Note that in the first several extracts below Wagner suggests that the artistic genius’s unconscious inspiration runs against the laws of nature, since it is not inspired by outward experience, but instead comes from within, from subjective feeling, the music in man, and imposes itself on outward experience, as any aesthetic (i.e., subjective) endeavor does. Our first extract I cited in my discussion of the transition from R.1 to R.2, to describe how Alberich’s forging of the Ring in Nibelheim, which we may construe as Wotan’s nightmare, already forgotten after he woke and saw the completed fortress Valhalla before him, produced the unconscious “Noth” – i.e., the anguish and the need – which gave birth to Wotan’s waking dream Valhalla, the refuge from Alberich’s “Noth”:
[P. 111] “ … Shakespeare’s spirit-shapes [or, if you will, the protagonists of Wagner’s music dramas, who present themselves to us on the stage] would be brought to sound through the full awaking of the inner organ of Music: or Beethoven’s motives would inspire the palsied sight to see those shapes distinctly, and embodied in those spirit-shapes they now would move before our eyes turned clairvoyant. … the prodigious force [i.e., unconscious artistic inspiration, which gives birth to the work of art which the artist presents to an audience] here framing appearances from within outwards, against the ordinary laws of Nature, must be engendered by the deepest Want (Noth). And that Want presumably would be the same as finds vent in the common course of life, in the scream of the suddenly awakened from an obsessing vision of profoundest sleep [(*) Translator’s Footnote: “Cf. Kundry’s awakening in Parsifal, acts ii. and iii.] … . This awaking out of deepest Want we witness in that redoubtable leap from instrumental into vocal music [which Wagner dramatized in Woglinde’s Lullaby, #4, music which produced the first words of the Ring, a metaphor for the birth of language itself, and even the drama of human history. Wagner here is referring to the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in which instrumental music is taken over by the human voice, which in effect tells us the meaning of this music by giving it words, just as Siegfried comes to know the meaning of birdsong.] … . (…) [P. 112] What we here experience is a certain overcharge, a vast compulsion to unload without, only to be compared with the stress to waken from an agonising dream; and the important issue for the Art-genius of mankind, is that this special stress called forth an artistic deed whereby that genius gained a novel power, the qualification for begetting the highest Artwork.” [786W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 111-112]
In our next extract Wagner again speaks of the genius’s unconscious artistic inspiration as somehow miraculous and supernatural, what he calls the “god-within-us,” the inborn antidote to Schopenhauer’s egoistic Will:
[P. 91] “Conversation about the Schopenhauer letters, … R. deploring the mistaken ideas about the dissemination of his philosophy; R. … says: these donkeys who don’t believe in God and who think such figures as Jesus or a great creative genius move according to the ordinary processes of nature [Erda’s knowledge of natural law and impulse]! They cannot understand that what prevails here is a special urge [Siegfried’s unconscious artistic inspiration by his unconscious mind and muse, Erda’s daughter Bruennhilde], a noble need which in the end produces something good. But one mustn’t think in this connection of the old Jewish God [i.e., Jehovah, or Wotan, who is indebted to Alberich as the founder of the gods’ heavenly abode, Valhalla, since #19>#20a].
(…)
