Gods and Nature (Including the Woodbird)

Let us start, as it were, at the top, although that will instantly require a qualification or two. For the beginning of the Ring as experienced in the theater is not the beginning of the story – or is it? Certainly not if we consider the words of Das Rheingold’s first scene to be the beginning, thinking the “Prelude” lacks its own dramatic content. That scene takes place in an already existing world, of whose earlier history we hear something in the Norns’ scene of Götterdämmerung; we hear – and piece together – hints elsewhere in the drama too. What, however, of the wordless Prelude itself? Is that the world’s creation? If so, by whom (Whom)? Listen to the music’s progress – with further words from Wagner to Liszt in mind: “just think of it! – the whole of the instrumental introduction to the ‘Rhinegold’ is constructed on the single triad of E♭!”Footnote ² We experience here “the gradual development of the material world … a wholly natural movement from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher … matter … spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive.”Footnote ³ Those words were written after Wagner had composed this music but were written neither by him nor with him or his poem in mind. However, the theology – or anti-theology – voiced here by his revolutionary comrade-in-arms, Mikhail Bakunin, is very much Wagner’s and arises from a common, materialist, “Left Hegelian” view of spontaneous generation as opposed to divine creation, such as the young Karl Marx, another student of similar politics and philosophy, had voiced a few years earlier.Footnote ⁴

Why mention that, in a chapter on the characters of the Ring, especially at the start? There are two principal reasons. First, to remind us of the Ring’s complicated narrative structure, both verbal and musical, mythical and realistic: we often find out about acts, ideas, even characters, after the points at which they would have been introduced. That is just as it would be in “real life”: for instance, I tell you about my mother and her family, once we know each other well, not before we meet, notwithstanding the fact that they existed before I did.Footnote ⁵ Second, also to remind us, before introducing the gods “at the top” of our hierarchy, that they are, in a sense, to quote Ernst Bloch, “gods without their being such.”Footnote ⁶ Nature ultimately has priority in this world, even if the gods think that they do and act as if they did. They do not stand independent from it, although politics and theology, to a certain extent instruments of their ideological domination, would have the other inhabitants of their world believe that they do. The singular, Christian God is, at any rate, not a character in the Ring.

It may, however, be argued that Nature is. Not simply, nor even principally, in the guise of the earth goddess, Erda, but as a primeval force wronged by Alberich’s theft of the Rhinegold and Wotan’s assault on the World Ash Tree. Nature is a source of wisdom through which the young Siegfried learns fundamental truths. Ultimately, Nature is a force, its despoliation notwithstanding, that might just emerge triumphant over those who have wronged it: in the Rhine flooding its banks, in the fire that burns Valhalla and its denizens. Is Nature a setting, a force, or a character? Perhaps we need not choose; perhaps, in fact, Wagner does not.Footnote ⁷ However, when Siegfried, prior to his corruption by society, stands closest to Nature, he understands birdsong; moreover, the Woodbird – as close to a vocal representation of Nature as we come – tells him what he must know, leads him where he must go. Truth, if never unambiguous, lies in Nature.

Wotan, Chief of the Gods

Now, rather like the Ring, or indeed the Bible, with its alternative myths of creation, let us start again at the top, with the gods and with their chief, Wotan. “In the cloudy heights / live the gods,” Wotan, in earthly disguise as the Wanderer, tells Mime; “their hall is called Valhalla.” So it is, but that has not always been the case; indeed, it is a recent development. Wotan, at any rate, “reigns over” this Schar: a word that may be understood militarily or angelically (host), socially (company), or in a pastoral, religious sense (flock). That is part of the point. Wotan’s, more broadly the gods’, dominion is priestly. The priesthood, as actually existing priesthoods tend to be, is both religious and political; it relies upon tradition, custom, belief, and ultimately – although Wotan is cagey about this – upon force. “Not through force,” he tells his fellow god Donner, with his hammer; if only to sustain the illusion (Wahn), there should usually be another way.

Yet force, that primeval sin against Nature, is how Wotan’s – the gods’ – rule has come about, as we learn in the Norns’ Scene. An “intrepid god” came to the spring of the World Ash, drank its cooling waters of wisdom, paid the price. For, Wagner tells us, there is always a cost, be it political, religious, economic, ecological, metaphysical. Paying with one of his eyes, hence the eye-patch, Wotan broke off a branch; he hewed from it the shaft of his spear, the violence of that deed brought home by the spear motif’s (Example 7.1) abrupt upward leap of a major seventh in the orchestra (Example 7.2).

Example 7.1 Spear motif

Example 7.2 Violence of spear creation

That that was more than the tree could take, more than Wotan should have done, is symbolized by the tree’s withering and its death, the poisoning of its spring. Yet with that deed of brutal, poisonous violence, Wotan became ruler of the heavens and thus ruler of the world. Wagner had learned much from his study of the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, as he acknowledged by dedicating to Feuerbach one of the major theoretical essays accompanying the Ring, The Artwork of the Future, echoing Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Perhaps the most important lesson learned and extended was that human beings (for that matter, giants, dwarves, heroes too) have a psychological tendency to ascribe their positive qualities, above all their capacity to love, to an exterior being or beings. In that process, not only do they deprive themselves of those positive qualities; they thereby invite, permit, enable that external force’s dominion (Herrschaft) over them.

