A conceptual basis for Bruennhilde’s comparison between herself and the reflection of Siegfried’s face in a still brook can be found in Wagner’s following poetic description of the union of poetical drama (Siegfried understood here as the conscious dramatist) with music (Bruennhilde regarded as a metaphor for the unconscious mind and its language, music), in which music takes on the definite individuality and specificity of language, while language enjoys the privilege of music’s restoration of involuntary, instinctive feeling, and the sense of infinitude and immediacy this brings, the oceanic feeling which so many experience in Wagner’s artworks. And Wagner adds that in this way an endless reaching content (i.e., the entire Ring drama, or Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde) is condensed to a definite utterance of feeling, i.e., musical motifs:
[P. 280] “… that horizontal extension, being the surface of Harmony, is its physiognomy as still discernible by the poet’s eye: it is the water-mirror which still reflects upon the poet his own image, while at the same time it presents this image to the view of him whom the poet wanted to address. This image, however, is in truth the poet’s realised Aim, -- a realisement which can only fall to the lot of the musician, in his turn, when he mounts from the depths, to the surface of the sea of Harmony; and on that surface will be celebrated the glorious marriage of Poetry’s begetting Thought with Music’s endless power of Birth. The wave-borne mirror-image is Melody. In it the [P. 281] poet’s Thought [Wotan’s confession of his hoard of knowledge (embodied now by Alberich’s Ring), and his poetic aim to redeem himself from its horrors] becomes an instinctively enthralling moment of Feeling; just as Music’s emotional-power therein acquires the faculty of definite and convincing utterance, of manifesting itself as a sharp-cut human shape, a plastic Individuality. Melody is the redemption of the poet’s endlessly conditioned thought into a deep-felt consciousness of emotion’s highest freedom (hoechster Gefuehlsfreiheit) [Siegfried will leave Alberich’s Ring with Bruennhilde, his unconscious mind, so that she can keep its power safe and protect him from the unhealing wound which it would deliver if he were conscious of it]: it is the willed and achieved Unwilful, the conscious and proclaimed Unconscious, the vindicated Necessity of an endless-reaching Content, condensed from its farthest branchings into an utmost definite utterance of Feeling [Wotan’s confession of the horror of human identity and history transmuted into redemptive musical motifs by Bruennhilde’s love].” [534W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 280-281]
“So neither can the artist prescribe from his own Will, nor summon into being, that Life of the Future which once shall redeem him: for it is the Other, the antithesis of himself, for which he yearns, toward which he is thrust … . Yet again, this living ocean of the Future cannot beget the mirror-image by its unaided self: it is a mother-element, which can bear alone what it has first received. This fecundating seed [Wotan’s confession, embodied now by Alberich’s Ring, which Siegfried, like Wotan before him, represses into his unconscious mind Bruennhilde by putting it in her hands for safekeeping], which in it alone can thrive, is brought it by the Poet, i.e. the Artist of the Present; and this seed is the quintessence of all rarest life-sap, which the Past has gathered up therein, to bring it to the Future as its necessary, its fertilising germ: for this Future is not thinkable, except as stipulated by the Past [Wotan’s past, i.e., collective, historical man’s past]. (…) And just as this verse, will the prophetic Artwork of the yearning Artist of the Present once wed itself with the ocean of the Life of the Future.” [555W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 376]
