which is coming to its ultimate fulfillment in Siegfried’s death. Siegfried the music-dramatist must die because mankind’s religious sin of pessimism, or world-denial, actually reaches its apogee in Wagner’s music-drama, the last vestige of man’s waning religious faith, and Siegfried the artist-hero is Wagner’s metaphor for himself, the 19th Century Music-Dramatist.
Gunther now introduces the subject of tragic hubris, from Greek drama, into Siegfried’s fate, saying of Siegfried: “(#33b/#35) You overjoyous hero,” recalling Siegfried’s penetration of Loge’s protective Ring of fire (the veil of Maya) to wake and win his muse Bruennhilde. To Siegfried’s question (aside to Hagen, and accompanied now by #42 Variant/#33b), is Bruennhilde making Gunther brood, Hagen responds, with self-conscious wit and wisdom: “If only he [Gunther] understood her (#174b Variant) as you do the singing of birds!” Hagen’s seemingly off-hand remark makes explicit what has only been implicit up until now, the deep underlying connection between the unconscious, involuntary mind (Bruennhilde), which produces dreaming, and music (the singing of woodbirds), in Wagner’s thinking. And, appropriately, Hagen’s remark is accompanied by the Motif of Remembrance, (#@: E or F?). {{ It is still to be determined whether the Motif of Remembrance is a #139 Variant, or an inversion of one of #174’s segments. }} By virtue of Siegfried’s having given away the secrets kept by Siegfried’s unconscious mind (Bruennhilde) to his audience (Gunther and the Gibichungs), Siegfried and his audience are about to become consciously aware of Wagner’s unique insights into the inner processes of artistic creation of which Wagner once spoke to Mathilde Wesendonck:
“ … I always hark back to my Schopenhauer, who has led me to the most remarkable trains of thought … in amendment of some of his imperfections. The theme becomes more interesting to me every day, for it is a question here of explications such as I alone can give [how through sexual love – Wagner’s metaphor for unconscious artistic inspiration - the Schopenhauerian Will, man’s inherent egoism, can redeem itself from itself, instead of through Schopenhauer’s method, the quieting or stilling of the Will by contemplation], since there never was another man who was poet and musician at once in my sense, and therefore to whom an insight into inner processes has become possible such as could be expected of no other.” [665W-{12/8/58}Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: RWLMW, p. 78]
And Siegfried will give away the secret of his formerly unconscious artistic inspiration, his true relationship with Bruennhilde, by performing a play within a play, a miniaturization of the plot of the Ring itself, in the narrative he sings now to the Gibichungs explaining how he acquired knowledge of the meaning of birdsong, i.e., the hidden source of inspiration for the music of his music-dramas. This play within the play is modeled on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the play Hamlet has written for the court is identical to the plot of Hamlet itself, and, like Hamlet, Siegfried finds his doom in this play. Because Siegfried’s sung narrative of the story of his life is the Ring itself in miniature, since it effectively recounts how Wagner himself came to be a music-dramatist, and considering also that its purpose is to interpret the Woodbirdsong, it is clear that Nattiez was incorrect when he surmised that the narrative Hagen persuades Siegfried to sing is Wagner’s metaphor for one of the corrupt genres of opera, for the sake of which Siegfried has allegedly betrayed his true muse of inspiration of the Wagnerian music-drama, Bruennhilde, in favor of a false muse, the coquette, the wanton, Gutrune, who represents a corrupt opera genre such as Parisian Opera Comique. [Nattiez: p. 84-88] Siegfried’s sung narrative of the story of his life is a representation of the music-drama itself, particularly the Ring which is now in progress, and
