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The Ring of the Nibelung
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[531W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 236]

[P. 236] {FEUER} “… the influence of the ‘eternal womanly’ … draws the manly Understanding out of its egoism,-- and this again is only possible through the Womanly attracting that thing in it which is kindred to itself: but that in which the Understanding is akin to the Feeling is the purely-human, that which makes-out the essence of the human species as such. In this Purely-human are nurtured both the Manly and the Womanly, which only by their union through Love become first the Human Being.

{FEUER} The impetus necessary to the poetic intellect, in this its poesis, is therefore Love, -- and that the love of man to woman. Yet not that frivolous, carnal love, in which man only seeks to satisfy an appetite, but the deep yearning to know himself redeemed from his egoism through his sharing in the rapture of the loving woman; and this yearning is the creative moment (das dichtende Moment) of the Understanding. The necessary bestowal, the seed that only in the most ardent transports of Love can condense itself from his noblest forces – this procreative seed is the poetic Aim, which brings to the glorious loving woman, Music, the Stuff for bearing.” [531W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 236]

 

[532W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 256; p. 263]

[P. 256] {FEUER} “… he [the Poet] has … freed his subject-matter, as much as he could, from a burdensome surrounding of historico-social and state-religious relations and conditionings. But the poet has never heretofore been able to bring this to such a point, that he could impart his subject unconditionally to the Feeling and nothing else, -- any more than he has brought his vehicle of expression to a like enhancement; for this enhancement to the highest pitch of emotional utterance could only have been reached precisely in an ascension of the verse into the melody … .

[P. 263] {FEUER} “ … the Poetic Aim can only be realised through its complete transmission from the Understanding to the Feeling … .” [532W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 256; p. 263]

 

[533W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 265]

[P. 265] {FEUER} “The Poet … is the knower of the unconscious, the aimful demonstrator of the instinctive; the Feeling, which he fain would manifest to fellow-feeling, teaches him the expression he must use; but his Understanding shows him the Necessity of that expression.” [533W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 265]

 

[534W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 280-281]

[P. 280] “But that horizontal extension, being the surface of Harmony, is its physiognomy as still discernible by the poet’s eye: it is the water-mirror which still reflects upon the poet his own image, while at the same time it presents this image to the view of him whom the poet wanted to address. This image, however, is in truth the poet’s realised Aim, -- a realisement which can only fall to the lot of the musician, in his turn, when he mounts from the depths, to the surface of the sea of Harmony; and on that surface will be celebrated the glorious marriage of Poetry’s begetting Thought with Music’s endless power of Birth. The wave-borne mirror-image is Melody. In it the [P. 281] poet’s Thought becomes an instinctively enthralling moment of Feeling; just as Music’s

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