Throughout the tetralogy, there is something ominous, indeed dominating, to the spear motif, closely associated with its creator and owner. It holds its own until finally Siegfried shatters it, scenically and musically. Wotan inscribes on it runes of law, with which he and the alien force of law rule over men, women, and their lives. His intentions have certainly not all been ignoble; he is a dreamer, with the advantages and disadvantages that entails. However, to inscribe them, literally, in dead wood is forcibly to perpetuate arrangements that have had their day. He must learn otherwise, and eventually does, yet not before having fulfilled his dream of Valhalla, a sacerdotal fortress in the sky where, as he greets it, “safe from fear and dread,” the gods will rule in eternity. (That they need to be safe from fear and dread suggests that, at some level, Wotan knows they cannot be, that there is no eternity, especially when it comes to dominion.) And so, he involves himself in a bargain with the giants, his builders, which he cannot keep; that is, he cannot keep to his own laws, his own runes. As the anarchist Wagner, friend of Bakunin, would tell you, such is the way of law, of political and religious power, of power relations tout court.

The Valhalla motif, the other principal theme associated with Wotan personally, is first heard softly, dreamily, as the young(ish) god imagines it, although even then, it has already been revealed, during the interlude between the first two Rheingold scenes as the other side of the motivic coin to Alberich’s curse, the latter’s B♭ minor paralleled by the relative major, D♭, of Valhalla (in which both Das Rheingold and the Ring as a whole will conclude).

Example 7.3 Valhalla motif

Example 7.4 The curse (trombones)

What a later, serialist generation, heavily influenced by Wagner and successors such as Debussy, would term all musical “parameters” – melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre – cooperate in the transformation. The Ring’s baleful song is voiced by cor anglais and clarinet reeds – the future of Tristan und Isolde not so distant – as scenically, if only in our heads, Rhenish tides at horizon become clouds. Harmony shifts, shedding dissonance and pungency of timbre as one. Softer-grained violas come to the fore, paving the way for the rhythmical transition towards Valhalla. That first soft, dream-like statement of the Valhalla motif proper is heard almost before our ears and mind realize any transformation has taken place. Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, another dark tale of a castle fortress and doomed inhabitants, may have been born here in this transition, a process Wagner more generally and, in my view, quite rightly termed his “most delicate and profound art.”Footnote ⁸

By the time that Wotan has paid the giants, through deceit and brute force, “through theft” – as Loge has told him he must, in order to survive – and thereby enabled the gods’ entrance into Valhalla, both motif and orchestration have hardened. They dazzle, a little too brazenly. Dreamed horns (Wagner marks them weich, or “tender”) have been transmuted into the public display – almost “trespassers will be prosecuted” – of fortissimo full orchestra, at which the Rhinemaidens’ sung accusations gnaw away: “false and cowardly” are the revels above, a charge underlined by chromatic C♭ minor chords, piercing a diatonic rainbow bridge and fortress that are simply too sure of themselves. However, Wotan knows, even if he will not admit it, even if the other gods do not know it, that the gods’ rule, even at its apparent zenith, is now doomed.

Thus, when we see Wotan next, in the second act of Die Walküre, he is a man who has begun to change. He has sired a good number of children from women other than his consort – for Wotan and Fricka, read Zeus and Hera – but that is what patriarchs do. More importantly, encouraged by Erda’s words, he has begun to reflect upon his and the world’s predicament. The children of whom we know, and whom we meet, are the Volsungs – Siegmund and Sieglinde, from a mortal woman, unnamed – and the Valkyries, from Erda. Earthly heroes and the Valkyries who take them to (supposed) immortality in Valhalla serve one purpose for Wotan: to protect him and the gods, above all from Alberich. Siegmund is even intended – as ultimately is Siegfried – to win back the Ring from Alberich. Valhalla thus proves anything but “safe from fear and dread”; instead, it intensifies those feelings. As well it might, for, as Fricka’s ruthless logic points out, the tragic dilemma is entirely his own: like that of the modern political and religious order he symbolizes.

As Wagner wrote in a celebrated letter of 1854, immediately prior to starting work on the score of Die Walküre, Wotan is the “sum total of present-day intelligence,” not only an individual character.Footnote ⁹ He is, essentially, where the world is, nowhere more so than in his second-act scene with Brünnhilde. In the course of this self-torturing monologue, in which Brünnhilde serves only as a foil, Wotan truly discovers for himself the impossibility of his situation and thus wills “the end.” He needs a free hero to rescue the order he has created, yet he also needs to control that hero’s deeds, thus removing his – “her” would be incomprehensible to Wotan and Wagner alike – freedom. Not for the last time in the Ring, though, Wagner the dramatist knows better than Wagner the theorist or Wagner the man-in-real-life, for Brünnhilde (see below), if incapable of nominal “heroic” status, nevertheless becomes indispensable to this process. Dramatic irony indeed. Faced with his insoluble dilemma, Wotan instead comes to will oblivion: first political, eventually metaphysical. We hear not merely repeated but developed, in well-nigh Beethovenian fashion, a motif that has since been named – not by Wagner, though – “Wotan’s frustration.”

