(…)
This lofty property of Music’s enabled her at last to quite divorce herself from the reasoned word; and the noblest music completed this divorce in measure as religious Dogma became the toy of Jesuitic casuistry or rationalistic pettifogging. (…) Only her final severance from the decaying Church [Siegfried’s and Bruennhilde’s independence of Wotan and the gods in Valhalla] could enable the art of Tone to save the noblest heritage of the Christian idea in its purity of over-worldly reformation … .” [1026W-{6-8/80} Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 223-224]
We find an explanation for Wotan’s assertion that what he confesses to Bruennhilde, his Will, not in words, will remain forever unspoken, below:
[P. 316] “… we have plainly to denote this Speaking-faculty of the Orchestra as the faculty of uttering the unspeakable.
(…)
[P. 317] (…) That this Unspeakable is not a thing unutterable per se, but merely unutterable through the organ of our Understanding; thus, not a mere fancy, but a reality, -- this is shown plainly enough by the Instruments of the orchestra themselves … . [(*) Wagner’s Footnote:] This easy explanation of the ‘Unspeakable,’ one might extend, perhaps not altogether wrongly, to the whole matter of Religious Philosophy; for although that matter is given out as absolutely unutterable, from the standpoint of the speaker, yet mayhap it is utterable enough if only the fitting organ be employed.” [539W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 316-317]
In other words, Bruennhilde will express Wotan’s thought only as feeling, in music, which is why Siegfried remains oblivious to the conceptual message she’s tried to convey about Wotan in her remarks above.
I have provided detailed evidence in Wagner’s writings and recorded remarks - and in passages from Feuerbach which may have influenced him - that Wagner conceived Bruennhilde as a metaphor not only for Wotan’s unconscious mind (i.e., Wotan’s and Siegfried’s muse of unconscious inspiration), and the language of the unconscious, music, but also, most importantly, as a metaphor for the unconscious mind as the repository of Wotan’s hoard of forbidden knowledge, a status Bruennhilde acquired when Wotan imparted this knowledge to her in his confession. However, in order to clinch our argument that Bruennhilde is indeed the repository for Wotan’s confession of his corrupt history, I’ll review briefly the documentary evidence below.
In Opera and Drama Wagner described the womanly as what the egoistic man - in this case the poet - seeks in order to redeem himself from his egoism, just as Wotan confesses to the sympathetic Bruennhilde his self-loathing and desperate longing for a hero freed from all that Wotan loathes in himself:
“… the influence of the ‘eternal womanly’ … draws the manly Understanding out of its egoism … .
The impetus necessary to the poetic intellect … is therefore Love, -- and that the love of man to woman. Yet not that frivolous, carnal love, in which man only seeks to satisfy an appetite, but the deep yearning to know himself redeemed from his egoism through his sharing in the rapture
