only after he realized that Siegfried’s and Bruennhilde’s love, betrayed, would fail to redeem the world from Alberich’s curse. #134 represented for Wagner unconsciously inspired art, and particularly his music-dramas, as the new religion which would replace the old, and it has failed, just as religion did. It was for this reason that Bruennhilde acknowledged to Wotan moments ago that Siegfried succumbed to the same curse which destroyed Wotan. Therefore #134’s presence here in a variant, and mostly inaudible, form suggests that the orchestra - at the moment of Wotan’s proclamation that Bruennhilde, waking, would redeem the world - was offering us, Wagner’s audience, a subliminal premonition of Bruennhilde’s final martyrdom and restoration of the Ring to the Rhinedaughters, which was not consciously willed or foreseen by Wotan. The deed that Bruennhilde did upon waking, which Wotan proclaimed would redeem the world, was her inspiration of Siegfried’s heroic deeds of art, his adventures. The #134 variant heard here is in any case hard to make out in the orchestra, the last definitive recurrence of #134 being heard when Bruennhilde castigated Gutrune as being merely Siegfried’s wanton, while Bruennhilde proclaimed herself Siegfried’s sole lawful wife (i.e., sole authentic muse of unconscious artistic inspiration).
We must also consider the fact that no motifs associated with the Rhine or Rhinedaughters were heard as Wotan proclaimed to Erda - accompanied by #134 - that Bruennhilde, waking, would work the deed that would redeem the world, nor did Wotan verbally allude to any hope that Bruennhilde would restore the Ring to the Rhinedaughters at that time. And at no time in the entire Ring has Erda, Wotan’s wife and Bruennhilde’s mother, ever even so much as hinted that Wotan should restore the Ring to the Rhine to end Alberich’s curse on it. Wotan, after all, thought Siegfried was immune from suffering Alberich’s Ring curse because Siegfried seemed to be freed (by Bruennhilde) from envy and from fear. No, the motif most emphatically sounding in the finale of the Ring is #93, often called the motif of “Redemption by Love” (even by Porges, whom we must assume got this information from Wagner himself during the 1876 Ring rehearsals at Bayreuth), but which is in actuality more a nostalgic echo of the hopes once placed in Siegfried which have been dashed by experience.
We have contradictory evidence in the Wagner documents which allude to this ending. On the one hand, Wagner himself called #93 merely his “hymn to heroes,” or “the glorification of Bruennhilde”:
“ ‘I am glad that I kept back Sieglinde’s theme of praise for Bruennhilde, to become as it were a hymn to heroes.’ “[832W-{7/23/72} CD Vol. I, p. 515]
Heinrich Porges, Wagner’s secretary who recorded all of Wagner’s thoughts about the Ring during the rehearsals for its premiere at the newly completed Bayreuth Festpielhaus in 1876, on the other hand, clearly described #93 as representing the banishment of death’s terror (fear), and as a song of redemption which overcomes fate’s power, something Porges says was well known, and presumably an interpretation advocated publicly by Wagner himself:
“Into her ecstatic outcry: ‘O hehrstes Wunder!’ Sieglinde must put all the intensity of which she is capable, she must release a great flood of emotion, enraptured and enrapturing.” [(*) Porges’ Footnote: “It is well known that this supremely lovely melody, banishing the terror of death, is employed at the close of Goetterdaemmerung as the song of redemption that overcomes the power of fate.”]” [872W-{6-8/76} WRR, p. 69]
