cosmos which gives birth to all phenomena of nature, including the laws of change, and the innocent time before the Fall, before the birth of consciousness. So #1, The Primal Nature Arpeggio which comes from the timeless time before the Fall, is the basis not only of #57b, but also of #53 as heard in our last two passages in association with Erda’s statement that her knowledge embraces the entire timebound world, and that everything which is will end. So #57ab, a compound motif comprising both Erda’s “Endet” and the Primal Nature Arpeggio, suggests not only the mortality of the heroes to whom Wotan will look for redemption, but also their status as exponents of natural necessity, the laws of motion and evolution and change in nature, the natural creativity of the cosmos in which no event or form is ever reproduced exactly in the course of time, the idiosyncrasy of each moment of space-time, so to speak. And, more abstractly, it represents Feuerbach’s and Wagner’s suggestion that feeling, that is to say music, unlike concepts, can capture the essence of nature as change, and in a sense restore the lost innocence of preconscious feeling (i.e., the Rhinedaughters’ joy in the Rhinegold).
Feuerbach seems to have captured this somewhat difficult concept in the following poetic variation:
“Every moment of life is fulfilled being, is of infinite significance, exists for its own sake … . (…) Life is heavenly music that the exalted Artist of the universe conjures forth out of the instrument of nature. Fools say that life is a bare, empty sound, that it passes away like the breath … . But life is music. Every moment is a melody or a fulfilled, soulful, inspired tone. (…) Musical tones also pass away, but every tone is filled being, has a significance as tone. Transitoriness disappears as a meaningless reality without significance in comparison to this inner significance and soul of the musical tone.” [24F-TDI: p. 171]
A crucial point at issue in Erda’s prophecy is that she does not tell Wotan that the gods can escape the fated doom she has foretold, but rather, offers them a suggestion of how they can avoid foreseeing it, how they can redeem themselves from consciousness of it and fear of it (the end), by submerging thinking (the Ring) in feeling (first the Rhinedaughters, now the Giants). This they can do by resorting to the refuge of consoling illusions founded in subjective feeling, called religious faith in earlier times, and art in secular times.
Wagner said it all in his following commentary on the crucial alteration he performed on Erda’s original statement. Initially, Wagner planned to have Erda say that a gloomy day was dawning for the gods unless they yield the Ring to the Giants. But Wagner altered this passage. In his final version, the one we hear in performance, Erda drops this condition, simply stating flatly that a day of darkness dawns for the gods:
“For me my poem [The Ring of the Nibelung] has only the following meaning: … Instead of thewords: ‘a gloomy day dawns on the gods: in shame shall end your noble race, if you do not give up the ring!’ I now make Erda say merely: ‘All that is – ends: a gloomy day dawns on the gods: I counsel you, shun the ring!’ – We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word: fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness … .” [613W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 306-307]
Remarkably, Erda counsels Wotan to shun the Ring but not with any prospect that by doing so he can change his fate. Our thesis that possessing the Ring means possessing objective consciousness
