suffering the consequences which would ensue if he were conscious of it. Thus, Froh’s hope that thanks to Alberich’s sacrifice of love for the sake of the Ring’s power, the gods could possess the Ring and its power without suffering its curse, without renouncing love (i.e., without renouncing the kinds of human thought, religion and art, which combine the power of the human mind, the Ring, with feeling, or love) comes to fruition in Siegfried’s love for his muse Bruennhilde.
And here, in Wagner’s description of the means through which his music in general. and musical motifs in particular, carry the burden of knowledge of the protagonists’ motives, so that the characters are freed from having to reveal their motives in words, we find the basis, again, for Siegfried’s innocence and naivete, and for Wotan’s assumption that by imparting his confession to Bruennhilde it would remain forever unspoken:
[P. 305] “The longing to raise the Opera to the dignity of genuine Drama could never wake and wax in the musician, before great masters had enlarged the province of this art in that spirit which now has made our German music acknowledgedly victorious over all its rivals. Through the fullest application of this legacy of our great masters we have arrived at uniting Music so completely with the Drama’s action, that this very marriage enables the action itself to gain that ideal freedom – i.e. release from all necessity of appealing to abstract reflection … .
[P. 306] By incessantly revealing to us the inmost motives of the action, in their widest ramifications, Music at like time makes it possible to display that action itself in drastic definition: as the characters no longer need to tell us of their impulses [or ‘grounds of action’ – Beweggruende] in terms of the reflecting consciousness, their dialogue thereby gains that naïve pointedness (Praezision) which constitutes the very life of Drama.” [842W-{2/73} Prologue to a Reading of Twilight of the Gods: PW Vol. V, p. 305-306]
[P. 407] “ ‘An improviser such as an actor [the mime Siegfried, acting out the drama Wotan wrote for him] must belong entirely to the present moment, never think of what is to come, indeed not even know it, as it were. The peculiar thing about me as an artist, for instance, is that I look on each detail as an entirety and never say to myself, ‘Since this or that will follow, you must do such and such, modulate like this or like that.’ I think, ‘Something will turn up.’ Otherwise I would be lost; and yet I know I am unconsciously obeying a plan [i.e., Wotan’s unspoken secret of the poetic aim, his confession to his unconscious mind, Bruennhilde]." [805W-{9/1/71} CD Vol. I, p. 407]
And in our final set of extracts which offer us insight into this passage Wagner presents, in a further elucidation of the concept of the “Wonder” in relation to his musical motifs, the best possible explanation of why Siegfried told Bruennhilde that while his senses only grasp and feel her, in the here and now, he cannot grasp what is far away in time or space:
[P. 348] “Let us … sum up this whole matter in one [P. 349] exhaustive definition, and denote the most perfect Unity of artistic Form as that in which a widest conjuncture of the phenomena of Human Life – as Content [Wotan’s confession] – can impart itself to the Feeling [to Bruennhilde] in so completely intelligible an Expression, that in all its ‘moments’ this Content shall completely stir, and alike completely satisfy, the Feeling. The Content, then, has to be one that is ever present in the Expression [thanks to the musical motifs into which Bruennhilde’s love transmutes and distills the essential contents of Wotan’s confession], and therefore the Expression one that ever
