particular feeling captured in tone and rhythm. In this way, thanks to Bruennhilde, who felt what Wotan thought, Wotan’s thought becomes Siegfried’s feeling, which Siegfried can’t understand conceptually, but can only intuit musically, or aesthetically. It is no accident that when Siegfried says he can’t understand what Bruennhilde sings to him, we hear #87, the fate motif associated with all that Wotan learned from Erda about the gods’ history and fate, which he then imparted to Bruennhilde. Siegfried is seemingly freed from this fate (in truth, only freed from paralyzing consciousness of it) by his unconscious mind Bruennhilde, who holds knowledge of it for him in order to protect him from the unhealing wound made by Wotan’s fear of the end. Thus, thanks to Bruennhilde, the fearful, self-loathing Wotan is reborn in the fearless, proud, loving, and creative Siegfried.
Pursuing his description of the Wagnerian “Wonder,” Siegfried adds, accompanied by #137, that his senses can’t grasp far away (“Ferne”) things, since he can see and feel only Bruennhilde. #137, here associated with Siegfried’s fear of waking Bruennhilde, is, like #96, based on #81, which is often described as the motif of “Wotan’s Frustration” (i.e., recalling his acknowledgment that his allegedly free heroes are merely reflections of what he loathes in himself and can’t transcend). However, #137 now begins a final transformation of this motif family into its culmination, the variant #164, later to be identified with Bruennhilde’s tragic recognition that the love she shares with Siegfried is, ironically, the fulfillment of the punishment Wotan said Bruennhilde brought on herself by living for love, when Wotan himself had resigned himself to its futility. What therefore is so far away that Siegfried can’t grasp it is Wotan’s confession of the gods’ and Waelsungs’ tragic history to Bruennhilde, things widely disbursed in time and space, a history recalled by the lengthy genealogy of transformations of the embryonic form of #21 (Wotan’s spear), with which this entire drama began.
This also explains why, as Siegfried complains to Bruennhilde that she has bound him in fetters of anxious fear, we hear #137, and as he asks her no longer to hide his courage which she’s bound with powerful bonds, {{ we seem to hear #17 or #19, }} and certainly #37. These are the motifs associated in S.3.1 - during Wotan’s confrontation with Bruennhilde’s mother Erda - with the objective knowledge of the world’s lovelessness, and the inevitable destruction of the gods’ ideal world by Alberich, which Erda had taught Wotan, wisdom which Wotan later said would wane before his will (Bruennhilde). This seems to me to prove beyond doubt that Siegfried’s fear of Bruennhilde arises from his premonition that Wotan’s hoard of forbidden knowledge, which she holds for Siegfried, might rise to consciousness in him if he wakes her. It is Bruennhilde’s duty now, Siegfried seems to be saying, to help him forget the fear she’s taught him. This all becomes much easier to understand when we recall that Wotan is reborn in Siegfried, and therefore Wotan’s second desire of Erda, that she should show him how to forget his care, is reborn in Siegfried also.
The following selection of passages from Wagner’s writings and recorded remarks provide a further foundation for our reading of the passage above as a poetic description of Wagner’s concept of the “Wonder,” through which musical motifs make the fearful, distasteful past and future, Wotan’s confession, present, as sublimated, blissful feeling.
Here Wagner explains what it is his music-drama must jettison in order for his art to regain a naivete which he believes has been lost in the super-sophisticated arts of modern times, namely, a
