Speaking of Siegfried’s and Bruennhilde’s description of themselves as one single unit, one identity, one person (which is no surprise, since Bruennhilde is Siegfried’s unconscious mind), Wagner, significantly enough, described his own unconscious artistic inspiration as a marriage of himself to himself. I first found the following passage cited by Donington in his book The ‘Ring’ and its Symbols, and it has always stimulated the deepest reflection on the metaphorical significance of the relationship of the heroes to the heroines in Wagner’s three canonic romantic operas, and the four music-dramas:
“I had been distressingly but more or less decidedly disengaging myself from the world; everything in me had turned to negation and rejection; even my artistic creativeness was distressing to me, for it was longing with an insatiable longing to replace that negation, that rejection, by something affirmative and positive, the marriage of myself to myself (‘sich-mir-vermaehlende’).” [657W-{9/18/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: Quoted by Robert Donington in his Wagner’s ‘Ring’ and its Symbols; p. 152]
And in the remarkable passage below Wagner explicitly describes the two aspects of his own psyche which must join in loving, marital union, to produce the unconsciously inspired music-drama, figuratively, as Beethoven’s music and Shakespeare’s dramatic gift:
[P. 110] “… let us … compare the work of Shakespeare [with musical composition by Beethoven]; and we shall find him [Shakespeare] to be the ghost-seer and spirit-raiser, who from the depths of his own inner consciousness conjures the shapes of men from every age, and sets them before his waking eye and ours in such a fashion that they seem to really live. … we may term Beethoven, whom we have likened to the clairvoyant, the hidden motor (den wirkenden Untergrund) of Shakespeare the ghost-seer: what brings forth Beethoven’s melodies, projects the spirit-shapes of Shakespeare; and both will blend into one being, if we let the musician enter not only the world of Sound, but at like [P. 111] time that of Light.” [785W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 110-111]
And so, riding on Grane’s (music’s) back, and protected by Bruennhilde’s shield (her loving protection, which figuratively renders Siegfried unconscious of the paralyzing knowledge of the truth which so benumbed Wotan), Siegfried rides off on his famous journey down the Rhine, where he will finally come to shore at the archetypal Gibichung Kingdom, Wagner’s archetype for the modern State, essentially secular but still holding on to the old forms, the worship of the gods, to undertake his new adventures inspired by his muse Bruennhilde. Siegfried is inspired now by feeling alone, not by thought, but his feeling is nonetheless not purely spontaneous and not freed from ulterior motive. Its ultimate source of inspiration is Alberich’s forging of his Ring from the Rhinegold which gave birth to consciousness, and Wotan’s (man’s) futile quest to preserve man’s religious longing for transcendent value in the face of Alberich’s advancement (through his son and proxy Hagen) of conscious knowledge. Siegfried the secular artist-hero is the unwitting pawn of historical man’s desperate quest to restore an innocence forever lost. Curiously, Mime had warned Siegfried not to try and go out into the cunning world until he’d learned the meaning of fear, and Mime said that Siegfried’s mother – presumably Sieglinde – had insisted that Siegfried learn this lesson. But Bruennhilde has in fact taught Siegfried the meaning of fear, and so he is now journeying into the world to the tune of #111, the so-called “Siegfried’s Mission Motif,” {{ and perhaps even #110 }}, both motifs recalling Siegfried’s self-proclaimed emancipation from Mime in the finale of S.1.1.
