Wagner in fact understood the aesthetic goal of his music-dramas as redeeming us from the burden of conscious thought by seeking refuge in a restoration of redemptive feeling, or music, in precisely the sense he described above:
“This [the Greek] Tragedy’s basis was the Lyric, from which it advanced to word-speech in the same way as Society advanced from the natural, ethico-religious ties of Feeling, to the political State. The return from Understanding to Feeling will be the march of the Drama of the Future [i.e., Wagner’s own revolutionary music-dramas].” [512W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 200]
This calls to mind Wagner’s insightful remark that we didn’t become conscious of our innocence until (through consciousness) we had lost it, and that world history is the tale of man’s artificial quest to restore what he had lost, i.e., restore, through religion and art, that innocence lost to us through our evolutionary acquisition of consciousness.
It also reminds us that Bruennhilde, Wagner’s metaphor for our unconscious mind and its language, music, in whom Wotan is storing his most abhorrent and unbearable thoughts in order to redeem himself from Erda’s knowledge, produces that special melody in which man seeks to restore lost innocence, to escape from the curse of conscious thought (Alberich’s Ring). This redemptive melody which Bruennhilde produces is distinct from the Mother-Melody of primal Nature, represented at its most archaic by #1, the Primal Nature Arpeggio. #1 is the basis for #53 and #54, motifs associated with Erda (i.e., Erda as known to collective man both objectively, as Dark-Alberich does, and subjectively, as Light-Alberich - Wotan – does). But with the creation of life out of the womb of Nature, Mother-Melody in the form of preconscious instinct is ultimately represented by Woglinde’s Lullaby #4, and by the Rhinedaughters’ other characteristic motifs and melodies, which metaphorically gave birth to man and his conscious mind.
#81’s association here with Wotan’s existential dilemma, that he desires to possess both love and power even in the face of their incommensurability, calls to mind Wotan’s rising awareness of this irresolvable dilemma in V.2.1, when his debate with his social conscience Fricka compelled him to acknowledge the futility of striving to resolve this contradiction.
It is curious, by the way, that Wotan states that in his quest for power he did not like to give up love, prior to telling that part of his tale concerning Alberich’s sacrifice of love for the sake of the Ring and its power. There is no specific reference in the Ring to Wotan’s being under obligation to renounce love for any other reason than either to forge, or possess, Alberich’s Ring. It is often argued, by those who presume that Wotan’s primal crime - in breaking off the most sacred branch of the World-Ash to make his Spear of divine authority - preceded the events dramatized in R.1, in which Alberich commits his primal crime, that Wotan’s sacrifice of an eye at that time, for the sake of gaining the wisdom which the spring under the World-Ash whispered, constitutes the original sin, the renunciation of love for power. On this view, in losing one of his eyes Wotan lost sight of love, and kept only the eye which looks outward at the objective world, but the problem with this thesis is that Wotan never attains the ruthlessness necessary to wholly renounce love for power. And he is not really missing one eye, because, as Donington suggested, it is the eye that looks inward. [Donington: p. 69] In point of fact Wotan in S.3.2 will tell Siegfried that Siegfried is looking at Wotan with Wotan’s missing eye. In any case, I would argue, again, that Wotan’s and
