[752W-{7/8/69} Valentina Serova’s reminiscence of a visit to Tribschen on 7/8/69: WR, p. 203]
[P. 203] {FEUER} “Someone made so bold as to ask why Wotan could rejoice in Siegfried’s protest, yet punish his daughter so cruelly for her disobedience. Wagner glanced fiercely at the questioner. ‘Because’, he replied, ‘Bruennhilde herself is no more than Wotan’s desire (his “Wunschkind”). When his desires begin to contradict his own will, in other words, when he has lost the power of free will, the violence of his anger is directed not against Bruennhilde but against himself. Bruennhilde may be the outward manifestation but its essence lies in Wotan’s inner discord.’ ‘In that case, why must Siegfried be killed?’ the questioner went on.
{FEUER} ‘Because 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]
[753W-{7/27/69} CD Vol. I, p. 130]
[P. 130] {FEUER} “Then he says that he sometimes has the feeling that art is downright dangerous – it is as if in this great enjoyment of observing he is perhaps failing to recognize the presence of some hidden sorrow.” [753W-{7/27/69} CD Vol. I, p. 130]
[754W-{8/15/69} CD Vol. I, p. 137]
[P. 137] {FEUER} “… R. plays me his third act [Siegfried], great emotion. ‘The kiss of love is the first intimation of death, the cessation of individuality, that is why a person is so terrified by it.” [754W-{8/15/69} CD Vol. I, p. 137]
[755W-{9-12/69} About Conducting: PW Vol. IV, p. 342]
[P. 342] {anti-FEUER} “It is one main characteristic of this Polish, never to dwell strongly upon anything, to plunge deep into nothing, or, as the saying goes, not to make much account. Item: the greatest, sublimest and most arcane, is dubbed a thing of course, quite ‘self-intelligible,’ at every man’s disposal at all hours, to learn or even to imitate its trick. So no time must be wasted on the prodigious, the daemonic, the divine, for simple reason that there’s nothing at all imitable to be found therein. (…) Then ‘harmlessness’ is praised as Art; … and so in wise agreement with our modern Philistine an altogether new idea of ‘Classicity’ is built, to buttress which, in wider spheres of art, the Greeks are called upon at last. – The Greeks with whom transparent gaiety was so very much at home. And this sickly shuffling-off the earnestness and awe of Being is raised into a whole system of latest World-philosophy (Weltanschauung), in whose completed midst our ‘cultured’ music-heroes take their undisputed easy-chairs of honour.” [755W-{9-12/69} About Conducting: PW Vol. IV, p. 342]
