We’ve now for the third time heard a comparison between Siegfried’s smelting and forging, and Mime’s brewing a potion to plunge Siegfried into a sleep from which he’ll never wake. If we pursue this matter deeply, we can see that Siegfried and Bruennhilde were effectively condemned to martyrdom from the moment in the finale of R.4 when Wotan had his grand idea (accompanied by the Motif of Wotan’s Grand Idea for Redemption of the Gods, #57, otherwise known as the Sword Motif) of how he might redeem Valhalla from the dread and dismay caused by Alberich’s curse on the Ring, and caused also by Erda’s prediction that this curse would bring about the twilight of the gods. For it was his grand idea which gave birth to motif #57, the Sword Motif, the motif representing Nothung, which is the instrument by virtue of which Wotan hopes his Waelsung heroes will restore lost innocence. But, as Wagner said, we did not value this innocence, or seek to restore it, until it had been lost, and it was lost by virtue of man’s acquisition of conscious mind, i.e., by virtue of Alberich’s forging of his Ring, which automatically carries the burden of the curse of consciousness. The ultimate meaning of this comparison is that, because Wagner’s secular art has inherited religious man’s futile longing for redemption (though jettisoning religion as faith, as a set of beliefs in the supernatural, and discarding religion’s supernatural promises that can’t be kept), it will, like religious faith, also succumb to the curse of consciousness, when Alberich’s hoard of knowledge rises from the silent night of the unconscious, Bruennhilde, to the light of day.
This tragic ending is the entire subject of the Ring’s final drama, The Twilight of the Gods. What makes this particulrarly interesting for our current discussion is that Wagner, in his essay Epilogue to the ‘Nibelung’s Ring’ described the plot of Tristan and Isolde as identical, in this respect, to the plot of Twilight of the Gods. [See 811W] I have implied that Siegfried, in re-forging his father’s sword Nothung, is actually brewing Mime’s sleep-of-death potion, i.e., is taking on the burden of his father Siegmund’s tragic destiny, to be an unwitting warrior in Wotan’s futile endeavor to redeem the gods from the shameful end which Alberich’s curse on his Ring will bring to fulfillment. And I have noted that Wotan’s futile endeavor to redeem himself from the Ring’s curse is actually the curse itself in its most unendurable incarnation, the ultimate instance, the most hyperbolically conscious experience, of the wound that will never heal. We are reminded that Tristan ultimately blames himself for brewing the love-death potion, the potion of unconscious artistic inspiration by his muse Isolde, which has become for him a never-healing wound.
[S.1.3: J]
Mime has now worked himself up into a blather of over-confidence, and is already celebrating the world-power that he will win, and the misery he will impose on all others, when he wins the Ring and Hoard from the hands of Fafner and Siegfried, even as Siegfried restores his father’s sword to its former glory and promises to strike down those who are false with it:
Mime: (#117?:) The glittering ring which my brother made (#33b >>:) and on which he cast an all-powerful spell – the shining gold that will make me master – (#117 vari:) that ring have I won, it’s mine to command (:#117 vari)!
