instances in the online version of my Ring study that my allegorical interpretation embraced Wagner’s rebellion (as dramatized in Wotan’s, Brünnhilde’s, Siegfried’s, Siegmund’s, and Sieglinde’s resistance to the moral implications of Feuerbachian materialism) against his own Feuerbachian premises, and that Wagner wrote this rebellion into his Ring libretto well before he’d read Schopenhauer and publicly turned away from Feuerbach. The problem for interpretation is that Wagner’s original materialist Feuerbachian premises continued to haunt him and persuade him to write his perhaps subliminal doubts into the librettos and music not only of his Ring, conceived originally during his so-called Feuerbachian period, but also of his subsequent music-dramas Tristan, Mastersingers, and Parsifal, created long after Wagner had ostensibly repudiated Feuerbach’s optimism in favor of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Obviously, this problem is more complex than is suggested by a superficial division of Wagner’s creative life into Feuerbachian and post-Feuerbachian (Schopenhauerian) periods.
In some of Feuerbach’s writings which influenced Wagner, the secular artist and the objective scientist are described as collaborating in building a new materialist world of freedom from illusion, a paradise on earth, from the ashes of dying religious faith (the death of God), when religious faith can no longer be sustained conceptually as the foundation of a set of beliefs in the face of scientific, secular thought. However, in his Ring, as I pointed out in numerous passages, Wagner drew on another concept which was only implicit in a few passages from Feuerbach’s writings which, when pursued to their ultimate conclusions, contradict Feuerbach’s primary thesis of a collaboration between secular art and objective science. What’s implicit in these few observations by Feuerbach is that the authentically inspired composer of music is conceived as falling heir to man’s age-old religious longing for transcendent value (a longing predicated like religious belief on self-delusion) in the face of dying religious faith, and is therefore, like religious man (Wotan), at least theoretically at war with the scientific world-view, represented in the Ring by Alberich and his son Hagen. In Wagner’s allegory Siegfried instinctively inherits Wotan’s antagonism towards Alberich’s and his brother Mime’s loveless worldview, and becomes an unwitting and involuntary agent in Wotan’s quest to redeem the gods from Alberich’s Ring Curse. Siegfried is predestined to play this role since his muse of unconscious artistic inspiration Brünnhilde, to whom Wotan leaves Siegfried heir, is the repository of Wotan’s confession to her of his need for such a fearless and free redeemer from Alberich’s Ring Curse, a confession which influences Siegfried subliminally, i.e. musically, via his muse Brünnhilde, who also speaks to Siegfried through the Woodbird (Wagner’s symbol for his musical motifs and their “Wonder”).
Wagner’s specific inspiration for his contrarian twist on Feuerbach’s original historical thesis is a few passages in Feuerbach’s writings, in one of which he states that when God could no longer sustain himself in the face of the rise of scientific secular thought, he took safe refuge in feeling, which in another passage Feuerbach identifies with music. Wagner’s paraphrase on Feuerbach’s remarks was his statement that when God had to leave us he left us, in memory of him, music. It’s noteworthy that the god Wotan takes refuge in his daughter Brünnhilde, his “Will,” by confessing to her both his forced acknowledgment that the gods (the object of religious faith) are predestined by Alberich’s Ring Curse to destruction, and his seemingly futile longing for a free hero who could redeem the gods from their fate. Having changed his mind from the suicidal and nihilistic despair which prompted Wotan initially to leave Alberich’s son Hagen heir to the world so he can destroy Wotan’s idealistic legacy, by deciding instead, with renewed hope of redemption, to make Siegfried his heir, Wotan also necessarily made Siegfried heir to his daughter Brünnhilde (his
