request that Bruennhilde restore the Ring to the Rhine and renounce the futile quest to redeem the world through love, so Bruennhilde now implicitly acknowledges this failure. But Wagner’s ultimate critique of art, especially his own art, as a means to redemption, he saved for his final music-drama Parsifal, in which the muse Bruennhilde’s reincarnate form Kundry will strive and fail to offer redemption to Parsifal (Siegfried reborn) through loving union with her, i.e., through unconscious inspiration of redemptive art, and ultimately will only attain redemption in death, after Parsifal has rejected her offer of redemption through art as not only futile, but downright evil and perverse.
In our following extract, previously cited, Wagner lay the groundwork for his critique of his own art, as a form of play which evades man’s existential dilemma for the sake of sweet, false consolation, which would become a primary theme of Parsifal:
[P. 229] “In full avowal of the Will-to-live, the Greek mind did not indeed 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 with this, rejoicing in the semblance, since it has banned therein its truthfulness of knowledge, it asks not after the goal of Being, and … leaves the fight of Good and Evil undecided; willing to pay for a lovely life by death, it merely strives to beautify death [Siegfried’s Death] also. We have called this a pastime, in a higher sense, namely a play of the Intellect in its release from the Will, which [P. 230] now only serves for self-mirroring, -- the pastime of the over-rich in spirit. But the trouble of the constitution of the World is this: all steps in evolution of the utterances of the Will, from the reaction of primary elements, through all the lower organisations, right up to the richest human intellect, stand side by side in space and time, and consequently the highest organism cannot but recognise itself and all its works as founded on the Will’s most brutal of manifestations. Even the flower of the Grecian spirit was rooted to the conditions of this complex existence, which has for base a ball of earth revolving after laws immutable, with all its swarm of lives the rawer and more inexorable, the deeper the scale descends. As manhood’s fairest dream that flower filled the world for long with its illusive fragrance, though to none but minds set free from the Will’s sore want was it granted to bathe therein; and what but a mummery at last could such delight well be, when we find that blood and massacre, untamed and ever slipped afresh, still rage throughout the human race; that violence is master, and freedom of mind seems only buyable at price of serfdom of the world? But a heartless mummery must the concernment with Art ever be, and all enjoyment of the freedom thereby sought from the Will’s distress, so long as nothing more was to be found in art … .” [1029W-{6-8/80}Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 229-230]
[T.3.3: F]
Having become wholly self-conscious, wholly awake, and embracing her mother Erda’s objective knowledge, which now includes the previously unspoken secret imparted by Wotan to Bruennhilde, the religious mystery of man’s aesthetic intuition and unconscious inspiration, Bruennhilde emulates her mother Erda, saying she, Bruennhilde, now knows all things (i.e., fate, the necessity of all that has happened, is happening, or will happen). And Bruennhilde therefore now knows what
