it’s only by virtue of Brünnhilde knowing for Siegfried what he doesn’t know, Wotan’s confession of all that he feared and loathed in time and space, that Siegfried is able to live solely in the present. This is the finest gift given by Brünnhilde, Wotan’s Will, to Siegfried. What else does Wotan mean when he tells Brünnhilde’s mother Erda that (thanks to the love Siegfried and Brünnhilde share, which Wotan hopes will redeem the world from Alberich’s Ring Curse of consciousness) “… your knowledge wanes before my will” [i.e. before Brünnhilde]?
Who’d have noticed these musico-dramatic resonances who hadn’t been drawn to look deeply into them? And yet these passages, words and music, are clearly part of what Wagner’s audience experiences in the theater, if only subliminally, feelingly, unless one's driven, as I was, and Siegfried was, to attempt to make what was felt become thought? And note, Wagner also employs his so-called World Inheritance Motif (Wotan’s Second Bequest Motif) H143 = #134 again to express this redemptive artistic “Wonder,” secular man’s substitute for dying religious faith, which was predicated on fear (Fafner), not love (Brünnhilde). Siegfried is fearless precisely because Brünnhilde knows for him what he doesn’t know, Wotan’s fearful confession, and forgets the fear Brünnhilde (not Fafner) taught him, through her love (her inspiration of his wondrous art).
But Scruton’s critique that my allegorical reading is too far removed from an audience’s aesthetic experience of the Ring in the theater raises an interesting question: assuming my allegorical reading is more or less accurate, does Wagner’s audience register during a Ring performance only Wagner’s sublimation of the deeper meanings I’ve attributed to the Ring, i.e. Wagner’s felt, subjective, musical response to them, or do they (or can they) rise to consciousness in the audience as the conceptual core of the drama? Wagner addressed this question early in his career by asking to what extent the original source of musical inspiration in life’s experiences, which perhaps the composer has forgotten, actually become part of an inspired musical composition, since Wagner suggests these outward life experiences are already transmuted into “musical sensation” before the composer is inspired to set to work:
"... grand, passionate, and lasting emotions, dominating all our feelings and ideas for months and often half a year, these drive the musician to those vaster, more intense conceptions to which we owe, among others, the origin of a Sinfonia Eroica. These greater moods, as deep suffering of soul or potent exaltation, may date from outer causes, for we all are men and our fate is ruled by outward circumstances; but when they force the musician to production, these greater moods have already turned to music in him, so that at the moment of creative inspiration it is no longer the outer event that governs the composer, but the musical sensation which it has begotten in him." [355W - {10/41} A Happy Evening, PW Vol. VII, p. 79-80]
But Wagner also said:
"I would gladly have called my dramas deeds of Music brought to sight (ersichtlich gewordene Thaten der Musik)." [838W-{10/72} 'On the Name "Music Drama",' PW Vol. V, p. 303]
And Wagner stated in several of his essays that the dramas in his operas and music-dramas are his answer to the question that abstract music always poses, why?; in other words, the human mind automatically seeks to know what’s behind its profoundest emotions, especially those generated in us by moving music. So Wagner conceived of his music-dramas as making what is musical, felt,
