By Paul Heise

Embracing Götterdämmerung

Twilight of the Gods opens with music from Siegfried, to which our hero woke Brünnhilde, because this final drama recounts the tragic consequences of Siegfried’s involuntary betrayal of the secret of unconscious artistic inspiration and humankind’s forbidden hoard of self-knowledge. In fact, Siegfried unwittingly predicts that he will betray his muse, Brünnhilde. This happens in the following way: Brünnhilde declares that her love for Siegfried would have no use unless it can inspire Siegfried to undertake new adventures, heroic deeds of art. Brünnhilde also reminds Siegfried that “What gods [that is, Wotan] have taught me I gave to you: a bountiful hoard [Hort] of hallowed runes.” Siegfried responds by saying, “You gave me more, o wondrous woman, than I know how to cherish [keep, or guard]: chide me not if your teaching left me untaught!” thus providing a summary of the entire plot of Twilight of the Gods.

Brünnhilde’s teaching leaves Siegfried untaught because she is his unconscious mind, through which he can possess knowledge and be inspired by it, yet remain unaware of it. Telling Brünnhilde that she gave him more than he knows how to cherish (keep, or guard), Siegfried unwittingly anticipates that he may reveal the unspoken secret which Brünnhilde has concealed even from him, the hoard of runes Wotan taught her in his confession.

The Ring enfolds the virtue of all his deeds, as he says, because Alberich’s hoard of knowledge, the Ring’s curse, and Wotan’s futile longing to redeem himself from it unconsciously inspire Siegfried to create his redemptive deeds of art. It is through Brünnhilde’s virtue alone, Siegfried says, that he still undertakes adventures; she chooses his battles, because, as Feuerbach and Wagner agreed, the authentic artist’s unconscious inspiration is involuntary, stemming from nature’s necessity. Preparing to leave her now for new adventures—to create inspired works of art and perform them in the outside world—he attributes all his courage to her because his unconsciousness of the truth makes him fearless.

We now learn how Hagen, the scientific, skeptical, cynical spirit of the modern world, compels Siegfried to give the secret of his artistic inspiration away to his audience, the Gibichungs. Hagen’s two potions, taken together, represent the “wonder” of Wagner’s Ring, which condensed the legacy of all human experience, our collective hoard of knowledge (to which Siegfried fell heir after killing Fafner), into one unified artwork. In addition, the Ring compressed this wealth of “meaning,” drawn from experiences widely scattered in time and space, into key musical motifs that carry the power of the whole. Since Loge represents our gift of artistic self-deception, Deryck Cooke’s observation that the Tarnhelm, Potion, and Loge Transformation Motifs are closely related is quite significant. Siegfried is in fact the unwitting exponent of Loge’s gift of this self-deceit. Just as Loge redeemed the gods from their first crisis by co-opting the power of Alberich’s Ring! and Tarnhelm to redeem Freia, Siegfried has preempted a second potential crisis by taking Alberich’s Ring and Tarnhelm from Fafner and thus keeping the Ring’s power out of Alberich’s reach. This in turn liberates Siegfried to wake Brünnhilde and obtain from her inspiration to perform redemptive deeds of art through which Valhalla’s idealistic legacy is given a new, but brief, lease on life. It is perhaps no surprise then that both Alberich and Loge predicted that Loge would betray the gods, and both Alberich and Wotan foresaw that Alberich would turn Wotan’s own heroes against him. Siegfried’s fate fulfills these prophecies. He is the hero upon whom Hagen, Alberich’s proxy, casts a spell so that Siegfried will betray the gods’ hope of redemption through love, or redemption through art.

Siegfried loyally serves Gunther’s and Gutrune’s unwitting appetite for self-deceit, just as Loge served the gods’ involuntary self-deceit. The Gibichung Hall is, in effect, a secular Valhalla. By transforming himself, through the Tarnhelm’s magic, into Gunther and by wedding the false muse, Gutrune (representing Wagner’s betrayal of his true muse’s secret to the public, for the sake of his audience’s approbation), the artist Siegfried makes his Gibichung audience indistinguishable from himself, revealing secrets to them which his own unconscious mind has concealed even from him. Wagner stated that through his musical motifs he, the artist, imparts to his audience the profound secret of his poetic intent. Now we can understand Wagner’s remark that for the authentic artist, his own art remains a mystery. By placing in his audience’s hands his unconscious mind, Brünnhilde, and revealing the forbidden hoard of dangerous self-knowledge (represented now by Alberich’s Ring), Si! egfried reveals to the public what his artwork should have concealed even from him, his art’s unconscious source of inspiration. He gives his audience Alberich’s Not instead of the gods’ blissful Wahn. This is why Hagen shouts incessantly that Not (danger) is here (and the Gibichung vassals respond in kind) and observes that Siegfried has protected Gunther (his audience) from this danger (until now), as he announces Gunther’s arrival with Brünnhilde!

