history, and the hidden source of his heroic inspiration in Wotan’s longing for a free hero who could redeem the gods from Alberich’s Ring Curse. Hans Sachs’s confession to Eva in his cobbling song from Mastersingers Act Two, a confession she grasps but whose meaning is entirely lost on her lover, the artist-hero Walther, is modeled on Wotan’s confession of forbidden knowledge to Brünnhilde, to which Siegfried remains consciously oblivious while Brünnhilde holds this knowledge for Siegfried, so it can inspire him subliminally, through feeling (music) rather than thought. Similarly, Sachs’s confession to Walther’s muse Eva is the true but hidden, unconscious source of Walther’s inspiration which ultimately gives birth to his master-song, in which his art offers the Folk of Nuremberg a secular redemption clearly modeled on Christ’s original offer of supernatural redemption, in which the Folk feel as if Paradise has been regained.
This concept that the Wagnerian heroine-muse in Wagner’s mature music-dramas knows for the hero his true but hidden source of inspiration (his true identity) is no mere figment of my imagination. Elsa offers to Lohengrin the opportunity to share with her the secret of his true but hidden identity, knowledge he’s forbidden to share, to help protect him from the harm she believes would ensue if this forbidden knowledge was revealed to the world at large. I’ve written an extended essay (based on a shorter article entitled ‘How Elsa Showed Wagner the Way to Siegfried’ published by Stewart Spencer in the May, 1995 issue of the now defunct scholarly journal of The Wagner Society - London, UK, Wagner) in which I explained that Elsa’s offer to Lohengrin inspired Wagner’s conception of Brünnhilde as Siegfried’s unconscious mind, who doesn’t merely possess like Siegfried true but secret knowledge of who he is, but keeps this a secret even from Siegfried, so he doesn’t know who he is. Siegfried told Fafner, “I don’t yet know who I am,” but Brünnhilde told Siegfried, “what you don’t know I know for you.” Similarly, Isolde holds the secret of Tristan’s true but hidden identity in silence, to protect Tristan from the consequences of making it known. Tristan doesn’t fully grasp his true, tragic identity until Act Three, after he’s betrayed Isolde (and thus her secret) by giving her, his true love, away to another man, King Marke, just as Siegfried betrayed Brünnhilde by giving her to Gunther. In light of this recurring allegorical trope it’s no accident that Kundry knows for Parsifal what he doesn’t know, his true identity, which Parsifal can’t remember. Parsifal, like Siegfried, is a sort of pure fool who doesn’t know who he is. I’ll go further: his muse of inspiration Venus knows for the artist-hero Tannhäuser something he evidently forgets each time he’s drawn inspiration from her to author and compose a song, that she’s his true but hidden, i.e., unconscious, muse of artistic inspiration, a fact which, once known publicly (i.e., consciously), can destroy Tannhäuser’s life.
If Wagner did indeed reconstitute Siegfried in differing ways in Tristan, Walther, and Parsifal, and reconstitute Siegfried's relationship with Brünnhilde in their relations with their actual (or potential) lovers Isolde, Eva, and Kundry, respectively, and if, moreover, Siegfried’s relationship with his predestined lover Brünnhilde is modeled on that of Lohengrin with Elsa, and/or that of Tannhäuser with Venus, then what possible merit can we find in the tired argument that Wagner lost interest in and outgrew Siegfried? It seems, instead, that in several of Wagner’s canonical romantic operas which preceded his creation of his Ring, and in those three music-dramas which followed it, he was developing, with ever greater sophistication and subtlety, a highly distinctive allegorical, dramatic trope, which continued to inspire him until the end, and of which Siegfried and his fate was a singular exemplar.
