of all his bliss, because he has become conscious of the fact that it merely perpetuates his suffering from his unhealing wound. What is the source of his unhealing wound? The fact that he, the artist-hero, was born, like Siegfried, through his mother’s (Nature’s) death, and therefore Tristan has fallen heir to Wotan’s (religious man’s) sin against all that was, is, or will be, objective truth. And what is more, through his loving union with his muse Isolde, he perpetuates that sin. That is why Tristan commits suicide rather than seek further healing from Isolde in the end: he recognizes that his being born through his mother’s death, his loving union with his muse of inspiration, Isolde, his unhealing wound, and his former ignorance of all this bitter truth (his status as a pure fool), are one and the same. It is no wonder that Wagner, in his Epilogue to ‘The Nibelung’s Ring,’ stated flatly that Twilight of the Gods and Tristan and Isolde have essentially the same plot, are variants of the same myth. [See 811W]
But this is also true of Wagner’s last music-drama, Parsifal. It is this unresolved existential dilemma, as dramatized in both the Ring’s final music-drama, Twilight of the Gods, and in Tristan and Isolde, which led Wagner to seek its resolution in his final artwork, Parsifal. Parsifal, like Tristan, has a traumatic revelation of his true nature, past history, and identity as the murderer of his mother (Herzeleide literally, Mother Nature figuratively), in Act Two, at the very moment Kundry, his muse of unconscious artistic inspiration in all his former lives, kisses him. In a devastating flash of intuition Parsifal sees that his former foolishness (i.e., his unconsciousness of his true identity, past history, and fate: like Bruennhilde, his muse Kundry knew who he was, but he did not), and his unwitting sin of world-renunciation (his murder of his mother, Nature, by neglecting her in order to seek out the companionship of the Grail knights, who throughout their lives, devoted as they are to positing transcendence, continually commit Wotan’s sin of world-renunciation) are identical with his sexual union with his muse Kundry (his unconscious artistic inspiration, which perpetuates religion’s sin of world-renunciation), and with Amfortas’s unhealing wound, a wound which the artist-hero Parsifal has perpetually reopened in his prior incarnations as culture heroes such as Buddha, Christ, or inspired artists, by infecting mankind with a longing for the impossible, a longing for transcendent meaning which truth can never satisfy. See my chapters on Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal for more detailed discussions of their conceptual links with the Ring.
Returning now to our story, perhaps the most dramatic evidence that Hagen’s influence merely reflects Siegfried’s own nature and destiny as a music-dramatist is the motival genealogy of #154, the motif representing both of Hagen’s potions. Its ultimate source is Loge’s Motif #35 (which Dunning coins “Loge’s transformations”). #35 is the basis for the two closely related motifs representing Mime’s Tarnhelm, #42, and #43, which I have suggested represent imagination in service either to science (Alberich in his quest for objective knowledge and the power it brings), or religion and art (Wotan’s retreat into subjective feeling, aesthetic intuition, with the help of Loge’s cunning). #43, associated with the Tarnhelm’s property which allows its owner to change forms or travel to any spot at will, gives birth to #154, Hagen’s Potion Motif. This motival genealogy represents the Wagnerian “Wonder,” Wagner’s use of his musical motifs as a special kind of imaginative symbolism, which permits Wagner to make present in emotion, at any moment, a vast array of feelings, incidents, characters, symbols, or ideas, dispersed widely in time and space within the drama. Siegfried lives in the present, without being troubled by a past. and freed from fear of the future, thanks to Bruennhilde, his unconscious mind, who holds for him the knowledge of his true identity as Wotan, and his fate, contained in Wotan’s confession.