Brünnhilde collaborates with Hagen to destroy Siegfried because Siegfried has unwittingly betrayed the secret formerly kept by his unconscious mind to the scientific world for analysis. Thus Alberich’s warning to Wotan—that his hoard would eventually rise from the silent depths to the light of day and that Wotan’s heroes would serve Alberich—comes to pass, for Siegfried himself has raised Alberich’s hoard to the light of day. Brünnhilde confirms this when she complains to Hagen and Gunther that she gave all her runes (namely, the hoard of divine runes that Wotan had taught her and that he in turn had learned from Erda) to Siegfried, only to have Siegfried glibly give her away to Gunther. In other words, Siegfried has revealed the forbidden knowledge that Wotan had assumed—having confessed it to Brünnhilde—would remain “forever unspoken” by compelling Brünnhilde to marry Gunther (his audience) without love, and forcibly taking Alberich’s Ring from Brünnhilde’s protective h! ands. Siegfried thus deprived himself and his audience of Brünnhilde’s redemption from Alberich’s curse, the curse of consciousness. As she tells Hagen, Siegfried is unaware that her magic has protected his front from wounds but not his back. In other words, by protecting Siegfried from Wotan’s foreknowledge of his inevitable, shameful end, Brünnhilde’s magic made Siegfried fearless. By betraying Brünnhilde, Siegfried has lost the gift of her protection (a sad fact to which the Rhine maidens allude later), and has thus betrayed the secret of his vulnerability to Hagen, who can now stab Siegfried in the back.

Wagner may have borrowed the notion from Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. On November 29, 1871, he told Cosima that “Prometheus’s words ‘I took knowledge away from Man’ . . . gave me a profound insight; knowledge, seeing ahead, is in fact a divine attribute, and Man [Wotan?] with this divine attribute is a piteous object, he is like Brahma before the Maya [illusion] spread before him the veil of ignorance, of deception; the divine privilege is the saddest thing of all.” Wagner’s interpretation of the significance of Prometheus Bound is confirmed by the following extract: “Prometheus: Through me mankind ceased to foresee death. Leader of the Chorus: What remedy could heal that sad disease? Prometheus: Blind hopes I made to dwell in them. Leader of the Chorus: O merciful boon to mortals. Prometheus: and more than all I gave them fire.” Significantly, Prometheus, whose name means “foresight,” or “foreknowledge,” is akin to Brünnhilde and Erda in both giving! humans foreknowledge of what they fear (teaching Siegfried fear) and in redeeming them from that knowledge and the fear it engenders (so Siegfried can forget the fear she taught him). In other words, Siegfried’s art is inspired unconsciously by that very knowledge of the meaning of humans’ fear which it seeks to conceal.

It is no accident that in the final pages of his Thoughts on Death and Immortality—in which he praises Eve as the destroyer of faith and teacher of that knowledge which ended our innocence—Feuerbach states that when Maya (illusion, deception) drove Brahma’s melancholy away, this depressed person became a world creator. This notion parallels Wagner’s earlier remark about Prometheus and corresponds with our thesis that by hearing Wotan’s confession of unbearable knowledge, Brünnhilde took Wotan’s knowledge away. Having thus repressed his knowledge into her, his unconscious mind, Wotan is able to give rise to his reincarnation as Siegfried, the free hero who will carry out Wotan’s will without conscious awareness of Wotan’s influence. Because Wotan, in his new incarnation as the innocent Siegfried, is now—thanks to Brünnhilde—unburdened by consciousness of depressing knowledge, which had ultimately paralyzed Wotan into inaction, he can become a world-historical creati! ve artist and replicate the primal creativity of the Folk (Wotan) whose involuntary artistic invention originally gave birth to the waking dream of Valhalla, the illusion that gods exist.