Example 7.5 Wotan’s frustration

Itself born of the spear motif, it points to the source of Wotan’s problems: pursuit and exercise of power. Its developmental recurrences seem to hark back to an older operatic tradition, punctuating, as it were, recitativo accompagnato with something equating structurally to ritornello. (If only Wagner had known Monteverdi’s music; he is certainly inspired here by Gluck and Mozart.) “I, lord of contracts,” he declares, “am now a slave to those contracts.” That, then, marks the start, if only the start, of Wotan’s conversion to the pessimistic idea of the nullity of human existence. Via his reading of Arthur Schopenhauer, Wagner had grown increasingly convinced of that since completion of the text of the Ring poems and the composition of Das Rheingold; the idea would permeate ever more strongly the music of those dramas to come. Returning to the phenomenal world, Wotan must, quite against his inclination, either as god or as father, sacrifice his own son, Siegmund. Only then will Fricka’s wrath (on which, see below) be appeased; only that way will the rule of the gods be maintained.

When, a generation later, we see – we hear too, with wondrously floating, “wandering” chords – Wotan as the Wanderer, conversion has progressed. The idea of the Wanderer had already a considerable German Romantic pedigree. Think of Schubert’s song, closing “There where you are not, there is happiness,” or Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, Wanderer above the Mist. There are, however, wanderings aplenty throughout the whole of the Western tradition, Homer’s Odyssey a case in point. In his essay A Communication to My Friends, Wagner had already drawn connections between Odysseus and earlier alienated, wandering characters in search of redemption: the Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin.Footnote ¹⁰ Wotan takes his place here in a development of so many earlier tendencies, within a more pessimistic, Schopenhauerian context. For the resigned Wotan as Wanderer takes his leave not from Odysseus’ return to his beloved Penelope – Wotan and Fricka have no issue and never will – but to Schubert’s and Friedrich’s antiheroes: resigned, unwilling to act, awaiting the end. Following their riddle contest, Mime’s head is his, yet he leaves it – not without malice – to Siegfried. He wins the upper hand in his final confrontation with Alberich by declining to engage. Alberich may still lust after the Ring of power; Wotan has (partly) learned.

In the momentous first scene of Siegfried’s third act, its Prelude having prepared the way for the perepiteia (turning point in ancient Greek tragedy) as a whole, Wotan may now reject Erda and her dictates of Fate. There may be an element of chauvinism, even misogyny, in the speed of transformation from “All-knowing! Primordially wise!” to “Unwise one,” but it is more than that. “What once I despairingly resolved in the wild anguish of internal conflict,” the conflict of family, society, and politics, “I shall now freely accomplish, gladly and joyfully.” And yet, while, having shed himself of the burden of that care – or so he thinks – Wotan cannot bring himself to acquiesce before Siegfried. The young Wotan is not entirely dead; nor will he ever be. Characters develop. Rarely, however, in plausible dramas, do they become something entirely different, any more than the head of an old political order will plausibly lead a new, revolutionary order. Here Wagner the dramatist, who had lived through the actual, political challenges of revolutionary defeat, knew better than Wagner the younger theoretician, who had called upon the king of Saxony to lead a “republican monarchy” and who had initially intended, in Siegfrieds Tod, to have the rule of the gods continue, purged and purified by the arrival of Siegfried in Valhalla. That had been almost a reversion to the old operatic necessity of a “happy ending,” the lieto fine. Neither life nor politics worked like that, however. At a dramatic level, Wagner had known that all along – as seen in Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin.

A Wotan philosophically converted yet not entirely transformed must still fight, must still have his spear shattered by the young hero’s sword. There is no avoiding the moment of the revolutionary deed, however bitter its consequent disappointments. Moreover, when Waltraute visits Brünnhilde in the first act of Götterdämmerung, we learn that Wotan in Valhalla continues to behave with fear and dread, not with the joy of which he spoke to Erda. Despondently, he awaits the end; even that is more difficult than he had assumed. Gloom and foreboding, of Wotan and the world he has in good part created, pervade the score of Götterdämmerung, even if he never sets foot on stage. It is arguably more “his” drama now than ever before.Footnote ¹¹ The most difficult lesson to learn – arguably he never does – is to await the acts of others. When Valhalla burns, a release both personal and political, it is at a moment of someone else’s choosing. Had Wotan asked himself riddles with the skill he did Mime, he might have learned that. Who, however, as even the Sphinx never asked, does that?

