the Rhine’s waters wash away the curse? We have it right here in a letter Wagner wrote to August Roeckel in one of several attempts to clarify the plot of the Ring:
“ … the pernicious power that poisons love is concentrated in the gold that is stolen from nature and put to ill use, the Nibelung’s ring: the curse that clings to it is not lifted until it is restored to nature and until the gold has been returned to the Rhine. This, too, becomes clear to Wodan only at the very end, once he has reached the final goal of his tragic career; in his lust for power, he had utterly ignored what Loge had so frequently and so movingly warned him of at the beginning of the poem; initially – thanks to Fafner’s deed – he learned to recognize the power of the curse; but not until the ring proves the ruin of Siegfried, too, does he see that only by restoring to the Rhine what had been stolen from its depths can evil be destroyed, and that is why he makes his own longed-for downfall a pre-condition of the extirpation of a most ancient wrong.“ [616W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 307]
We find here the basis for a key distinction which will take on considerable importance in the last act of Twilight of the Gods, that Wotan’s hope to be redeemed from Alberich’s curse through the love which Siegfried and Bruennhilde share, i.e., through secular art, is dashed, and is therefore completely distinct from the ultimate redemption, the restoration of the Ring to the Rhinedaughters, to which Wotan has resorted in prompting Waltraute to determine whether Bruennhilde will restore Alberich’s Ring to the Rhinedaughters and thereby take the weight of the curse off of gods and world. The Rhinedaughters themselves, ultimate agents of redemption from the Ring curse, will make this distinction in T.3.1.
Wotan’s despairing acknowledgment that his hope of living on, redeemed, in the love of Siegfried and Bruennhilde, is futile, finds an echo in Wagner’s critique of his own art, which expresses a despair that began to trouble Wagner in the early fifties while he was engaged in completing the Ring libretto. The notion of art as a profound form of play, once enthusiastically endorsed by Wagner, in his later life came to seem to him glib and shallow, given the earnest, terrible nature of the world, and the seemingly invincible egoism of man’s (Schopenhauerian) Will, which was the ultimate subject of art:
[P. 246] “I am often now beset by strange thoughts on ‘art’, and on the whole I cannot help finding that, if we had life, we should have no need of art. Art begins at precisely the point where life breaks off: where nothing more is present, we call out in art, ‘I wish’. I simply do not understand how a truly happy individual could ever hit upon the idea of producing ‘art’: only in life can we ‘achieve’ anything. – is our ‘art’ therefore not simply a confession of our impotence? – Indeed! Or such at least is our art, and all the art which springs from our present dissatisfaction with life. It is no more than ‘a desire expressed with the utmost clarity’! (…)
[P. 247] Ah, how ludicrous it would be if, with all our enthusiasm for art, what we were fighting over were simply thin air!” [583W-{1/12/52} Letter to Theodor Uhlig: SLRW, p. 246-247]
[P. 229] “In full avowal of the Will-to-live, the Greek mind did not … avoid the awful side of life, but turned this very knowledge to a matter of artistic contemplation: it saw the terrible with wholest truth, but this truth itself became the spur to a re-presentment whose very truthfulness was beautiful. In the workings of the Grecian spirit we thus are made spectators of a kind of pastime, a play in whose vicissitudes the joy of Shaping seeks to counteract the awe of Knowing. Content