When Siegfried, in his pride, refuses to give the Ring to the Rhine maidens so they can wash away Alberich’s curse in the Rhine’s waters, he is in effect refusing to seek refuge in music (Brünnhilde’s singing). He is refusing to consign knowledge to the oblivion of the unconscious mind and is thus, as the Rhine maidens tell him, unwittingly relinquishing Brünnhilde’s gift, her protection. Having scornfully rejected the Rhine maidens’ offer to end the Ring’s curse, for the first time Siegfried becomes conceptually conscious of Wotan’s original religious conviction that life would not be worth living were Siegfried to acknowledge that fear (Fafner) is a motive stronger than love. The longing to return the Ring of consciousness to the preconscious Rhine is Wagner’s metaphor for what Wagner himself described as humankind’s futile quest to restore lost innocence. Wagner felt that this was the primary motive underlying human history, a longing satisfied only artificially by rel! igion and art. There is rich irony in the fact that it was specifically Loge, the god of self-deceit, who was most insistent that the gold which Alberich stole be returned to the Rhine maidens.

How then will Hagen be able to expose Siegfried to destruction, since in Siegfried religious faith has retreated from thought to feeling (music), from head to heart, from power to love? By requesting that Siegfried disclose how he learned the meaning of birdsong. At Hagen’s behest, Siegfried uses music—Wagner’s musical motifs—to unlock his unconscious (Brünnhilde) and expose its forbidden hoard of knowledge to the light of day. Instigated by Hagen, Siegfried, like Wagner, makes music think. Just as Wotan’s thought was transformed into feeling by Brünnhilde, so Siegfried, by revealing the “meaning” of the Woodbird’s song, transforms feeling back into the thought (until now “unspoken”) that had originally inspired it. How poignant then must we find Hagen’s answer to Siegfried’s question “Is Brünnhilde making him [Gunther, Siegfried’s audience] brood?”: “If only he understood her as you do the singing of birds!”

When Siegfried spills the wine—which Gunther called Siegfried’s blood—on the ground, saying it will refresh Mother Earth, Siegfried unwittingly acknowledges that he will fall as a sacrifice of atonement to Erda, Mother Earth, for perpetuating Wotan’s religious sin of world denial, or pessimism, in art. Alberich cursed his Ring expressly to punish this sin, Wotan’s sin against all that was, is, and will be (Erda’s wisdom), and Siegfried will be martyred by it.

The fatal potion that Siegfried refused when it was offered by Wotan’s head, Mime, Siegfried now accepts from Hagen at precisely the moment when he has recounted Mime’s failure to lure him into drinking it. It is worth recalling that Mime manufactured the Tarnhelm according to Alberich’s specifications, and Loge’s Transformation Motif, the Tarnhelm Motif, and Hagen’s Potion Motif are closely related. Now that Siegfried (Wagner) has betrayed his unconscious to consciousness, his retelling of how he won the Ring has jolted his memory to reveal to himself his true identity. Wagner seems to be telling us that if the musical motifs in his Ring, which hold the key to the unspoken secret of Wagner’s (Wotan’s, or Light-Alberich’s) poetic intent, are interpreted correctly, they will put an end to unconsciously inspired art, because Brünnhilde—the artist’s unconscious mind and muse—will wake forever. Brünnhilde’s eyes, as Siegfried’s final words tell us, “are now open foreve! r.” Here Wagner confesses that he has unwittingly collaborated with the modern world in undoing the very redemption for which he designed his revolutionary art.

The Ring ends with Brünnhilde’s last judgment against us, the human species, for using the artist-hero’s innocence in unwitting service to our fear and hypocrisy, only to sacrifice him to modern science, the curse of consciousness: Wotan (Wagner’s Feuerbachian conception of God as a metaphor for historical man), by implicating the artist-hero in his crime of self-deceit, predestined the hero to certain destruction at the hands of truth, the very truth we would inevitably bring to the light of day. Gunther and Gutrune, representatives of modern man, of “us”—Wagner’s audience—are horrified that they allow scientific, secular thought (Hagen) to lure them, for the sake of power, into martyring the one hero, the artist-hero as savior, who has given their life meaning. The tragedy, as Brünnhilde puts it, is that Siegfried had to betray love and music so that his unconscious mind, a woman, could grow wise by becoming fully conscious. Brünnhilde now “knows” everything con! sciously. Erda’s knowledge no longer wanes before her. The ultimate irony in this tragedy is that in the very effort to provide religious mystery, the noumenal—one more lease on life in an increasingly scientific, demythologized world—Wagner the Nibelung unwittingly dredged up the last refuge of religion, the mystery of unconscious artistic inspiration, from the silent depths of his unconscious mind to the light of day, thus exposing to consciousness and explaining away the last mystery of being, formerly kept secret by his womb of night. In his final artwork, Parsifal, Wagner openly renounces art, the redemption through love. Our only consolation is that the love of Siegfried and Brünnhilde lives anew in each performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

Paul Heise, an independent Wagnerian scholar, has studied the Ring Cycle for more than 30 years.