religious impulse to break his subjection to egoistic impulse and enslavement to natural law]. It is this profound feature that gives sanction to my poem and to my music, without which they would have no ability to stir us. Now, nothing is more striking in this context than the fact that, in all the conceptions that I held and which were devoted to speculating upon and reaching an understanding of life, I was working in direct opposition to my own underlying intuitions. While, as an artist, my intuitions were of such compelling certainty that all I created was influenced by them, as a philosopher, I was attempting to find a totally contrasting explanation of the world which, though forcibly upheld, was repeatedly – and much to my amazement – undermined by my instinctive and purely objective artistic intuitions. My most striking experience in this respect came, finally, through my Nibelung poem; it had taken shape at a time when, relying upon my conceptions, I had constructed a Hellenistically optimistic [Feuerbachian] world for myself which I held to be entirely realizable if only people wished it to exist, while at the same time seeking somewhat ingeniously to get round the problem why they did not in fact wish it to exist. I recall now having singled out the character of my Siegfried with this particular aim in mind, intending to put forward here the idea of a life free from pain; more than that, I believed I could express this idea even more clearly by presenting the whole of the Nibelung myth, and by showing how a whole world of injustice arises from the first injustice, a world which is destroyed in order - to teach us to recognize injustice, root it out and establish a just world in its place. Well, I scarcely noticed how, in working out this plan, nay, basically even in its very design, I was unconsciously following a quite different, and [P. 358] much more profound, intuition, and that, instead of a single phase in the world’s evolution, what I had glimpsed was the essence of the world itself in all its conceivable phases,, and that I had thereby recognized its nothingness, with the result, of course – since I remained faithful to my intuitions rather than to my conceptions - , what emerged was something totally different from what I had originally intended.” [642W-{8/23/56} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 357-358]
That pessimism which nihilistically seeks to nullify the world because it gives us no pretext to sustain our consoling religious illusions, is presumably Wotan’s frame of mind as the Ring reaches its climax, and Bruennhilde’s judgment against him falls on Wotan’s ears.
[T.3.3: G]
Bruennhilde now withdraws Alberich’s Ring from the dead Siegfried’s finger, only in order to give it away again to the Rhinedaughters, who have conferred with Bruennhilde in the night down at the bank of the Rhine, for they will take it from Bruennhilde’s ashes after she has joined Siegfried in death, consumed by his funeral pyre:
(She signals to the vassals to bear Siegfried’s body to the funeral pyre; at the same time she draws the ring from his finger and gazes at it thoughtfully. #115; #54; #2 [but this seems more like #1?])
Bruennhilde: My inheritance now I take as my own. – (#19) Accursed band! (#19) (#164? [perhaps a specific musical reference to the moment in T.1.3 after Waltraute has told Bruennhilde of Wotan’s desire that she redeem gods and world from the “weight” of the curse by returning the ring
