Bruennhilde and Siegfried during their ecstatic love-duet, and presumably by the audience for the art to which their union will give birth.
When, accompanied by the Twilight of the Gods Motif #54, the Norns proclaim “An end to eternal wisdom,” their mother Erda’s wisdom - which embraces the inevitable end of the gods - has temporarily been repressed into the unconscious where Bruennhilde hides it. So long as Bruennhilde maintains this unspoken secret, so long as it sleeps in her and only emerges into consciousness sublimated as a dream rather than as waking reality, the actual twilight of the gods will not occur. For the Norns’ eternal wisdom lives on unchanged in the world and its laws, in spite of any subjective psychological event which takes place in the artist-hero Siegfried and his audience. They descend now to sleep with their mother Erda, accompanied by the “Magic Sleep” (or “Godhead Lost”) motif #97, and finally by #87, the fate motif representing the world-events whose historical necessity they spin. But their knowledge has only waned temporarily before Wotan’s will Bruennhilde. Should Siegfried or Bruennhilde somehow betray that knowledge to the light of day, the gods’ fate will be sealed, and will come about not figuratively but in fact.
How has Siegfried’s loving union with Bruennhilde made love, feeling, the heart’s need, music, the new law of the world? It is through a trick the mind plays on us, as Wagner describes below. Of all the arts music seems to aesthetic philosophers the least directly connected with human experience, since it contains no images or ideas from the real world, only abstract patterns of notes which somehow capture all the nuances of the human passions and sentiments, as if music was their very essence. But, as Wagner notes below, these expansive moods which seem to us sui generis (just as our dreams seem to have been created within us by something else, though they are after all our very own, the product of our unconscious mind), are in fact the indirect product of events in our past life which are transmuted over time by our unconscious mind into moods which presumably have lost all trace, for us, of the events which originally inspired them:
[P. 79] “… grand, passionate, and lasting emotions, dominating all our feelings and ideas for months and often half a year, these drive the musician to those vaster, more intense conceptions to which we owe, among others, the origin of a Sinfonia eroica. These greater moods, as deep suffering of soul or potent exaltation, may date from outer causes, for we all are men and our fate is ruled by outward circumstances; but when they force the musician to production, these greater moods have already turned to music [P. 80] in him, so that at the moment of creative inspiration it is no longer the outer event that governs the composer, but the musical sensation which it has begotten in him.” [355W-{10/41} A Happy Evening: PW Vol. VII, p. 79-80]
It is precisely in this sense that Wotan’s repressed hoard of knowledge, which he imparted to Bruennhilde, influences Siegfried unconsciously, and therefore in such a manner that Siegfried seems to be inspired spontaneously, without any influence by Wotan. Through this means it seems as if music, heart-felt subjective feeling, is now the law of the world which trumps the objective laws represented by the Norns’ knowledge of time, space, and causality. Here are some of Wagner’s thoughts on this particular question:
“Everywhere we see the inner law, only conceivable as sprung from the spirit of Music, prescribe the outer law that regulates the world of sight … .” [791W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 121]
