has its foundation in Wotan’s need to create a hero freed from Wotan’s (i.e., history’s, or drama’s) influence, who will of his own volition redeem the gods.
Let’s examine some of Wagner’s thoughts on this subject of music’s new status as the mysterious, unconscious foundation of the drama:
[P. 106] “Seeing that Music does not portray the Ideas inherent in the world’s phenomena, but is itself an Idea of the World, and a comprehensive one, it naturally includes the Drama in itself … . (…) As a drama does not depict human characters, but lets them display their immediate selves, so a piece of music gives us in its motives the character of the world’s appearances according to their inmost essence (An-sich).” (…) [P. 107] We … should not go far astray, if we defined Music as man’s qualification a priori for fashioning the Drama. Just as we construct for ourselves the world of semblances through application of the laws of Time and Space existing a priori in our brain, so this conscious representment of the world’s idea in Drama would thus be foreordained by those inner laws of Music, operating in the dramatist equally unconsciously [P. 107] with the laws of Causality we bring into employment for apperception of the phenomenal world.” [782W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 106-107]
Thus, in Wagner’s mind, the drama (the subject of Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde) is now subordinated to Wagner’s substitute for lost religious faith, music, represented by Bruennhilde and the love she shares with Siegfried, which inspires his art:
“Hear my creed: Music can never and in no possible alliance cease to be the highest, the redeeming art. It is of her nature, that what all the other arts but hint at, through her and in her becomes the most undoubtable of certainties, the most direct and definite of truths.” [650W-{2/57} On Liszt’s Symphonic Poems: PW Vol. III, p. 247]
However, in the following extract Wagner adds that this seemingly sui generis music is in fact often the product of a mood which a thought of an experience arouses in the composer, which inspires him to write music:
“ … the experience that a piece of music loses nothing of its character even when the most diverse texts are laid beneath it, shows the relation of Music to Poetry to be a sheer illusion: for it transpires that in vocal music it is not the poetic thought one seizes … but at most the mood that thought aroused in the musician when it moved him to music.” [781W-{9-12/70}Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 104]
Given Wagner’s line of reasoning, it was inevitable he would ultimately grant music, as the new religion, an almost supernatural status as a religious mystery wholly inaccessible to conscious reason (and thus presumably irreducible to Feuerbachian science):
[P. 86] “Here the might of the musician is conceivable as nothing but Magic. It certainly is an enchanted state into which we fall while listening to a true Beethovenian masterwork, when in every particle of the piece – which our sober senses would tell us was merely the technical means of exhibiting a given form – we discern a supernatural life (geisterhafte Lebendigkeit), … [P. 87]