Alberich, Lord of the Nibelungs (with the Rhinemaidens)

The Wanderer describes himself to Mime in the second, “riddle” scene of Siegfried, as “Licht-Alberich” (“Light-Alberich”). With the advantage of hindsight, Wotan accepts that not only are he and Alberich antagonists for the Ring of power; they are two sides of the same coin of what Nietzsche, steeped in Wagner’s influence, would dub the will to power.Footnote ¹² The musical connection has long been clear from the transformation, outlined above, of Alberich’s Ring and curse into Wotan’s stronghold sure. That stronghold will never be so strong and sure as Wotan thinks, though, for Alberich’s material will always be immanently corrosive. Indeed, when Wotan, as power-hungry as his antagonist, wrenches the Ring from Alberich, we hear “a musical re-creation of the moment when Alberich stole the gold.”Footnote ¹³

Let us therefore take a step back to that other story of primeval violence against Nature at the opening of Das Rheingold. We observe an Eden of sorts, albeit with a bitter, savage, even world-historical twist. Alberich is a dwarf, an ugly one at that, in a world of superficial beauty, of hedonism. He is not, at this stage, lord of anything or anyone; he is a lowly being in a world ruled over by the gods. Alberich would play with the Rhinemaidens, yet their reaction is to toy with his feelings, feigning interest, one by one, only so as cruelly to spurn him. “Let us see, handsome one,” says Wellgunde, having swum over to him, she far more agile, mobile than this awkward, sneezing creature, unsure of hands, of feet, of who he is: not a fish out of water, but rather a dwarf therein. “What [do] you look like? – Pfui! You hairy, humpy fool! Black, horned, sulfurous dwarf! Find yourself a sweetheart who could bear you!” And yet, while emphasizing difference, the wheedling, slippery chromaticism of Alberich’s music also already hints at a threat to the almost bland diatonic play of the Rhinemaidens. Chromaticism in Wagner’s tonal universe colors, invades, corrodes, destabilizes, without ever quite transforming itself into Schoenberg’s “air of another planet.” Instability of rhythm is just as important here too. To quote Theodor Adorno, in Wagner’s music “all the energy is on the side of the dissonance.”Footnote ¹⁴ Or as Goethe’s Mephistopheles, musically transformed into the chromaticism of Liszt’s Faust Symphony, has it: “I am the spirit that always negates.”Footnote ¹⁵

Wagner said that he “had once felt every sympathy with Alberich, who represents the ugly person’s longing for beauty.”Footnote ¹⁶ And yet, the taunting and the misery aside, there is something within, something that has been there all along, that has Alberich act as he does. “How a blazing fire burns and glows in my limbs! Rage and desire, wild and powerful, sends my spirits into turmoil! – Though you might laugh and lie, lustfully I crave you, and one of you must succumb to me!” Alberich is no “noble savage” – be that understood in terms of literary pastoral or Rousseauvian Enlightenment. No such thing exists in the Ring, as Siegfried’s boorishness will confirm. Alberich “finally stops, breathless and foaming with rage, and shakes his clenched fist,” exclaiming, “Might this fist even seize one of you!” For Alberich, like Shakespeare’s Caliban a “salvage and deformed slave,” comes close to Aristotle’s “bestial man,” a characterization placing both on the edge of rational “civilization,” which may or may not be read as having a racial or at least “othering” element.Footnote ¹⁷

Alberich has been confirmed in the hopelessness both of his specific position vis-à-vis the Rhinemaidens – they will never “love” him – and more generally of this society. When he hears Rhinemaidens sing of the gold they guard, he has been pushed to do something they had never guessed anyone would. He renounces love, a hopeless cause for him anyhow, and seizes the gold, winning the “measureless might” Wellgunde has blithely, foolishly hymned. “Alberich wrenches with terrible power,” read Wagner’s stage directions, “the gold from the reef, and then plunges into the depths, into which he quickly disappears. Heavy darkness suddenly descends upon all quarters. The maidens dive abruptly into the depths in pursuit of the robber.” On his curse, the violence of the diminished seventh C minor perversion of the original C major gold fanfare makes clear that Alberich and what Wagner, in correspondence, termed his “liebesgelüste” (erotic urge), have entered the world forever.Footnote ¹⁸ This “fall,” as in the Bible’s Creation myth, symbolizes in one sense the introduction of unfree labor into the world.

And yet, although Alberich will win power, he will never be happy, never find fulfillment for any of his urges. In capitalism, one never does; it would not be capitalism if one did. From the grand scale of the imperial power’s quest for new colonies, markets, and so forth to the personal level of the modern consumer’s never-ending quest for a new and then a newer iPhone, the psychology of capitalist economics is foretold. When Alberich makes his final appearance, he will counsel his son, Hagen, always, as he himself has done, to “hate the happy.”

