Siegfried betrays his authentic art, the music-drama, as a logical consequence of the nature of the music-drama itself, not by succumbing to the temptation to produce a corrupted form of opera for the harlot Gutrune’s sake, and the half-Jewish Hagen’s sake, as Nattiez would have it.
Siegfried’s own music-drama will betray its secret source of inspiration, figuratively, through Siegfried’s conscious interpretation of the meaning of the Wagnerian musical motif, represented during this narrative by #128 and #129, the Woodbird’s Songs, which are Wagner’s metaphor for the music in his music-dramas. Wagner on many occasions described his musical motifs as allowing his audience to share the artist’s profoundest secret, his secret source of artistic inspiration:
“ These Melodic Moments … will be made by the orchestra into a kind of guides-to-Feeling (Gefuehlsweigweisern) through the whole labyrinthine (vielgewundenen) building of the drama. At their hand we become the constant fellow-knowers of the profoundest secret of the poet’s Aim, the immediate partners in its realisement.” [547W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 346]
“Though as regards Literature the diversity of European tongues presents an obstacle, yet in Music, that language understandable by all the world alike, there would be supplied the great conforming force, which, resolving the language of abstractions into that of feelings, would transmute the inmost secret of the artist’s thought (Anschauung) into a universal message … .” [679W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 302]
And here Wagner notes that through the music of the music-drama the music-dramatist lends his audience (“the Folk”) his own clairvoyance:
“[Speaking of Greek Tragedy, Wagner said:] The fashioning of the tragedy belonged no more in strictness to the poet, but to the lyrical musician: not one shape, one deed in all the tragedy, but what the godlike poet had beheld before, and ‘told’ to his Folk; merely the choregus led them now before the mortal eye of man itself, bewitching it by music’s magic to a clairvoyance like to that of the original ‘Finder.’ The lyric tragedian therefore was not Poet, but through mastery and employment of the highest art he materialised the world the poet had beheld, and set the Folk itself in his clairvoyant state. – Thus ‘musical’ art became the term for all the gifts of godlike vision, for every fashioning in illustration of that vision.” [967W-{6/79} On Poetry and Composition: PW Vol. VI, p. 140-141]
What Siegfried is doing, in disclosing to his Gibichung audience how he came to grasp the meaning of Birdsong, i.e., how Wagner came to grasp the hidden programme, the historical preconditions, which inspire all authentically great music, is that, as Wagner said, he is providing mankind with a philosophy which will explain the enigma of the world (i.e., man’s unique place in the world) to him:
“ … Schopenhauer believes he must recognise in Music itself an idea of the world, since he who could entirely translate it into abstract concepts would have found withal a philosophy to explain the world itself.” [765W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 65]
