to fight for his life, because Wotan had acknowledged that the seemingly free Siegmund was merely a reflection of Wotan’s own self-deception, which is why Wotan had given up hope that Siegmund could redeem gods and world from Alberich’s curse.
To a variant of {{ #20(?) (Valhalla) }}, Bruennhilde calls upon Wotan, the eternal guardian of oaths, to gaze on her grief and behold his eternal guilt. Now #96 (the motif representing Bruennhilde’s musical softening of #81 – ultimately the spear motif #21 – and moral softening of Wotan’s intent to punish her for standing up for Siegmund) and #87 rise from the orchestra as she asks Wotan to hear her lament. These same two motifs are heard throughout her lament, which is the following: “(#96) By the (#87) bravest of deeds [Siegfried’s killing of Fafner and taking possession of Alberich’s Ring and Tarnhelm, so Alberich couldn’t regain their power], (#96) which you dearly desired, (#96/#87) you doomed him who wrought it to suffer (#96) the curse to which you in turn succumbed.” In other words, Wotan, like Mime, intended not only to manipulate and exploit Siegfried to do what Wotan could not do, but also intended to martyr Siegfried, and all this – in Wotan’s case - for the sake of a futile quest for redemption. Because Wotan’s quest for redemption from Alberich’s curse was futile, Siegfried was inevitably doomed to the same twilight, the same shameful end, the fulfillment of Alberich’s curse, to which the gods would ultimately succumb. And Bruennhilde unwittingly played her own role in this tragic fate, by staging a rebellion against Wotan’s law (#96) in favor of his Waelsung heroes (whom he had given up for lost) which, in the end, was an inevitable expression of his futile quest to escape his own fate, and purge himself of his own identity, to deny his own true nature. Bruennhilde’s rebellion, in other words, made her an unwitting pawn in Wotan’s master plan for redemption, which was predestined to failure. It was inevitable that Siegfried and Bruennhilde would betray their love, since it was predicated from the beginning on Wotan’s inability to confront the truth.
And now Bruennhilde delivers her final summation, accompanied by #87 (Fate): “It was I whom the purest man had to betray that a woman might grow wise.” Since Bruennhilde is Siegfried’s and Wotan’s unconscious mind, and the word “wise” is code in the Ring for self-conscious (i.e., too self-conscious to obtain unconscious inspiration), Bruennhilde is echoing what Siegfried meant when he said that Bruennhilde’s eyes are now open forever. Bruennhilde, man’s collective unconscious, has now woken and can never return to unconsciousness. Bruennhilde has become, in effect, indistinguishable from her mother Erda, Erda as known objectively when any human being wears the Ring of consciousness, and is thus the spokesperson for Nature’s bitter truth. The days of involuntary collective dreaming, which once involuntarily produced religious revelation and artistic inspiration, are now over. And this is what Wagner added to Feuerbach’s critique of religion, that the secular art, particularly music, in which Feuerbach admitted that God, man’s religious feeling, had found refuge, would itself someday succumb, of necessity, to the same spirit of scientific inquiry which had inevitably disillusioned man about religious faith. Man’s metaphysical impulse to seek to satisfy impossible demands, his futile quest to posit man’s transcendent value and a supernatural realm of being, in which man could find redemption from bitter reality, was destined to failure. This was the essence of Alberich’s curse on the Ring, that the quest to posit a consoling falsehood would, in the end, be more painful (engender more “Noth”) than acknowledging, and acting on the basis of, the truth.
And just as Wotan, upon finally realizing in his despair that Siegfried and Bruennhilde would betray their love and fail to redeem gods and world from Alberich’s curse, prompted Waltraute to
