most transcendently beautiful actions Wotan’s own egoism and fear of the truth, Wotan’s hope for redemption of the gods will be reborn in his grandson Siegfried, Siegmund’s son. Siegfried will be an artist-hero through whose inspired artworks Wotan will hope to restore religious feeling, when religious thought as a set of illusory beliefs can no longer be sustained in the face of the rise to consciousness of man’s ever increasing hoard of objective knowledge.
Wotan’s initial hope in Siegmund, and the subsequent thwarting of that hope, gives us the plot of The Valkyrie, the next in our series of Ring music-dramas. Wotan’s hope in Siegfried gives us the plot of the following music-drama Siegfried, and Siegfried’s failure as a redeemer is the basis of the plot of Twilight of the Gods, the last music-drama in this tetralogy. #57ab, the Sword Motif, or Motif of Wotan’s Grand Idea, is the motival embodiment of Wotan’s ongoing hope for redemption, and as such is certainly heard in the Ring more often than any other motif. The sword Nothung, which is wielded by Wotan’s Waelsung heroes Siegmund and Siegfried, and whose motif #57b stems from the pre-fallen Primal Nature Arpeggio #1, is the incarnation of what Feuerbach called nature’s necessity. Nature’s necessity, as experienced by man, is not only constituted of nature’s laws, but also of man’s participation in nature’s evolutionary and unconscious creativity, and the acknowledgment of the transient nature of the world in art. Wagner gleaned all this from his study of Feuerbach who, as one can see in his following remark, not only provided Wagner with the theoretical basis for the concept of natural necessity, but also gave Wagner an intimation of the similar concept of the world as “Will” which Schopenhauer had developed long before, but with which Wagner did not become familiar until, most scholars believe, 1854:
“The free act of humanity must exist simultaneously as necessity in nature. The spiritual surrender of the self must also be a natural, physical surrender, … must be willed and established, not by your own intentional, self-conscious will, but by the universal will in your will. Natural death is thus the ultimate sacrifice of reconciliation, the ultimate verification of love.” [17F-TDI: p. 125]
It is, of course, entirely possible that Feuerbach was himself familiar with the still obscure Schopenhauer in 1830 when he wrote this.
I noted that Bruennhilde is the product of Wotan’s union with her mother Erda. The implications of this for our interpretation of the Ring are momentous, since we can also say that Bruennhilde is the product of Wotan’s two distinct motives in seeking out Erda. First, Wotan wished to learn of Erda the full truth about why he must live his entire life in care and fear, and presumably to learn whether he can somehow escape the fate, the twilight of the gods, she foresaw. But what Erda foresees is nothing more than the objective truth, the nature of the world. Since she is herself the world, her knowledge is self-knowledge. And her knowledge is knowledge of necessity, of what must be. Wotan therefore can’t escape his fate. And he can’t escape the bitter truth: having witnessed Fafner kill his brother Fasolt for the sake of Alberich’s Ring, the first fruits of Alberich’s curse on his Ring, Wotan has amended his original desire of Erda, and now no longer wishes to confront the truth. Therefore his second desire of Erda is to learn from her how he can free himself from the dread and dismay, the existential fear of the end, which her prophecy has engendered. We have a clue: since the gods’ rule depends upon man’s fear of the truth, perhaps the redemption Wotan seeks is some sort of expression of religious man’s longing for transcendent value and immortality which need not fear the light of the truth. Bruennhilde therefore must in some way
