rack and ruin, and which we heard in its most definitive form when ultimately Wotan was persuaded to protect her sleep from all but a fearless hero (Siegfried). And we hear #134, the motif I believe is best understood as Wagner’s motif of Redemption through Love, the love of hero and heroine, which is a metaphor for the artist-hero Siegfried’s unconscious artistic inspiration by his muse Bruennhilde. Wotan’s thought, in other words, was the question, how could his free hero come into being without Wotan’s intervention?: by confessing this thought to the womb of his wishes, Bruennhilde, Wotan gave birth to his new, purified self, Siegfried. This, ultimately, was the thought which Bruennhilde felt and fought for against Wotan’s hyper-conscious objections.
Bruennhilde has made a rather remarkable proposition. It is that a thought can have a corresponding feeling, linked with it irrevocably, which somehow carries the import of the thought without any conceptual element. This is precisely what Wagner himself said his musical motifs do: they can’t think but they can convey a thought, can be messengers of a thought, especially thoughts with which they have once been associated. Though the evidence for it in this libretto text is ambiguous and indeterminate, Bruennhilde is, in effect, suggesting that the love she and Siegfried share is music, the “purely-human” which the soul of myth – i.e., Siegfried - and music have in common. We will trace below the influence of Feuerbach’s reflections on this subject - specifically the relationship between religious belief, and feeling (music) - on Wagner’s concept of the music-drama.
Feuerbach identifies music with feeling per se, and with heart’s love specifically:
“What … is it which acts on thee when thou art affected by melody? (…) What else than the voice of thy own heart?” [42F-EOC: p. 9]
And here, Wagner concurs that music’s spirit is love:
“I cannot conceive the spirit of Music as aught but Love.” [561W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 306]
In our comparison of passages from Feuerbach and Wagner below, we find Wagner paraphrasing Feuerbach quite closely with respect to Feuerbach’s thesis that love (which Wagner reads as music) lends prosaic matters the aura of ideality and spirituality, while at the same time grounding the so-called spirit in matter and the mundane affairs of mortal humans:
“Love … idealizes matter and materialises spirit. Love is the true unity of God and man, of spirit and nature.” [60F-EOC: p. 48]
[P. 110] “… the organ of the heart is tone; its conscious speech, the art of Tone. She is the full and flowing heart-love, that ennobles the material sense of pleasure, and humanises immaterial thought. Through Tone are Dance and [P. 111] Poetry brought to mutual understanding; in her are intercrossed in loving blend the laws by which they each proclaim their own true nature; in her, the wilfulness of each becomes instinctive ‘Will’ (‘Unwillkuerlichen’) … .” [434W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 110-111]
