historical context (which Wagner identifies with the soulless, loveless State) for the dramatic action which Wagner feels impedes the free flow of love, i.e., feeling, in art:
[P. 200] “This [i.e., Greek] Tragedy’s basis was the Lyric, from which it advanced to word-speech in the same way as Society advanced from the natural, ethico-religious ties of Feeling, to the political State. The return from Understanding to Feeling will be the march of the Drama of the Future … from the very beginning of his work, the modern poet has to exhibit a Surrounding – the State – which is void of any purely-human sentiment, and therefore is un-communicable through the Feeling’s highest utterance. So that he can only reach his purpose, at all, [P. 201] through the organ of the ‘combining’ Understanding, through un-emotional modern speech … .” [512W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 200-201] [See also 536W]
It is precisely this loveless “surrounding” (Wotan’s confession of all that he loathes about himself and wishes to jettison) to which Bruennhilde was alluding when she told Siegfried that what Wotan thought, she felt, i.e., she sublimated Wotan’s tragic confession into blissful feeling, music.
Now clearly, Siegfried represents for Wagner, among other things (such as the artist-hero), the Feuerbachian “free, self-determining individual” alluded to below, who, according to both Feuerbach and Wagner, is the foundation upon which the future social religion will be built, which will replace man’s former belief in the gods and their supernatural “other world.” And Wagner asks here what sort of paradisal, free human life we could create if all the olds, the old religion (belief in the supernatural), old law, old customs, old unexamined assumptions and articles of faith, old history predicated on man’s egoism rather than upon love, could be sent far, far away (“Fernen”). And here we find the basis for Siegfried’s allusion to Wotan’s confession of world history to Bruennhilde as something “far away” which he can’t grasp with his senses, which can only grasp the here-and-now, i.e., the present in the form of the musical motif, rather than the wide array of phenomena which are condensed in it through association. Bruennhilde, holding Wotan’s hoard of knowledge for Siegfried, has sent it far away, and Siegfried only grasps it in the present, as music, through his sense of hearing:
[P. 202] “In the free self-determining of the Individuality there … lies the basis of the social Religion of the Future … .
[P. 203] … we may guess the measureless wealth of living individual relationships, if we take them as purely-human, ever fully and entirely present; i.e. if we think every extrahuman or non-present thing that in the State, as Property and historic Right, has placed itself between them, has torn asunder their ties of Love, has dis-individualised, Class-uniformed, and State-established them, -- if we think this all sent far away [“fernen”?]. “ [514W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 202-203]
The extracts below offer the most dramatic evidence yet that by virtue of hearing Wotan’s confession, Bruennhilde has granted Wotan not only the gift of repressing intolerable knowledge of his true origin, nature, and history, into his unconscious, thereby redeeming himself from it temporarily, but furthermore has solved his problem of how to produce a hero, freed from consciousness of Wotan’s influence and guilt, who will nonetheless perform that deed which frees the gods from Alberich’s curse on the Ring. And, as so often, we find the basis of Wagner’s allegory in Feuerbach.