We should not, however, view that world in which amoral nymphs swam carefree in the Rhine as a golden age; that no more exists in the Ring than the “noble savage.” “The state of nature,” wrote Hegel, in his Philosophy of History, well read by Wagner, “is far more a state of injustice, power, untamed natural urges, inhuman deeds and feelings” than society.Footnote ¹⁹ Does Alberich’s theft, then, in the Christian tradition, constitute a felix culpa?Footnote ²⁰ It has elements of that. Yet, his fall – thus temporal rise – is portrayed darkly indeed. Having taken possession of the gold – which had never previously been possessed, let alone owned – Alberich has effectively transformed it into capital. Here Wagner shows the strong influence of contemporary socialist thinkers such as Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, the actor and director Eduard Devrient, who worked – uneasily – with Wagner in Dresden, noted in his diary that the “destruction of capital” was a “hobby horse” for Kapellmeister Wagner as he began to formulate the Ring project.Footnote ²² In between the first and third scenes of Das Rheingold, Alberich has been busy. The process is essentially as outlined here by Proudhon: “How much is a diamond worth which needs only to be picked out of the sand,” or gold from the Rhine? “Nothing; it is not a product of man. How much will it be worth when cut and mounted? – The time and expense which it has cost the laborer. Why, then, is it sold at so high a price? – Because men are not free … What, then, is the value which is based upon opinion? – Illusion, injustice, and robbery.”Footnote ²³ Welcome to Nibelheim, to which Wotan and Loge journey to try to redress Wotan’s fateful bargain with the giants.

Deep in the bowels of the earth, Alberich is lord, king, factory-owner, dictator. Consider him as you will, so long as you bow down. He has brutally suppressed his brother Nibelungs, Mime included. They work for him, enslaved, like workers in nineteenth-century factories. They will always be on their guard, he tells them, never knowing when he is watching, for the Tarnhelm, wrought by Mime, has granted Alberich the (totalitarian) gift of invisibility. An earlier age might have thought of secret police; our online activities and the harvesting of data by international corporations come perhaps closer still to the horror and the danger. And yet, like any capitalist, Alberich is never satisfied; he wants more. (Facebook never stops “developing.”) “Do you see the hoard that my host has accumulated for me?” he asks. That, however, is just “for today”; it will grow mightier still. “With the hoard,” he continues to boast to his visitors, “I will, I think, work miracles: the whole of the world I shall win to be my own.” He might almost have been writing the Communist Manifesto – as Marx just had been. Man, dwarf, even god: all could alienate their essence in the state, in capital, even in what they construed to be love, just as much as in God. In both Capital and the Ring, both building upon Feuerbach, they do. The Ring of power, forged from Rhinegold, gleams and intimidates as what Wagner himself dubbed a “stock-exchange portfolio.”Footnote ²⁴ Alberich rules, like any businessman, as personification of capital.

“The relationship of industry and, in particular, the world of wealth to the political world is one of the principal problems of modern times,” we read a little earlier in Marx.Footnote ²⁵ And such is the struggle between Wotan, Alberich, and their progeny in the Ring. A crucial distinction would be that, for Wagner, traveling between anarchist Bakunin to world-denying Schopenhauer, all power relations merit hostility, even those, such as “love,” which may initially seem forces for good. Alberich’s plan is to storm Valhalla with his band of enslaved Nibelungs and win the gods’ fortress for himself. That would be a fine revenge for his earlier misery, or so he thinks. He helps destroy Wotan, just as capital helps destroy traditional forms of authority, yet he never wins, and certainly never wins a happier life. The curse he utters on losing the Ring to Wotan falls on him too. In Siegfried, he is still more eaten up with envy, in thrall to the Ring’s power – as much the power of power-lust as anything it can actually “do” – than previously.

One final thing: unlike Hagen, unlike the gods, unlike Mime, unlike the heroes we have seen, Alberich may well survive the final conflagration. We never learn what becomes of him: surely no accidental ambiguity. The Rhinemaidens, though, summoned by Brünnhilde, retrieve “their,” Nature’s, gold – at least for now. Will the whole “cycle,” if cycle it be, start again? That, you may have guessed by now, is up to us.

Other Gods

Freia, Donner, and Froh

The other “full” gods, brothers and sisters to Fricka, are cipher-like: more representatives of dramatic and divine functions than full-drawn characters. That seems at least in part to be deliberate. Das Rheingold, the only drama in which they appear and indeed play any meaningful role, is a purposely frigid world, to be contrasted with Volsung love and humanity in the ensuing first act of Die Walküre. Music associated with Freia, Donner, and Froh, then, is identical to that of the objects associated with them. (Wotan and his spear arguably share the same motif too; yet it is not the only music associated with him and proves more amenable to development.)

Freia’s golden apples bring the gods immortality. When the gods lose her to the giants, they turn gray. In a crucial dramatic parallelism and dialectic, she is also the goddess of love – at least nominally, although, in such a power-ridden world, it is not entirely clear what that means.Footnote ²⁹ Wotan’s willingness to sacrifice her (love) first for Valhalla, and then for the Ring, shows us his values.

Donner, with his hammer, proposes resolution of the situation through brute force, which is too much (even) for Wotan. His hot-headedness is put to better use in fomenting a thunderstorm, to be followed by Froh’s rainbow bridge, which will lead the gods on the deluded, illusory majesty of their entry into Valhalla. Vocal types are as one might have expected: Freia a lightish, silvery soprano, Donner a deep baritone, Froh a lyric tenor.

