outburst of her jealousy, wakes first from out the thrill of worship into the full reality of love … .” [573W]-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 347]
Thus Wagner’s praise of Elsa for doing what is normally regarded as a crime, breaching faith, and thus renouncing worship of God (or the gods), for the sake of love (feeling), tallies perfectly with his notion, borrowed from Feuerbach, that religious faith as a set of beliefs had to end in order to free the artist from staking a claim on the truth which is indefensible, since the artist offers man the feeling of having transcended the world, without staking a factual claim that the world has actually been transcended. Only in this way could the artist emancipate himself from the contradictions which undermine religious faith, and only in this way can Bruennhilde redeem Wotan (religious faith) by freeing his chosen hero Siegfried from his overt influence. In other words, both Elsa’s breach of Lohengrin’s demand for unquestioning faith, and Bruennhilde’s breach of Wotan’s demand that she keep his unspoken secret without acting upon it in the objective world, are steps towards religious faith’s only means of redemption, of salvaging the essence of religion, the longing for transcendent value, when religious belief (the gods) must pass away in the face of man’s inevitable advancement in knowledge of himself and nature. [See my chapter on Lohengrin for a detailed discussion of Elsa’s breach of Lohengrin’s requirement of faith as the basis for Wagner’s transformation from a composer of traditional romantic operas into the revolutionary creator of the music-drama.]
Just as Lohengrin separates himself from Elsa, so that she can now offer her restored brother (and Lohengrin’s heir) Godfrey inspiration by giving him Lohengrin’s horn, sword, and ring (models for Siegfried’s horn, sword, and ring, as John Deathridge noted in an essay published in a programme not currently available to me), so Wotan now severs all contact between himself – the divine world – and the newly mortal Bruennhilde, so that she can freely offer her services as muse to the artist-hero Siegfried, who will soon wake and win her. Wagner expressed this need for art - as feeling - to sever itself from the church, which offers man a set of beliefs considered to be true which are actually false, in the following passage:
[P. 223] “… the music of the Church was sung to the words of the abstract dogma; in its effect however, it dissolved those words and the ideas they fixed, to the point of their vanishing out of sight; and hence it rendered nothing to the enraptured Feeling save their pure emotional content. (…) [P. 224] This lofty property of Music’s enabled her at last to … divorce herself from the reasoned word; and the noblest music completed this divorce in measure as religious Dogma became the toy of Jesuitic casuistry or rationalistic pettifogging. (…) Only her final severance from the decaying Church could enable the art of Tone to save the noblest heritage of the Christian idea in its purity of over-worldly reformation … .” [1026W-{6-8/80}Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 223-224]
[V.3.3: E]
Bruennhilde now asks Wotan to spell out in detail the punishment he’s planned for her. When he confirms what he’d already threatened, that he’ll seal her in soundest sleep so that she will remain vulnerable to any man who wishes to wake and win her (thereby introducing one of the most
