“But then Rub. plays us the first part of the (Opus) 106 Sonata [Beethoven], and our delightis boundless! … R: ‘It is like being taken into the workshop of the Will, one sees everything moving and stirring as if in the bowels of the earth.’ – ‘Anyone who could translate this into words would have the key to the enigma of the world.’ “ [1055W-{1/17/81}CD Vol. II, p. 600]
This is just another way of saying that Siegfried betrayed his muse Bruennhilde, his unconscious mind and its language music, by giving her away to his audience, Gunther and the Gibichungs. Siegfried committed this sin against his muse Bruennhilde by betraying the secret knowledge she’d been holding for Siegfried, the Ring, to the light of day. Wagner did this by providing his audience, in his musical motifs, the key to unlock the profoundest secret of Wagner the poet’s aim, an aim which up till then had presumably remained unconscious, a mystery, even for Wagner himself.
In Wagner’s theory of the music-drama, the dramatic action, that which is presented by the artist to his audience, is an allegory - like a waking dream, or like established religion’s mythology, which can only provide an easily digestible metaphor for the actual experience of divine revelation - which only provides the vaguest intimation of its original, hidden source of inspiration, the secret of the artist’s profoundest intent, an intent which according to Wagner remains as hidden from its author, if he’s an authentically inspired artist, as from his audience:
“We must assume that this … immediate vision seen by the Religious, to the ordinary human apprehension remains entirely foreign and unconveyable … . What, on the other hand, is imparted thereof … to the layman … , can be nothing more than a kind of allegory; to wit, a rendering of the unspeakable, impalpable, and never understandable through [their] immediate intuition, into the speech of common life and of its only feasible form of knowledge, erroneous per se. In this sacred allegory an attempt is made to transmit to worldly minds (der weltlichen Vorstellung) the mystery of the divine revelation: but the only relation it can bear to what the Religious had immediately beheld, is the relation of the day-told dream to the actual dream of night. (…) … the record left upon our own mind by a deeply moving dream is strictly nothing but an allegorical paraphrase, whose intrinsic disagreement with the original remains a trouble to our waking consciousness … .” [704W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 27-28]
However, in Siegfried’s betrayal of his muse Bruennhilde by giving her away to Gunther, his audience, and in the course of Siegfried’s narrative, the work of art in which Siegfried brings his betrayal of his muse’s secrets to a head, Siegfried reveals both to himself and others, consciously, the forgotten dream or nightmare, which originally gave birth to the waking dream, or allegory.
Siegfried’s narrative of his youthful adventures is Wagner’s metaphor for the Ring itself, the story of how Wagner the music-dramatist fell heir both to religious man’s longing for transcendent value, and to scientific man’s hoard of objective knowledge of man and his world (the hidden programme of all inspired music), and how, finally, through inspiration by his muse, Wagner was able to wondrously transform all that man fears into sublime art. By killing Fafner and taking possession of the Ring, Tarnhelm, and Hoard, Siegfried took aesthetic possession of the terrible world, reconciling man with a world transfigured by art. Wagner created his work, as Siegfried tells Gunther (accompanied by the Motif of Remembrance, (#@: E or F?)), in order to cheer up woebegone man, fallen man, who had given up his religious faith for the sake of the power objective knowledge can grant us, and needed consolation for his loss. Siegfried’s singing to the Gibichungs of his boyhood days is actually Wagner singing of mankind’s childhood, of the
