and wed by the authentic artist-hero Siegfried, to whom her chastity must be sacrificed. It is only by renouncing the key religious notion of transcendence, whose symbol here is the Valkyrie chastity which denies man’s physical nature, and reaffirming man’s relationship with the real world, in art, that the Wagnerian redemption by love, i.e., redemption by art, can transpire. Religious man’s chastity, a symbol of world-renunciation, is to be replaced by the secular artist’s world-affirmation. Thus Wotan’s nihilistic intent to end it all finds its escape hatch: Wotan’s religious impulse can find a new release on life, in art, without making the preposterous and falsifiable claim to spiritual transcendence. In other words, our means to feel as if we transcend nature, stems from nature.
And here we have the primary passages recording Wagner’s critique of Schopenhauer’s concept of redemption. Note that in this first passage Wagner identifies sexual love’s ecstasy, as a redemptive force, with genius, i.e., artistic inspiration:
“… I have been slowly rereading Schopenhauer’s principal work, and this time it has inspired me, quite extraordinarily, to expand and – in certain details – even to correct his system. The subject is uncommonly important, and it must, I think, have been reserved for a man of my own particular nature, at this particular period of his life, to gain insights here of a kind that could never have disclosed themselves to anyone else. It is a question … of pointing out the path to salvation, which has not been recognized by any philosopher, and especially not by Sch. [Schopenhauer], but which involves a total pacification of the will through love, and not through any abstract human love, but a love engendered on the basis of sexual love, i.e. the attraction between man and woman. (…) The presentation of this argument will take me very deep and very far: it involves a more detailed explanation of the state in which we become capable of recognizing ideas, and of genius in general, which I no longer conceive of as a state in which the intellect is divorced from the will, but rather as an intensification of the individual intellect to the point where it becomes the organ of perception of the genus or species, and thus of the will itself, which is the thing in itself; herein lies the only possible explanation for that marvellous and enthusiastic joy and ecstasy felt by any genius at the highest moments of perception, moments which Sch. seems scarcely to recognize, since he is able to find them only in a state of calm and in the silencing of the individual affects of the will.” [664W-{12/1/58} Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 432]
“We can but take it that the individual will, silenced in the plastic artist through pure beholding, awakes in the musician as the universal Will … . Hence the great difference in the mental state of the concipient musician and the designing artist; hence the radically diverse effects of music and of painting: here profoundest stilling, there utmost excitation of the will. In other words we here have the will imprisoned by the fancy (Wahn) of its difference from the essence of things outside, and unable to lift itself above its barriers save in the purely disinterested beholding of objects; whilst there, in the musician’s case, the will feels one forthwith, above all bounds of individuality: for Hearing has opened it the gate through which the world thrusts home to it, it to the world. This prodigious breaking-down the floodgates of Appearance must necessarily call forth in the inspired musician a state of ecstasy wherewith no other can compare: in it the will perceives itself the almighty Will of all things: it has not mutely to yield place to contemplation, but proclaims itself aloud as conscious World-Idea.” [771W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 72]
