speaking to himself, a thought which so reassured him that he was prompted to add that what he has said to no one in words (but imparts to Bruennhilde in his confession), will remain forever unspoken. The quiet, subtle chord changes in the orchestra in V.2.2 Dunning identified as #15 and #59a. We have now heard these chord changes again as Bruennhilde said to Wotan “Rest, rest, thou god!” Wotan’s unspoken secret, imparted to his unconscious mind and sublimated as music, has now been spoken as words, has risen from the silent night of feeling to the daylight of full consciousness as words. We are now reaching the climax of the Ring, whose plot and its underlying import was summarised for Bruennhilde by Wotan in his confession, and now the true source of Wagner’s inspiration in creating it is manifest.
After Wagner had written the entire Ring libretto (1853), with the exception of a few changes made afterward, he discovered Schopenhauer’s philosophy in 1854, and, as is well known, renounced Feuerbach’s materialist, so-called optimistic (i.e., world-affirming) philosophy for the sake of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy (i.e., a philosophy of world-denial, which owes much to Hindu and Buddhist thought as understood by Schopenhauer through numerous translations). Evidently during the writing of the libretto for the Ring, in which Wagner traced the necessity for Siegfried’s death back to the birth of human consciousness in evolution, Wagner discovered something about the nature of man which disillusioned him about the possibility of predicating a humane civilization upon the materialist truth, objective knowledge of man and nature, that the atheist Feuerbach was preaching. He made a few changes in the Ring libretto but left most of its Feuerbachian content and structure intact. It is generally argued, however, that Schopenhauer’s influence can be found in Wagner’s changing attitude to the music, most of which was not yet written in 1854 when he first read Schopenhauer’s works. It is argued, for instance, that because Schopenhauer insisted that music is the Will, the thing-in-itself, Wagner concluded that the drama and poetry of the Ring is secondary to its music, a pale reflection of it, and that therefore Wagner felt freer to manipulate the music and to employ motifs for purely musical rather than dramatic reasons as his composition progressed. But I would argue that Wagner in the writing of the Ring libretto had already had, long before he read Schopenhauer in 1854, a revelation of the irredeemably egoistic nature of man, especially of the egoism underlying man’s quest for redemption from his egoism, the quest to posit man’s transcendent value, and that there was little Wagner found in Schopenhauer that was not already implicit in the Ring drama, Schopenhauer providing merely philosophic support for Wagner’s own turnabout in attitude toward his material.
Here is what Wagner said about this change in attitude in a justifiably famous and oft-quoted passage from a letter he wrote on 8/23/56 to August Roeckel, with whom he shared his most detailed insights into the creation of his Ring:
[P. 357] “Rarely, I believe, has anyone suffered so remarkable a sense of alienation from self and so great a contradiction between his intuitions and his conceptions as I have done, for I must confess that only now [i.e., after having read Schopenhauer] have I really understood my own works of art (i.e. grasped them conceptually and explained them rationally to myself), and I have done so with the help of another person, who has furnished me with conceptions that are perfectly congruent with my own intuitions. The period during which I worked in obedience to the dictates of my inner intuitions began with the Flying Dutchman; Tannhaeuser and Lohengrin followed, and if there is any single poetic feature underlying these works, it is the high tragedy of renunciation, the well-motivated, ultimately inevitable and uniquely redeeming denial of the will [i.e., man’s
