in chronological order from the beginning to the end of the Ring, but that as Wagner’s musical composition progressed towards the climax of Götterdämmerung he accumulated an ever larger repertoire of musical motifs with which to enhance the drama’s meaning through a virtually infinite capacity for subliminal cross-referencing, in view of their preposterous assumption that “… the psychological and philosophical drama was becoming ever more diluted”:
”With the resources of the motifs already introduced, and with an increasing facility in combining, condensing and varying an amazing array of thematic material, his musical language was developing in density and complexity even as the psychological and philosophical drama was becoming ever more diluted. One might have expected the theorist of Opera and Drama to have adjusted the music to the simple requirements of the action and to the replacement of the profoundly thoughtful Wotan with the terminally naive Siegfried. But he quite evidently did not. [P. 195]
“The musical language goes far beyond matching the protagonists’ thoughts and feelings, serving rather to express the background of emotion and idea against which their doings could take on new meaning - and then to transcend them, with an authority higher than any of them have and that only Brünnhilde even approaches.” [P. 196]
The whole point they’re missing is that since, in my allegorical reading, Siegfried is Wotan reborn minus consciousness of his true identity (because Brünnhilde knows for Siegfried what he doesn’t know), and Wagner not only suggested that Siegfried is Wotan reborn, but that one of his musical motifs’ most powerful properties is to recall to Wagner’s audience the prior lives of his protagonists of which the protagonists themselves remain unaware [See 640W - {5/16/56? ML, p. 528-529], and finally, since Cosima told us that Wagner regarded Brünnhilde as a symbol for his own music [See 933W - {8/2/78} CD Vol. II, p. 128], it goes without saying that “the musical language goes far beyond matching the protagonists’ [conscious] thoughts and feelings, serving rather to express the background of emotion and idea against which their doings could take on new meaning - with an authority higher than any of them have and that only Brünnhilde even approaches.”
When Wotan looked inward and confessed his intolerable vision of the irredeemable guilt in our corrupted human history, i.e., man’s Fallen nature, to Brünnhilde, Wotan (Wagner’s image of collective, historical man seeking transcendent value in a world which lacks it) dipped his bleak vision of our Fallen nature and our historical guilt, our irresolvable existential dilemma, in transfiguring music. This was Wagner’s dramatization of his transfiguration of his unbearable doubts about our bid for transcendent meaning through his music, sublimating those doubts into his musical motifs. As I said, Siegfried is the free, innocent, pre-Fallen self Wotan longed to become, shorn of all consciousness of our existential guilt and fear by virtue of Brünnhilde’s (Wagner’s musical motifs’) knowing for Siegfried what he doesn’t know, and keeping it a secret from him, for, as Wotan told Brünnhilde: “What in words I reveal to no one, let it stay unspoken for ever: with myself I commune when I speak with you.”
I’m happy to report that Dr. Kitcher did respond not only to my request that he attempt a reading of the version of my Ring book posted since 2011 at www.wagnerheim.com, but also to my request that he respond to a brief summary of my much longer critique of Finding an Ending (both the