Erda, Earth Goddess

Erda’s appearance in Das Rheingold foretells the end, her motif awaiting another inversion into that of Götterdämmerung. It is her insistence, heard with that initial inversion, that a “dark day dawns for the gods,” which changes Wotan forever. Henceforth an element of metaphysical reflection will never quite be absent. She is mysterious and speaks with an eternal wisdom quite different form Loge’s reason.

Example 7.6 Erda motif

Ideally a contralto, or at least deep-toned mezzo, will emphasize her difference from all others. Wotan is determined to learn more; in the time – at least a generation – between Das Rheingold and Die Walküre – he seeks her out, possesses her. Consensually or otherwise, the Valkyrie daughters spring from that act of possession.

There remains, as would befit the instigator of quasi-religious conversion, Schopenhauerian avant la lettre, something mysterious to Erda. She can nevertheless be understood in certain respects to embody Fate.Footnote ³² With the first scene to the third act of Siegfried, Wagner returned to composition of the Ring, musical and dramatic imperatives transformed by work on the more overtly symphonic scores of Tristan and Die Meistersinger and their overtly Schopenhauerian (broadly speaking, politically pessimistic) dramas. Wotan here hopes at first that Erda will help him “hold back a running wheel.” He realizes, via her protestations – Wagner at least hints at a nagging wife, an echo of Fricka – that Fate is also a form of power to be shunned and dismisses her. “The wisdom of the primeval mothers nears its end: your knowledge is obliterated before my will.” It is, perhaps, an act of violence, although not so unambiguous as translation may suggest. For Wotan, and we are always, for better or worse, encouraged to view things through Wotan’s eye, it is also an act of renunciation. We shall not see Erda again.

The Norns

The three Norns – and, in a sense, two of the Valkyries, Waltraute and Brünnhilde – continue in Götterdämmerung their mother Erda’s tale of Fatal wisdom. In the first scene of the Prologue we see the rest of the Ring-cosmos beginning to catch up with Wotan’s dismissal of Erda, with his willing of metaphysical – probably physical too – oblivion. Fulfillment of that act may be said to be the stuff of Götterdämmerung as a whole, again returning us to the idea, partial yet not absurd, that the Ring is Wotan’s story, and that most, if not all, of the characters have something of him in them. The Norns – no names: just First, Second, and Third – weave the web of Fate, as they sing of the world over which it has apparently hitherto ruled. We learn of Wotan’s earliest deeds from them. Other characters and their actions are reexamined, retold in ways partly old, partly new. Memory and discovery work like that. Alberich’s curse gnaws away at the rope – a new perspective this, complementary to, yet not identical with, Wotan’s willing the end – and it breaks. We may already have guessed that musically, from the world-weariness of the opera’s opening E♭ minor chords: slow, laden down with chromatic, dramatic, even traumatic weight. Whatever it was the sisters were doing is ended: be it exchange of cosmic gossip, perhaps of questionable veracity, or retelling, even creation, of the “eternal knowledge” they claim. The Norns return to their mother, we are told. Like many others, they await the end.

Giants: Fasolt and Fafner

The arrival of Fasolt and Fafner in Das Rheingold is a musical coup de théâtre endearing in its clumsiness, intentional or otherwise. Their motif is simple, stable, diatonic, difficult to imagine developing into anything other than what it is: like those it depicts. They are honest workers, so it seems, whose toil has built Valhalla for Wotan. He has promised them the beautiful Freia as their wage; they stand their ground as he would extricate himself from the bargain, so he must find something for them in her stead. That is Alberich’s hoard, or so he hopes. Yet what Wotan and indeed Fafner have not allowed for is that Fasolt, the opera’s only character with a glimmer of goodness, will genuinely fall in love with Freia. It echoes, perhaps, the teasing of Alberich; yet this unbeautiful misfit, another victim of Wotan’s order, feels something more tender, more human. It is the love of which others sing yet which they never seem to have experienced. Fasolt therefore cannot bear to let her go until the piling of the hoard includes its final piece: the Ring, finally hiding his love from sight. Contemptuous of his brother giant’s weakness and immune to it, Fafner seizes his opportunity to make off with more than his fair share of the spoils. Advised by Loge to keep the Ring, Fasolt makes to do so. Fafner slays him, exiting with the hoard in its entirety, Ring included.

Fafner hoards less as a rapacious capitalist, more as a rentier. With the Tarnhelm, he transforms himself into a dragon, so as to repel treasure-seekers. “What I lie on, I own,” the slothful bass sings, utterly in thrall to the protection of something he does not, will not use. In French socialist terminology, he is oisif (lazy), not actif. So fearsome are his appearance, reputation, and the mere sight of his Neidhöhle vale that no one goes near. The giants’ theme may not truly have developed, but its timpani perfect fifth has slowed and decayed, transformed into the ever-corrosive tritone. Only the boy without fear, Siegfried, his music as yet as carefree and diatonic as Fafner’s is the opposite, will dare penetrate this musico-dramatic lair. He slays Fafner, the last of his giants, with Notung, the sword of revolution.

