condense into a single, present moment of highly individualized feeling the entire history of its past (and future) associations with elements of the dramatic action and libretto:
“ … even the simplest action confounds and bewilders the Understanding, which would fain regard it through the anatomical microscope, by the immensity of its ramifications: would it comprehend that action, it can only do so by discarding the microscope and fetching forth the image in which alone its human eye can grasp; and this comprehension is ultimately enabled by the instinctive Feeling [Bruennhilde] – as vindicated by the Understanding [Wotan’s confession]. This image of the phenomena, in which alone the Feeling can comprehend them, … this image, for the Aim of the poet, who must likewise take the phenomena of Life and compress them from their view-less many-memberedness into a compact, easily survey-able shape, -- this image is nothing else but the Wonder [i.e., Wagner’s musical motifs]. [521W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 212]
Having defined the “Wonder” in brief above, he now examines it in greater depth:
“The condensation of the most varied and extended phenomena, where many members harmonise to produce one, single, definite effect; the perspicuous presentation of such a harmony [in Wagner’s musical motifs], which to us remains unseizable without the deepest research and widest experience [as in Alberich’s and Wotan’s accumulation of their hoard of knowledge in the course of world history], and fills us with amazement when beheld, -- in art …, this is to be obtained through nothing save the miraculous. Here in poetic fiction the tremendous chain of connection embracing the most heterogeneous phenomena is condensed to an easily-surveyed bond of fewer links [Wotan’s confession is condensed into Wagner’s musical motifs], yet the force and might of the whole great chain [Wotan’s confession of world-history] is put into these few: and in art this might is miracle [Wagner’s “Wonder,” the gift of his musical motifs, is his substitute for the religious notion of the miraculous].” [478W-{49-51 (?)} Notes for ‘Artisthood of the Future’ (unfinished); Sketches and Fragments: PW Vol. VIII, p. 371]
When Wagner alludes above to discovering a harmony underlying a vast array of distinct phenomena, otherwise unseizable without the deepest research and widest experience, we find here the basis for Wagner’s metaphor of the Wandering Wotan gathering a hoard of knowledge during his travels over the earth (Erda), and personal visits to Erda. Wotan’s wandering represents the entirety of human experience of the world, and man’s advancement in knowledge, over time. It is this hoard of terrible knowledge which Wotan redeems aesthetically (thus “discovering a harmony underlying a vast array of distinct phenomena”) by dipping it in music through his repression of these unbearable thoughts into his unconscious mind, Bruennhilde. This hoard of knowledge of the gods’ inevitable fate was the basis for Wotan’s existential fear, which Siegfried will not suffer because Bruennhilde, holding this knowledge for Siegfried, protects him from Alberich’s curse on the Ring, the curse of consciousness. But these motifs, as Wagner says above, possess the force of the whole array of phenomena, widely separated in time and space, with which they have been associated in the course of the drama. This explains why Wagner’s music-dramas always feel more substantial and meaningful, at any given moment, than even the immediate dramatic and musical context might seem to warrant. One always feels as if each given moment is linked to the whole, and is portentous with the power of the whole. This also helps to explain why directorial tampering with Wagner’s stage imagery, which he deliberately left general and vague in order not to impose a particular or topical reading on his universal myth, can undermine the numinous, dreamlike effect which Wagner sought.
