We realize now that Alberich’s curse on his Ring could only be lifted once Alberich had exacted his revenge on religious man, the usurper, to punish him for co-opting Alberich’s Ring power in order to create and preserve consoling illusions which denied Mother Nature, a revenge which embraces Wotan and his proxies, the Waelsung heroes, and his daughter Bruenhilde, all of whom must go under in order that the Ring may be returned to the Rhine, and dissolved in its waters. Wotan’s messengers the Ravens, whom Bruennhilde invokes here, seem to have their own motif based upon #161, the “Hagen’s Watch Motif.” It is one of the most piquant ironies of the Ring that Wotan needed Hagen to deliver Siegfried’s death-blow, so that man’s religious impulse could finally die out in its last exemplar and refuge, the music-dramatist Siegfried, just as the Trinity of God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit needed Judas to martyr Christ so that, through his resurrection, mankind could find redemption in the Holy Spirit. However, there is no such redemption to be found here. The tidings Wotan has waited for his ravens to bring home are Siegfried’s death, which alone releases the world from Alberich’s curse on those whose happiness depends on self-deception. We therefore hear #51, the Curse Motif, as Bruennhilde sends Wotan’s ravens home to him with these tidings. Wotan’s only salvation was to cease longing for salvation.
In a final invocation of Wotan Bruennhilde now grants him rest from his World-Wandering, i.e., from his futile quest to redeem Valhalla’s gods from Alberich’s curse, in a musico-dramatic passage of the greatest brevity, a passage to which Deryck Cooke devoted considerable attention, compressing as it does the entirety of the Ring drama into a very few motifs with great subtlety. I reproduce the passage verbatim here: “Bruennhilde: (#59 chords) Rest now, (#20c; #83) rest now, (#20d) you god!” The motifs in play here are #59, representing the Rhinedaughters’ original lament for the lost gold from the finale of R.4 (their lament for the lost paradise of animal preconsciousness), #20cd, representing Valhalla and Wotan’s futile hopes for its redemption from Alberich’s threat, and #83, the Motif known as the “Need of the Gods,” a compound motif comprised of #53 and #54 (#53 representing Erda’s proclamation of her knowledge of all that was, is, and will be, which includes the essence of the real world, that all things that are, end, and #54 representing the twilight of the gods, the prime instance of Erda’s law that all things - even what we regard as immutable and eternal - are ephemeral), and #81, the motif representing Wotan’s recognition that his entire quest for redemption from egoism is inspired by his own egoism, and is therefore futile. Wotan, in other words, can no more escape his fate, the natural necessity of all he will do in life, than he can escape his true identity and essence, which are one with his fate. Wotan’s wandering the earth (Erda) in search of both objective knowledge of the world, and of a subjective means (aesthetic intuition) to consign this knowledge to oblivion, is now at an end, with the victory of consciousness over unconsciousness, knowledge over ignorance and innocence, power over love. #83 as a whole represented, of course, the gods’ need for a free hero who could breach religious faith yet preserve religious feeling in art, a need which has been thwarted through Siegfried’s involuntary self-betrayal.
Way back in V.2.2, just before Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde of all that Erda had taught him about world history and its inevitability, and specifically about the gods’ predestined end at the hands of Alberich’s son, we heard the same chord changes which now accompany Bruennhilde as she tells her father to rest from his wandering, namely, #15 and #59a {The Rhinedaughters’ cry of “Rhinegold! Rhinegold!”). We heard these chord changes just after Bruennhilde called herself Wotan’s will, and just before he responded that, in speaking to her, he was therefore merely