Siegmund and Sieglinde (with Hunding)

Children of a mortal woman and the mysterious “Wolf” or “Wälse” (English, Volsa) – they never learn that he is Wotan – the twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, have long been separated. Siegmund comes to Sieglinde’s hut, seeking shelter from a storm. We hear a solo cello line, tender beyond anything imaginable in the loveless world of Das Rheingold.

Example 7.7 Die Walküre opening, cello solo

It speaks immediately, better than words ever could, of sexual attraction and even of a tenderness already extending beyond the merely sexual. When Sieglinde’s brutal husband, Hunding, returns home, he senses an untrustworthy identity in their eyes. Siegmund, or “Wehwalt” (“Woeful”) as he calls himself, recounts a tale of outlawry, of society as the repressive enemy both of him and of human flourishing: typical of Wagner’s charismatic heroes, from Rienzi to Parsifal. He is brave – not fearless, as his future son, Siegfried, will be – and has rescued a woman, as he will again, from forced, loveless marriage. (For Wagner, if all marriages are loveless, some are more so than others.)

Such is enough to make Siegmund Hunding’s mortal enemy, for it was Hunding’s clan from whom Siegmund had rescued the woman. Bound by the laws of hospitality, Hunding, who is nothing if he is not “traditional” – he cries for vengeance to Fricka – must let the stranger stay with them that night, but they will fight on the morrow. Sieglinde drugs her husband so that she and Siegmund might escape. Before she joins him, though – before he knows that she wants to join him – Siegmund is confronted with the sword left for him in the tree by Wotan. (So much for a “free hero,” although Siegmund knows nothing of this.) In the age-old tradition, none before could extract it, yet Siegmund can. The sexual metaphor, as Sieglinde joins him outside, is powerful if not subtle. They recognize each other at last as brother and sister, yet that is irrelevant.Footnote ³³ She names her guest “Siegmund,” “Victorious,” a back-formation from her own name. Their love and identity are irrespective, as noted earlier, of kinship. “Du bist der Lenz,” (“You are the Spring”), Sieglinde tells her brother-lover, the final trace of ice from Rheingold- and Hunding-winters melting. The curtain falls just in time, to the most torrid, frenzied musical climax in the Ring and arguably in all of Wagner.Footnote ³⁴

In the second act, then, both are outlaws, in flight from Hunding and society, though battle with the former and thus, implicitly, the latter will come. The “Annunciation of Death” scene, in which Brünnhilde, the “Valkyrie” of the opera’s Walküre title, visits Siegmund prior to battle, to take him to Valhalla proves crucial in her development towards humanity, for she sees something neither she nor Wotan could ever have anticipated. (There is freedom, after all, in Siegmund’s thoughts and acts; Wagner’s plot development is nothing if not dialectical.) When told that Sieglinde would not be permitted to accompany him, Siegmund refuses; he would choose hell over such immortality. That marks the highpoint of conscious atheist defiance in the Ring, for Siegfried will never find meaning in his deeds. This is Don Giovanni’s “No! No!” albeit in the name of true love and fidelity. Brünnhilde has been awakened to this humanity. Once Siegmund is dead, she braves her father’s wrath to ensure the temporary safety of Sieglinde that she might bear her brother’s son in the forest before she too dies.

Siegfried

Foretold musically and verbally in Die Walküre, we meet the young Siegfried in the opera bearing his name. In an intensification of his father’s charismatic origins, Siegfried has known neither father nor mother; he has never known another human, having been brought up by Mime in the forest, with only animals for companionship. What he has – all he will ever have, until his dying moments – is instinct. His strength and his weakness are his lack of reflection, his lack of consciousness of the meaning of his deeds. And so, when foes – Mime, Fafner, whoever – would frighten him, they cannot; he is the boy without fear, a fairytale figure transplanted into the politically malevolent world of the Ring.

Wagner depicts the hero – fully intended to be the hero of the Ring, prior to Wotan’s usurpation of that role – unsparingly. This, again, is no Rousseauvian noble savage, but a critique, at least partly intentional, of such a notion. If Siegfried finds his foster-father Mime unbearable, through “heroic” instinct rather than reason, it is not – not until tasting Fafner’s blood and speaking to the Woodbird afford him a little understanding – because he knows of Mime’s plotting; it is because he despises a figure less “heroic” than himself. And so, we find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to sympathize with Siegfried. Fafner and Mime may deserve their deaths at his hands, but there is something chilling to his dispatch of them with his father’s sword Notung. That, far from incidentally, proved to be a shattered sword only Siegfried could reforge: courtesy of a brute strength – perhaps a “natural” art too – entirely foreign to Mime.

It is with that revolutionary – or at least rebellious – sword that Wotan’s spear is shattered, the impatient boy, anxious to make his way to Brünnhilde’s rock, again not understanding the consequences of his deed. He simply finds a tedious old man blocking his way and acts accordingly. Discovery that this old man had been his father’s apparent foe makes things worse, but again Siegfried never understands what that entails. Does Siegfried commemorate what many on the Left would see as the bourgeois failing of elevating rebellion over thoroughgoing revolution more truly than Wagner himself realized? Many of Wagner’s critics on the Left, Adorno for instance, would argue very much so.Footnote ³⁵ Whatever the truth of that, Siegfried unquestionably learns something important upon passing through the fire no other would dare approach to reach Brünnhilde, his sleeping beauty. In a startling psychoanalytical sequence – fairy tales are like this – he learns first that this armored warrior is “no man,” then that the woman before him is not his mother. He finally learns fear of a sort through sexual anticipation and fulfillment.

