#87) had to betray, (#87:) that a woman might grow wise (:#87).
Bruennhilde calls for the Gibichungs to assemble logs to make Siegfried’s funeral pyre on the bank of the Rhine, accompanied now by #115, the “Power of the Gods Motif,” which has taken on a powerfully ironic character in Twilight of the Gods because it becomes here a musical symbol for the gods’ inevitable destruction. She calls for the Gibichungs to light the funeral pyre so that its flames will consume the most exalted hero Siegfried, as we hear #54 (Twilight of the Gods). It is clear from this that Valhalla’s fate and Siegfried’s fate are one, though Wotan had desperately wished that his hero Siegfried and heroine Bruennhilde would be independent and autonomous from the gods. Bruennhilde says she herself yearns to share the hero’s fate, his holiest honor, evoking the Indian practice of suttee, in which the widow burns to death alongside her dead husband on his funeral pyre.
As Bruennhilde turns back to look upon Siegfried’s body and contemplate his face, we hear #140 in a developed form, and she describes him as the purest of men who betrayed her. We hear #40 (Tragic love) and #74b (expressing the tenderness of the physical affection in love), as Bruennhilde makes her complaint to the dead Siegfried that he betrayed his faithful wife (his muse of inspiration) while remaining loyal to his friend, i.e., loyal to his audience (Gunther), by sundering her from himself with Nothung. In other words, he employed his phallus in an inverse sense, under the loveless compulsion of the Ring curse, which forced the unconscious, Wotan’s wish-womb, to expose its mysteries to the light of day. Siegfried unwittingly revealed what it was the purpose of his art to conceal, both from himself and his audience. To further variants of #40, Bruennhilde recounts how she has been troubled by the conundrum that though nobody ever swore oaths more nobly, kept contracts more truly, or loved more loyally, Siegfried nonetheless broke his oaths and contracts, and betrayed his truest love, like none ever did before him. The reason for this is that Siegfried was the unwitting heir to Wotan, Wagner’s metaphor for Feuerbach’s collective, historical man, whose original social contract was predicated on self-deception, and self-deception split the human mind into the unconscious (the source of consoling falsehoods, and repository for repressed knowledge of unbearable truths) and the conscious (with the potential to ascertain objective “truth”). This inability to acknowledge the truth made Siegfried, even in his seeming purity, inherently self-contradictory, divided against himself, and the natural necessity of evolution made it inevitable that the contradiction underlying Siegfried’s apparent freedom of action and spontaneous love would rise to consciousness and storm, with shattering effect, the New Valhalla he had made with his muse Bruennhilde.
Bruennhilde now turns her eyes upward towards Wotan and asks him, accompanied by #87 and #88 (the motifs associated in V.2.4 with her announcement to Siegmund of the fate Wotan had willed for him, which was utterly contrary to Wotan’s innermost desire, and thus contrary to Bruennhilde, Wotan’s heart, represented here by #96, and contrary even to actual fate, Erda’s knowledge, over which Wotan has no control), why Siegfried betrayed those who trusted him so completely. #87 and #88 remind us also that Bruennhilde had come to Siegmund to announce his death, rather than
