After having come under Schopenhauer’s influence, Wagner provided a description of one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas as granting us an insight into the will’s (i.e., the unconscious mind’s) workshop within the earth’s bowels, which almost certainly references Alberich’s Nibelheim workshop, which likewise sits in the bowels of the earth, or Erda:
“… Rub. plays us the first part of the (Opus) 106 Sonata [Beethoven], and our delight is boundless! … R: ‘It is like being taken into the workshop of the Will, one sees everything moving and stirring as if in the bowels of the earth.’ – ‘Anyone who could translate this into words would have the key to the enigma of the world [as Siegfried tries to translate theWoodbird’s tunes into words].’ ” [1055W-{1/17/81}CD Vol. II, p. 600]
And Wagner has appended a thought above which is extraordinarily intriguing, in light of Siegfried’s initially inept attempt to grasp the meaning of the Woodbird’s song by imitating it musically. He says that anyone who could translate this inspired music into words would have the key to the world’s enigma. Since the Woodbird’s music’s hidden meaning will be revealed to Siegfried after he tastes the dead Fafner’s blood, and the Woodbird’s last and most important message will be that Siegfried should fulfill his lifelong search for a boon companion by seeking out the sleeping Bruennhilde, it is clear that Bruennhilde, the recipient and repository of Wotan’s account of the unspoken secret of world history and the religious mysteries in his confession, holds the key to the enigma of the world in this sense. It is music, in other words, which will give the music-dramatist Siegfried (and perhaps his audience) the key to his own unconscious mind, Bruennhilde, who holds for him the solution to the enigma of the world (or at least the enigma of man).
Siegfried instinctively seeks to grasp the meaning of the Woodbird’s musical speech, intuiting that it may be trying to tell Siegfried something about his mother, the mother who died giving him birth. And this is true in three senses: (1) Wagner mentioned on several occasions that the presence of #66 here represents Siegfried’s dead mother Sieglinde’s effort to warn her son, through the Woodbird’s tune (the Woodbird on this interpretation being his dead mother’s spirit reincarnated), about Mime’s treacherous plan of murder, and also to guide him to his predestined bride Bruennhilde. [See, for instance, 745W] (2) Bruennhilde, whom the Woodbird will soon call upon Siegfried to wake and woo, will present herself to Siegfried in S.3.3 as - so to speak - his surrogate mother: she is in fact his metaphysical mother, as I have explained in detail previously. (3) The Forest Murmurs guide us back to the mother of all things herself, Erda, Mother Nature, who embodies that natural necessity which Siegfried’s inspired artistic nature has inherited. It’s symbol is his sword Nothung, whose Motif #57, stemming from the Original Nature Motif #1, is heard here as one of the Woodbird’s tunes. It is worth remembering that the one motif most closely identified with Erda and her knowledge, #53, is a harmonically enriched variant of #1, the Primal Nature Motif. And the motif to which Erda’s daughters, the Norns, spin her knowledge, is an inversion of #3, the second variant of #1. The Woodbird tunes #128 and #129, variants of #4, call to mind Woglinde’s Lullaby, Wagner’s motival symbol for preconscious feeling or instinct.
Siegfried has also made a curious observation which, in the event, has the greatest significance. He notes that “a querulous dwarf,” i.e., Mime, once told him that one could eventually make out the meaning of Woodbirds’ singing. I noted earlier that Wagner claimed - as both author and composer of his music-dramas – to have unique insight into the genius’s creative unconscious. When he
