the most tragic work of all, but before that one sees the great happiness arising from the union of two complete beings.” [807W-{9/6/71} CD Vol. I, p. 410]
[808W-{9/6/71} CD Vol. I, p. 410]
[P. 410] {FEUER} “Siegfried does not know what he is guilty of; as a man, committed entirely to deeds, he knows nothing, he must fall in order that Bruennhilde may rise to the heights of perception.” [808W-{9/6/71} CD Vol. I, p. 410]
[809W-{11/29/71} CD Vol. I, p. 435-436]
[P. 435] {FEUER} “On his return R. says to me, ‘Prometheus’s words ‘I took [P. 436] knowledge away from Man’ came to my mind and gave me a profound insight; knowledge, seeing ahead is in fact a divine attribute, and Man with this divine attribute is a piteous object, he is like Brahma before the Maya spread before him the veil of ignorance, of deception; the divine privilege is the saddest thing of all.” [809W-{11/29/71} CD Vol. I, p. 435-436]
[810W-{12/71} Epilogue to The Nibelung’s Ring (PW Vol. III, p. 266]
[P. 266] {FEUER} “After five years’ arrest of my musical productiveness, it was with great alacrity that I set to work on the [musical] composition of my poem, in the winter of 1853 to 1854. With the ‘Rheingold’ I was starting on the new path, where I had first to find the plastic nature-motives which, in ever more individual evolution, were to shape themselves into exponents of the various forms of Passion in the many-membered Action and its characters.” [810W-{12/71} Epilogue to The Nibelung’s Ring (PW Vol. III, p. 266]
[811W-{12/71} Epilogue to The Nibelung’s Ring (PW Vol. III, p. 268-269]
[P. 268] {FEUER} “With the sketch of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ I felt that I was really not quitting the mythic circle opened-out to me by my Nibelungen labours (dem Kreise der durch meine Nibelungenarbeit mir erwecken dichterischen und mythischen Anschauungen). For the grand concordance of all sterling Myths, as thrust upon me by my studies, had sharpened my eyesight for the wondrous variations standing out amid this harmony. Such a one confronted me with fascinating clearness in the relation of Tristan to Isolde, as compared with that of Siegfried to Bruennhilde. Just as in languages the transmutation of a single sound forms two apparently quite diverse words from one and the same original, so here, by a similar transmutation or shifting of the Time-motive, two seemingly unlike relations had sprung from the one original mythic factor. Their intrinsic parity consists in this: both Tristan and Siegfried, in bondage to an illusion which makes this deed of theirs unfree, woo for another their own eternally-predestined bride, and in the false relation hence arising find their doom. Whereas the poet of ‘Siegfried,’ however, before all else abiding by the grand coherence of the whole Nibelungen-myth, could only take in eye the hero’s downfall through the vengeance of the wife who at like time offers up herself and him: the poet of ‘Tristan’ finds his staple matter in setting forth the love-pangs to which the pair of lovers, awakened to their true relation, have fallen victims till their death. Merely the thing is here more fully, clearly treated, which even there was spoken out beyond mistake: death through stress [P. 269] of love (Liebesnoth) – an idea which finds expression in Bruennhilde, for her part conscious
