that of Wagner’s secular art. This then is the meaning of #134, the only motif in the Ring which Wagner ever christened a “redemption motif,” and whose first occurrence in the Ring in our current passage from S.3.1 Wagner described as sounding like the proclamation of a “new religion”:
“Wagner expressly demanded that the Redemption theme [Dunning’s Motif #134; Millington’s Motif number 49, as found in Stewart Spencer’s translation of the Ring] as it enters after Wotan’s words, ‘Was in des Zwiespalt’s wildem Schmerze verzweifelnd eins ich beschloss, froh und freudig fuehre, frei ich nun aus’ [“What I once resolved in despair, in the searing smart of inner turmoil, (#134:) I now perform freely, in gladness and joy … “ - from Stewart Spencer’s translation of the Ring, p. 247-248:]: … should be taken ‘slightly faster’ than the preceding bars and that it should be ‘very brought out (sehr heraus)’, as he tersely put it. He once characterized the spiritual significance of this theme (whilst going through the work at the piano) by the statement: ‘It must sound like the proclamation of a new religion.’ “ [878W-{6-8/76} WRR, p. 103]
And here in Feuerbach’s description of his “new religion” we find a part of the foundation for Wagner’s notion that his own secular art is a new religion:
[P. 216] “… our religious doctrines and usages … stand in the most glaring contradiction to our present cultural and material situation; our task [P. 217] today is to do away with this loathsome and disastrous contradiction. Its elimination is the indispensable condition for the rebirth of mankind, the one and only condition for the appearance of a new mankind, as it were, and for the coming of a new era. Without it, all political and social reforms are meaningless and futile. A new era also requires a new view of the first elements and foundations of human existence; it requires – if we wish to retain the word – a new religion!” [283F-LER: p. 216-217]
Wagner described the significance of Siegfried the artist-hero’s inheritance of Wotan’s (religion’s) legacy in the following thematically related set of extracts, in which it becomes clear that the only way out of Wotan’s irresolvable existential dilemma - the fact that Wotan can no longer sustain religious man’s consoling self-deception in the face of the inevitable rise to consciousness of Alberich’s hoard of objective knowledge, yet can’t psychologically bear to live within the only world we have, the prosaic world known to science in which egoism is universally accepted as the highest or sole motive - is by retreating to feeling, man’s innermost depths, in art. Only in this way can Wotan salvage the best, ageless part of himself from the nihilistic self-destruction to which he originally consigned Valhalla (religious belief) and all of his dreams and ideals which are either overtly or covertly predicated on belief in man’s transcendent value:
“Wodan rises to the tragic heights of willing his own destruction. This is all that we need to learn from the history of mankind: to will what is necessary and to bring it about ourselves. The final creative product of this supreme, self-destructive will is a fearless human being, one who never ceases to love: Siegfried.” [615W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW,p. 307]
“Following his farewell to Bruennhilde, Wodan is in truth no more than a departed spirit: true to his supreme resolve, he must now allow events to take their course, leave things as they are, and nowhere interfere in any decisive way; that is why he has now become the ‘Wanderer’: observe him closely! He resembles us to a tee; he is the sum total of present-day intelligence, whereas
