Siegfried is the man of the future whom we desire and long for but who cannot be made by us, since he must create himself on the basis of our own annihilation.” [619W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 308] [See also 909W]
And in the following extract Wagner offers us a striking description, clearly a model for Wotan’s relationship with Siegfried, of his own historical position as an artist, whose creative gift allows him to rise above religious man’s nihilistic longing to end it all in the face of the world’s prosaic ugliness, and redeem himself from this insufferable existence in that “true-dream image” called art:
“Who can look, his lifetime long, with open eyes and unpent heart upon this world of robbery and murder organised and legalised by lying, deceit and hypocrisy, without being forced to flee from it at times in shuddering disgust? Wither turns his gaze? Too often to the pit of death [Wotan informs Bruennhilde in V.2.2 that he now seeks “Das Ende!”]. But him whose calling and his fate have fenced from that, to him the truest likeness of the world itself may well appear the herald of redemption sent us by its inmost soul. To be able to forget the actual world of fraud in this true-dream image, will seem to him the guerdon of the sorrowful sincerity with which he recognised its wretchedness.” [1141W-{11/82} ‘Parsifal’ at Bayreuth,1882: PW Vol. VI, p. 312] [See also 580W]
And in the following remark Wagner applies this thesis directly to the plot of the Ring:
[P. 8] “I had … finally completed, the poem of my ‘Ring des Nibelungen.’ With this conception I had unconsciously admitted to [P. 9] myself the truth about things human. Here everything is tragic through and through, and the Will, that fain would shape a world according to its wish, at last can reach no greater satisfaction than the breaking of itself in dignified annulment. It was the time when I returned entirely and exclusively to my artistic plans, and thus, acknowledging Life’s earnestness with all my heart, withdrew to where alone can ‘gladsomeness’ abide.” [694W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 8-9]
The notion that Wotan (religion) lives on in Siegfried (art) thanks to Bruennhilde, who holds for Siegfried – and thus protects him from the paralyzing effect of – Wotan’s fatal self-knowledge, provides Wagner with a concept of reincarnation which becomes a crucial aspect of his theory of musical motifs, through which, as Wagner says in the second extract below, the past life of a hero, now forgotten by him, can be made ever present to the audience by the sounding of motifs which link the hero’s past and present lives, a concept to which Wagner later gave objective form in his final music-drama Parsifal, which some scholars have rightly described as, in effect, the fifth act of the Ring:
[P. 626] “It is the most sublime of all scenes [S.3.1] for the most tragic of my heroes, Wotan, who is the all-powerful will-to-exist and who is resolved upon his own self-sacrifice; greater now in renunciation than he ever was when he coveted power, he now feels all-mighty, as he calls out to the earth’s primeval wisdom, to Erda, the mother of nature, who had once taught him to fear for his end, telling her that dismay can no longer hold him in thrall since he now wills his own end with that selfsame will with which he had once desired to live. His end? He knows what Erda’s primeval wisdom [P. 627] does not know: that he lives on in Siegfried. Wotan lives on in Siegfried as the artist lives on in his work of art: the freer and the more autonomous the latter’s spontaneous
