Now, thanks to this Wonder, the gift of the musical motifs she brings to birth, Bruennhilde is able to make Siegfried a knower through feeling, i.e., able to give him an aesthetic intuition of Wotan’s thought, without the burden of the fear this thought would engender if conceptually conscious:
[P. 329] “Music cannot think: but she can materialise thoughts, i.e. she can give forth their emotional contents as no longer merely recollected, but made present. (…) [P. 330] … and inasmuch as we thus make our Feeling a living witness to the organic growth of one definite emotion from out another, we give to it the faculty of thinking: nay, we here give it a faculty of higher rank than thinking, to wit, the instinctive knowledge of a thought made real in Emotion.” [542W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 329-330] [See also 511W]
As a knower through feeling, Siegfried is Wotan reborn minus conscious conceptual knowledge of his true identity and history. Thus, following Wagner’s suggestive remarks below concerning the authentic artist’s (and of course Wagner’s) ignorance concerning the true source of his own inspiration, we may regard Siegfried the artist-hero as unconscious of the true source of his inspiration, which thus remains a mystery even to him:
“ … how can an artist hope to find his own intuitions perfectly reproduced in those of another person, since he himself stands before his own work of art – if it really is a work of art – as though before some puzzle, which is just as capable of misleading him as it can mislead the other person.” [641W-{8/23/56}Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 357]
However, the clue to the meaning of Siegfried’s art, i.e., Wagner’s art, the music-drama, lies in the musical motifs into which Wotan’s confession of poetic intent, his history and longing to redeem himself from it, has been condensed through Bruennhilde’s “Wonder.”
It now seems as if Wotan has attained his goal of creating the free hero who, wholly uninfluenced by Wotan’s motives and autonomous from him, nonetheless has done, of his own volition, what Wotan needed for him to do, secure the Ring so Alberich cannot regain its power. Though Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde of his unspoken secret is the true, hidden source of Siegfried’s unconscious artistic inspiration, Siegfried is solely conscious of a feeling, or music, the sublimated form of this repressed knowledge, similar in this respect to Wotan’s waking dream or allegory, Valhalla, whose true but forgotten source of inspiration was Alberich’s forging of his Ring.
Wotan wanted a Valhalla which would have no debts, no preconditions, no outward constraints. It was for this reason that he imagined a hero freed from all that constrains the gods (like religion’s false claim to the power of truth). Musical feeling, as Wagner redefined it, seemed to offer Wotan the means to spontaneously produce the feeling of man’s transcendent value without having to acknowledge thinking’s quibbles. What Wagner really meant when he began to proclaim after his introduction to Schopenhauer in 1854 that music produces the drama, is that man’s aesthetic intuition takes possession of man’s hoard of knowledge and Ring of consciousness, and thereby makes us feel as if we have consigned their claim upon us to oblivion. In this way tragedy becomes ecstasy, power becomes love. Wagner’s concern to grant music pride of place over poetical drama
