bit later?]) As my arm enfolds you, I hold you fast; as my heart beats wildly against your own; as our glances ignite and breath feeds on breath, eye to eye and (#140 vari:) mouth to mouth (:#141 varis; :#140 vari), (#134:) then, to me, you must be what, fearful, you were and will be (:#134)! (#140 frags:) Then gone were the burning doubt that Bruennhilde might not now be mine (:#140 frags).
Contrary to Bruennhilde’s resolve, Siegfried insists on plunging into the flood of that brook in which his image was reflected back to him, to drown in his passion for Bruennhilde, accompanied by the new, urgent, rapidly repeated motif #144. He describes his passion as Loge’s fire, which longs to be cooled in Bruennhilde’s flood. He climaxes with a shouted demand (with #134 sounding in the orchestra): Bruennhilde must wake for him! Then Siegfried and Bruennhilde engage in a rather strange and off-putting argument: Bruennhilde says she was, and will be, Siegfried’s own, while Siegfried insists she be so now. Siegfried sums up his demand, again with #134 in the background: “then, to me, you must be what, fearful, your were and will be!”
This awkward grammatical construction actually makes eminent sense if we grasp it as Wagner’s poetical version of his theory of the “Wonder.” What Siegfried is saying, in effect, is that thanks to Bruennhilde’s redemptive love, the entirety of Wotan’s confession of world history and the gods’ fate, all that is widely disbursed in time and space, has been condensed into moments of feeling as musical motifs, which make present both the past and future, because the sounding of a motif calls up memories of all the past with which it was associated, and foreshadows all those things with which it will be associated in the future. This is the true meaning of Wagner’s concept of redemption by love, i.e., redemption of man’s religious impulse through Wagner’s secular music-drama and its “Wonder.” And let us not overlook the fact that Siegfried correlates “fearing” with Bruennhilde’s knowledge of past and future. It is implicit therefore that by virtue of Bruennhilde’s magical protection, only to be obtained through loving union with his muse Bruennhilde, which allows Siegfried to live solely in the now, without concern for all that is far away (“Fernen,” past, future, or distant in space), and that has been repressed into the unconscious through Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde (because Wotan so feared to contemplate this knowledge that he could not bear to become conscious of it), Siegfried can restore his courage and fearlessness.
Wagner had some very interesting things to say about Siegfried’s experience of losing himself in a sea of oblivion, or musical harmony. This was Wagner’s secular substitute for the religious man’s mystical experience of oneness with the cosmos. As always, there are antecedents in Feuerbach, who noted that feeling, as opposed to thinking, gives us the impression of infinity:
“In the activity of reason I feel a distinction between myself and reason in me; this distinction is the limit of individuality; in feeling I am conscious of no distinction between myself and feeling; and with this absence of distinction there is an absence also of the sense of limitation. Hence it arises that to so many men reason appears finite, and only feeling infinite.” [154F-EOC: p. 287]
Wagner elaborates Feuerbach’s thesis in its application to music in particular. We can see in this passage also Wagner’s equation of immersion in water or the sea with the mystical experience, the
