[Wotan] had to vanish, he left us – in eternal memory of him – Music [Bruennhilde].” [999W-{12/25/79} Introduction to the Year 1880: PW Vol. VI, p. 34]
In the following passage Wagner explains how, in the face of scientific inquiry (“physics”), music can save the essence of religious feeling, while religious thought (“the church’s thunders”) fights on futilely against science in its quest to control thought:
[P. 261] “ … the Folk … demands a realistic notion of divine eternity in the affirmative sense, such as Theology herself can only give it in the negative ‘world without end.’ Religion, too, could ease this craving by naught but allegoric myths and images, from which the Church then built that storeyed dogma whose collapse has become notorious [the twilight of the gods Erda foretold]. How these crumbling blocks were turned to the foundation of an art [modern orchestral music] unknown to the ancient world, I have endeavoured to show in my preceding article on ‘Religion and Art’; of what import to the ‘Folk’ itself this art might become through its full emancipation from unseemly service [Siegfried freed from the gods’ influence], and upon the soil of a new moral order, we should set ourselves in earnest to discover. Here again our philosopher [Wagner speaks her of Schopenhauer, though he first became acquainted with these ideas in Feuerbach’s writings] would lead us to a boundless outlook on the realm of possibilities, if we sought out all the wealth contained in the following pregnant sentences: -- ‘Complete contentment, the truly acceptable state, never present themselves to us but in an image, in the Artwork, the Poem, in Music.” [1048W-{11/80}What Boots This Knowledge – First Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 260-261]
In our final selection from Wagner’s writings on this subject Wagner calls music the God within us, and describes it as our last religion, which gives us the power of rebirth (just as Wotan, thanks to Bruennhilde, is reborn in Siegfried) if we preserve her integrity:
[P. 34] “Our Music he [“the Devil”] shall not thus deal with; for still it is the living god within our bosom. Let us guard it therefore, and ward off all profaning hands. For us it shall become no ‘literature’; in it resides our final hope of life itself. There is something special in our German Music, ay, something divine. (…) We alone know ‘Music’ as herself, and to us she gives the power of all regeneration and new-birth; but only while we hold her holy. Were we to lose the sense of genuineness in this one art, we had lost our last possession. May [P. 35] it therefore not mislead our friends, if precisely on this field, of Music, we show a front implacable to whatsoe’er we rate as spurious. Indeed it wakes in us no little pain, to see the downfall of our musical affairs so utterly unheeded; for so our last religion melts away in jugglery.” [1000W-{12/25/79} Introduction to the Year 1880: PW Vol. VI, p. 34-35]
And here we find a basis for Wotan’s (religious man’s) insistence that he must wholly sever himself from Bruennhilde (music) and her concerns, and also for Bruennhilde’s remark to Siegfried that what Wotan thought, she felt:
[P. 223] “Through the art of Tone did the Christian Lyric thus first become itself an art: the music of the Church was sung to the words of the abstract dogma; in its effect however, it dissolved those words and the ideas they fixed, to the point of their vanishing out of sight; and hence it rendered nothing to the enraptured Feeling save their pure emotional content.
