In our final extract from Wagner’s writings which demonstrate a connection in Wagner’s allegorical thinking in the Ring between Wotan’s unspoken secret, Wagner’s musical motifs, and Bruennhilde as Wotan’s unconscious repository for his confession of his unspoken secret, we have the following, which indirectly suggests not only that Bruennhilde, as Wotan’s unconscious, is the womb in which Wotan’s seed, his confession of his thought, is converted into redemptive musical motifs, but that by virtue of this Bruennhilde’s feelings, or musical motifs, become the subliminal messengers of Wotan’s thoughts:
“This faculty [“… of uttering the unspeakable …”] the ear acquires through the language of the Orchestra, which is able to attach itself just as intimately to the verse-melody as earlier to the gesture, and thus to develop into a messenger of the very Thought itself, transmitting it to Feeling … .” [540W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 324]
Bruennhilde’s status as both the repository of Wotan’s confession of his disturbing hoard of forbidden knowledge, and as the musical, and therefore subliminal, messenger of these thoughts, will have the most extraordinary bearing on our understanding of Bruennhilde’s future, loving relationship with Wotan’s second and final Waelsung hero, Siegfried.
[V.2.2: B]
Now we confront the substance of Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde, starting with Wotan’s account of his earliest remembered history:
Wotan: (#starkly unmusical recitative) When youthful love’s delights had faded, I longed in my heart for power: impelled by the rage of impulsive desires, I won for myself the world.
Carolyn Abbate speculated that the reason Wotan’s history is not initially illustrated by musical motifs is that in this first portion of his account he is speaking of events which occurred prior to any which are dramatized in the Ring, and Wagner did not create motifs for events which are not actually set before us on the stage. [Abbate: P. 177-182] However, though the World-Ash is never literally represented on the stage, but merely spoken of by the Norns during their recitation of that portion of world history (in T.P.1) which according to Abbate occurred prior to the events represented in the Ring’s first scene, R.1, it does have its own motif #146 (according to Cooke, a rhythmic variant of #53). Abbate takes it for granted that Wotan’s own earliest history is comprised of events which presumably occurred prior to R.1, whose subject is Alberich’s misadventure with the Rhinedaughters, during which the first of the Ring’s motifs are introduced in direct association with actions which take place, and words which are spoken, on stage.
This presents a problem of chronology I discussed in my chapter on R.2: whose original sin, which brought about our Fall from innocence, came first? Was it Alberich’s theft of the Rhinegold, cursing of love, and forging of the Ring of power, or Wotan’s making his spear of authority from a branch of the World-Ash Tree, which withered the Ash and dried up the whispering spring of wisdom under it? An obvious solution I previously suggested is that Alberich (Dark-Alberich) and Wotan (Light-Alberich) are metaphors for collective humanity understood from two distinct
