“The unconscious [Wotan’s unconscious mind, Bruennhilde] is precisely the involuntary, the necessary and creative … .” [466W-{49-51 (?)} Notes for ‘Artisthood of the Future’ (unfinished); Sketches and Fragments: PW Vol. VIII, p. 346-347]
P. 236] “… the influence of the ‘eternal womanly’ [Bruennhilde] … draws the manly Understanding [Wotan’s confession] out of its egoism, - and this again is only possible through the Womanly attracting that thing in it which is kindred to itself: but that in which the Understanding is akin to the Feeling is the purely-human, that which makes-out the essence of the human species as such. In this Purely-human are nurtured both the Manly and the Womanly, which only by their union through Love become first the Human Being.
The impetus necessary to the poetic intellect [Siegfried], in this its poesis, is therefore Love, -- and that the love of man to woman [Siegfried’s loving union with his muse of inspiration, Bruennhilde]. Yet not that frivolous, carnal love, in which man only seeks to satisfy an appetite, but the deep yearning to know himself redeemed from his egoism [redeemed from fear and the longing for actual power] through his sharing in the rapture of the loving woman; and this yearning is the creative moment (das dichtende Moment) of the Understanding. The necessary bestowal, the seed that only in the most ardent transports of Love can condense itself [into Wagner’s musical motifs] from his noblest forces – this procreative seed [Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde] is the poetic Aim, which brings to the glorious loving woman [Bruennhilde], Music, the Stuff for bearing.” [531W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 236]
Furthermore, in the following passage Wagner tells us why Siegfried does not know who he is (as Siegfried tells Fafner in S.2.2, “I still don’t know who I am!”), why Siegfried is so innocent, naïve, and seemingly spontaneous. Wotan, by virtue of storing his repressed thought in his unconscious mind Bruennhilde, and condensing the conceptual content of his confession, his conscious intentions, into the unconscious mind’s language music, i.e., musical motifs, is reborn, thanks to his wish-womb Bruennhilde, as the fearless artist-hero Siegfried:
[P. 305] “The longing to raise the Opera to the dignity of genuine Drama could never wake and wax in the musician, before great masters had enlarged the province of his art in that spirit which now has made our German music acknowledgedly victorious over all its rivals. Through the fullest application of this legacy of our great masters we have arrived at uniting Music so completely with the Drama’s action, that this very marriage enables the action itself [i.e., Wotan’s longed-for redeemer Siegfried] to gain that ideal freedom – i.e. release from all necessity of appealing to abstract reflection – which our great poets [P. 306] sought on many a road, to fall at last a-pondering on the selfsame possibility of attaining it through Music.
By incessantly revealing to us the inmost motives [Wotan’s inmost motives as confessed to his unconscious mind Bruennhilde] of the action [Siegfried’s adventures], in their widest ramifications, Music [Bruennhilde] at like time makes it possible [for Siegfried] to display that action itself in drastic definition: as the characters [Siegfried, in whom Wotan’s lost innocence is restored] no longer need to tell us of their impulses [or ‘grounds of action’ – Beweggruende] in terms of the reflecting consciousness, their dialogue thereby gains that naïve pointedness (Praezision) which constitutes the very life of Drama. Again, whilst Antique Tragedy had to confine its dramatic dialogue to separate sections strewn between the choruses delivered in the Orchestra – those chants in which Music gave to the drama its higher meaning – in the Modern
