If Woglinde’s Lullaby #4 is Wagner’s motival metaphor for the mother-melody, or primal preconscious animal instinct, out of which language grew (as indeed it did during her lullaby in R.1), then #128ab and #129, variants of #4, may well represent the European orchestral music tradition, especially as it was developed by Wagner as an integral aspect of music-drama. For Wagner says that in our time, language (allegedly) having lost its instinctual roots, and the evolution of conscious thought having produced modern science which, according to Wagner, represents a wholesale renunciation of love or subjective feeling, man seeks redemption from this excessive consciousness by descending from his intellectual heights to the depths of love, i.e., to restore lost innocence. Man strives to restore lost innocence by seeking a language, orchestral music, which has retreated from prosaic conceptual thought to return to its instinctual roots in feeling. And this of course links the Woodbird’s song directly to the sleeping Bruennhilde, guarded by #98, another of this set of pentatonic nature melodies.
Wagner provided a poetic image of his music-dramas’ orchestral music’s place in history with the following description, which links it clearly to the forest murmurs and Siegfried’s eventual ability to discriminate particular voices of nature, the birdsongs, in the forest’s hum:
“I have recourse to metaphor once more, to give you finally a picture of the melody … encompassing the whole dramatic tone piece; and for this I will keep to the impression which it is to produce. Its endless wealth of detail is in nowise to reveal itself merely to the connoisseur, but also to the most naïve layman, if only he has come to the needful collectedness of spirit. First of all, then, it should exert on him somewhat the effect produced by a noble forest, of a summer evening, on the lonely visitant who has just left the city’s din behind; the peculiar stamp of this impression … is that of a silence growing more and more alive. For the general object of the artwork it may be quite sufficient to have produced this root-impression, and by it to lead the hearer unawares and attune him to the further aim; he therewith takes the higher tendence unconsciously into himself. But when, overwhelmed by this first general impression, the forest’s visitor sits down to ponder; when, the last burden of the city’s hubbub cast aside, he girds the forces of his soul to a new power of observing; when, as if hearing with new senses, he listens more and more intently – he perceives with ever greater plainness the infinite diversity of voices waking in the wood. Ever and ever a new, a different voice peers forth, a voice he thinks he has never heard as yet: as they wax in number, they grow in strange distinctness; louder and louder rings the wood:; and many though the voices be, the individual strains he hears, the glinting, overbrimming stream of sound seems again to him but just the one great forest-melody … .” [690W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 339]
As further evidence that Wagner understood the Woodbirdsongs #128 and #129 to have originated in the figurative mother-melody of our animal ancestors’ preconscious instinctuality, his following description of Beethoven's music, as a restoration of the bird language which man allegedly spoke before the birth of conscious conceptual thought (“ideas”), provides further confirmation:
“… he is still delighted with the picture of Beethoven: ‘That is how he looked, this poor man who gave us back the language men spoke before they had ideas; it was to recover this language of the birds that Man created the divine art.” [751W-{7/4/69}CD Vol. I, p. 119]
