legends shadowing the mysteries of religion.” [837W-{10/72}On the Name ‘Music Drama’: PW Vol. V, p. 300-302]
It is implicit in this passage that though Wagner in his theoretical writings of the late 1840’s and early 1850’s regarded the drama as the source of inspiration for the music-drama’s music (just as Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde of his tragic history is her source of inspiration, or rather, the source of that inspiration she imparts to the artist-hero Siegfried in loving union), now that Siegfried has woken Bruennhilde - Wagner’s metaphor for music - it is music itself, and the unconscious which produces it, which will give birth to Siegfried’s music-drama. In other words, the original, authentic source of inspiration, Alberich’s forging of the Ring of power and its consequence, man’s Fall through consciousness, which is the subject of Wotan’s confession, will unconsciously, subliminally inspire the artist Siegfried, as if from nowhere, to produce a seemingly spontaneous and free act of creation, the product of thought which has been sublimated into feeling. It will be as if Siegfried’s inspiration arises spontaneously and mysteriously from feeling alone. Alberich’s and Wotan’s history becomes, as it were, the unconscious programme which fills otherwise inchoate feeling, music, with form.
Wagner expounded his reversal of the proper sequence of evolution (reversing the natural evolution from feeling or instinct to words, by retreating from the word back to music) in his following rebuttal of Feuerbach. For Feuerbach’s life’s work, which Wagner began to put behind him after his decisive experience of Schopenhauer in 1854, was the demonstration that the real world gave birth to man, who in turn invented the gods: ergo, the gods have a natural, physical origin. But under Schopenhauer’s influence Wagner reversed Feuerbach’s formulation, granting pride of place to the thing-in-itself, the Will, which Wagner – following Schopenhauer – identified with music:
“Reality surely to be explained by Ideality, not the other way round. A religious dogma may embrace the whole real world: let anyone try, on the contrary, to illustrate Religion from the real world.” [896W-{78-82?} Notes of uncertain date, presumably from 1878-1882: PW Vol. VIII, p. 391]
Wagner also renounced Feuerbach’s description of Christian faith as covert egoism. [See 703W] One can see in Wagner’s reversals of his former Feuerbach-inspired opinions, that Wagner’s aversion to Feuerbach’s propensity to trace all human feeling, thought, and action back to the natural egoism which man inherited from his animal ancestors, is behind Wagner’s repudiation of his former viewpoint that it is drama (reality) which gives birth to musical form (ideality), even if the composer remains unconscious of the programme which actually inspires him.
But Wagner did not renounce his former materialist, Feuerbachian orientation by returning to the traditional religious belief in the supernatural, transcendent realm of spirit. He still located this alleged seat of man’s will to redemption, his longing to escape the bounds of time, space, and causation (Fate), in some mystery of nature located in feeling and preconscious animal instinct. His supposed about-face respecting his original belief that it was the drama which inspired his music, proclaiming instead that music gives birth to the drama, was nothing more than a reaffirmation of what was already implicit in the transformation of Woglinde’s Mother-melody #4 into words. It was nothing more than an acknowledgment of the implications of what Wagner had long supposed, that man evolved from instinctive animal ancestors whose minds had not yet developed reflective
