for their mother since they’d spilt some fresh milk: but no sound I heard of a lament befitting the greatest of heroes.” And in her final testimonial to Siegfried moments later, as she’s preparing to ride her horse Grane into the flames of Siegfried’s funeral pyre to rejoin him in death, she proclaims: “Heavy logs heap up for me here in a pile at the edge of the Rhine: high and bright let the flames flare up and consume the noble limbs of the most exalted hero! (…) … for my own body yearns to share in the hero’s holiest honour … !” Wagner had well over 20 years to meditate on precisely what he wished Brünnhilde to say in her last moments in which she rises to a height of tragic grandeur and wisdom which Kitcher and Schacht are glad to celebrate in their book as eclipsing not only Siegfried’s gravitas but that of Wotan as well, but for some bizarre reason failed to register Kitcher’s and Schacht’s demotion of Siegfried into a caricature of a hero, who, according to them, we're supposed to deplore, in her final encomium on Siegfried’s greatness.
Kitcher and Schacht can only propose their thesis by not only ignoring Brünnhilde’s own highest estimation of Siegfried, her final words on the subject, but also by ignoring something of profound import to Wagner that he outlined in his article ‘Epilogue to The Nibelung’s Ring’ in 1871 [811W - {12/71} 'Epilogue to The Nibelung's Ring,' PW Vol. III, p. 268-269]. Here, he stated that the plots of Twilight of the Gods (originally Siegfried’s Death, the first part of the Ring tetralogy Wagner authored) and Tristan and Isolde are virtually identical, for "... 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." But Wagner goes further: "What in the one work [Twilight of the Gods] could only come to rapid utterance at the climax, in the other [Tristan and Isolde] becomes an entire Content, of infinite variety; and this it was, that attracted me to treat the stuff at just that time [i.e., after having completed the musical composition of the Ring up through Siegfried Act Two, Wagner broke off composing the music for the Ring to both author and compose Tristan and Isolde], namely, as a supplementary Act of the great Nibelungen-myth, a mythos compassing the whole relations of a world."
So Wagner regarded Siegfried and Tristan as conceptually, dramatically, mythologically variations of the same character. Since Wagner authored and composed Tristan long after he’d allegedly demoted Siegfried from his prior position of significance (thanks presumably to Wagner’s increasing identification with Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy and renunciation of Feuerbach’s optimistic materialist philosophy, of which Siegfried is supposedly the exemplar, after first reading Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation in 1854) to a mere fossil from a prior, now outdated conception of the Ring which Kitcher and Schacht say Wagner had outgrown, giving Wotan and Brünnhilde pride of place, it’s curious that Wagner would choose to resurrect Siegfried and his tragic destiny in a variation of his persona, Tristan, in a music-drama written entirely under Wagner’s presumably new philosophic dispensation, the one under whose influence he also completed composition of the Ring’s music.
But, thanks to my allegorical reading of Wagner’s music-dramas, we can carry this argument further, because I’ve demonstrated that Wagner doesn’t only resurrect Siegfried in Tristan, but also in the artist-hero Walther von Stolzing from The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and in the pure fool Parsifal in Wagner’s final music-drama Parsifal. I placed considerable emphasis in my Ring interpretation on the fact that thanks to having been the beneficiary of Wotan’s confession, Siegfried’s muse Brünnhilde knows for Siegfried what he doesn’t know, his true identity and pre-
