themselves in the face of it. As I pointed out previously, this plot scenario has its origin in Tannhäuser, an artist-hero who’s unconsciously inspired by his muse Venus but involuntarily (Wagner says he does it as if under a spell) exposes this dangerous secret to his audience in the contest song he sings at the Wartburg to win Elizabeth’s hand, thereby also betraying his conscious muse of inspiration Elizabeth. Wagner’s metaphor reflects Feuerbach’s conception of historical necessity, that what was once unconscious will become conscious, and that powers once conceived as those of transcendent, spiritual beings will be traced back to their true source in Mother Nature and her impersonal, involuntary laws.
My allegorical reading also explains why Siegfried becomes so Alberich-like or Hunding-like in his brutal treatment of his true love Brünnhilde in abducting her to force her into marriage with the unworthy Gunther, once he falls under the sway of Hagen’s potion of love-and-forgetting. Alberich had foreseen that through the power of his Ring Curse of consciousness he'd someday suborn Wotan’s heroes and turn them against him. Siegfried, the inspired modern artist (a metaphor for Wagner himself) par excellence, necessarily becomes too conscious over time to be capable of accessing his unconscious mind, his muse, for inspiration, any longer. And because of this rising consciousness Siegfried unwittingly and involuntarily exposes the formerly hidden secret of his unconscious artistic inspiration to the light of day, thereby destroying his former role as a secular redeemer. Thus Wagner couldn’t help dramatizing the analogy between Siegfried’s and Tristan’s situations, as modern artist heroes who’ve become so conscious of themselves that they must of necessity betray the secrets of their formerly unconscious artistic inspiration, their muse, to conscious thought (symbolized by their lovelessly keeping themselves apart from their true love while abducting her for another man), and Alberich’s archetypal rape of the Rhinegold by renouncing love and forging the Ring of conscious thought out of our formerly preconscious feelings (the Rhinedaughters). This is the authentic meaning behind Siegfried’s and Tristan’s forceful abduction of their true loves Brünnhilde and Isolde to give them away to another man. This other man is Wagner’s metaphor for his own audience, with whom he shared those innermost secrets of his inspiration which had been hidden even from him, through his musical motifs, in Tristan’s case represented by the alte Weise, “old tune,” which he interprets, and in Siegfried’s case by the Woodbird’s tune which he translates into words. It’s noteworthy in this respect that Tristan takes responsibility for having brewed the potion of love and death which is the symbol for his relationship with his muse Isolde, whom he’s betrayed, and having become conscious of his role in brewing it curses it, in light of the fact that the two potions Hagen administers to Siegfried (the first via Gutrune), which taken together make Siegfried conscious of the fact that he betrayed his muse of inspiration Brünnhilde, symbolize a rise to consciousness within Siegfried of repressed self-knowledge which was a necessary consequence of Alberich’s Ring Curse of consciousness, i.e., human nature as realized through history.
Wagner’s Walther Von Stolzing from Mastersingers represents, in contrast, Wagner’s conception of the golden age of unconsciously inspired art prior to Siegfried’s and Tristan’s [modern artists’] betrayals of their muses, prior to the modern age of science, since he manages to produce for his audience a redemptive work of art inspired unconsciously (during his dream on midsummer night’s eve) by his muse Eva, or Eve in Paradise. It was Eve whose gift of divine (but divinely forbidden) knowledge, a model for both Wotan’s and Hans Sachs’s confessions to the muses Brünnhilde and Eva, respectively, exiled us from paradise, to which we can only return in our modern, secular, scientific age in the musical feeling produced in us by the Wonder of art which the muses inspire