Alas, once again he never really learns the meaning of “love,” and thus, upon leaving the rock, readily falls prey to the machinations of Hagen and his Gibichung half-siblings. Gutrune’s potion of forgetfulness – which he readily drinks, instantly transferring his affections to a woman whose name he does not yet even know – is essentially a metaphor both for human corruption and wiles against which fearless Siegfried will ever stand defenseless, and for the readiness with which a “rebel without a consciousness” will, by dint of that very lack of consciousness, betray the one he loves or has loved.Footnote ³⁶ He has “forgotten” Brünnhilde when he returns to her rock to win her for Gunther; he has no compunction in sexually assaulting her to humiliate her and to break her spirit. Again, he seems not even to realize what he has done. And so, a web of lies and betrayal, as planned by Hagen, has been spun that will lead to his downfall. Brünnhilde herself will betray Siegfried in turn, enabling Hagen to stab Siegfried in the only place her runes do not protect him: his back, since she knew he would never back away from an enemy.

In the Funeral March, we hear what is essentially an “ideal” version of this hero and of heroism more broadly. We hear Siegfried’s motivic and dramatic genealogy from his parents onwards. However, we also hear the hopes invested in him, the nobility of what might have been, just as, at the last, Siegfried finally achieves some level of conscious understanding that he had loved Brünnhilde all along. It is too late, save as a memorial, yet that has dramatic and even political significance. A hero who held revolutionary potential or, to the more skeptical, had at least been believed to have done so, has been deconstructed. Siegfried’s memory, infinitely more glorious than his actual, human reality, will serve as an example, a revolutionary memorial, perhaps even an incitement to future revolutionary deeds by us as heirs to those closing “men and women moved to the very depths of their being.” Wagner wrote that, in the Ring, he wanted to “make clear to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense.”Footnote ³⁷ Here, at last, in tragic, Hegelian retrospect, he does, penning a response to his own programmatic explanation of Beethoven’s Eroica Funeral March:

And note that we shall hear Siegfried’s motif once again: another reminder of what might have been, what still yet might be, at the close of the Immolation Scene, immediately preceding the final phrase of the Ring. There is mileage, it seems, remaining in the idea and the ideal of revolutionary heroism, of bringing down with Feuerbach those human qualities from gods to men. That holds even if it did not work as we had hoped on any particular occasion, historical, dramatic, or both.

Example 7.8 Götterdämmerung, closing phrase

Mime

We meet Mime in Das Rheingold and in Siegfried. He is first the skilled smithy enslaved by his brother Nibelung, Alberich, that kin relationship an exaggeration and condensation of sources on Wagner’s part. Mime forges the Tarnhelm only to be oppressed and beaten (physically and economically) further by him. It is from Mime, speaking to the visitors Loge and Wotan, that we learn in lyrical, Schubertian reminiscence of an older, preindustrial Nibelheim, prior to Alberich’s monstrous, capitalist conversion of it into something equivalent to the hell of a modern factory. Here, Mime seems sympathetic, eliciting our sympathy for the underdog. As mentioned above, he often does even in his dealings with Siegfried – partly because Siegfried often seems so unsympathetic. And yet, we learn that Mime has only brought up the troublesome boy because he thinks Siegfried might win Fafner’s hoard for him. Partly through his miserable existence, partly on account of that power-lust he shares with others, Mime too would do anything to win the Ring and its (apparently) measureless might. When Siegfried, having tasted Fafner’s blood, can hear Mime’s true thoughts – as opposed to his wheedling flattery – the hero swiftly finishes him off, to dark laughter from Alberich, observing from afar.Footnote ³⁹

Hagen

In Götterdämmerung, Alberich still hopes to win back the Ring, through the “tenacious hate” of his son, Hagen, sired expressly, lovelessly, to that end. Love foresworn, force remained. Wotan’s creation of the Volsungs through a mortal woman, to keep him safe from Alberich is mirrored in Alberich’s creation of Hagen, as Alberich reminds him, to keep his father safe from heroes. The contrast by now lies in Wotan having (more or less) given up hope and thus having reached some sort of peace with himself and the world, whereas Alberich remains as eaten up with fear, anxiety, and power-lust – are they not the same? – as ever. Hagen has his own agency, his own intelligence, his own consciousness: an anti-Siegfried, perhaps, whose loyalty his father clearly fears, for Alberich continually urges him, “Be true! Be true!” Wotan necessarily failed in creating a “free hero”; Alberich fears his antihero may prove too free.

Hagen scores against Siegfried in cunning and created malevolence, his dark bass (like Alberich’s) a typically “operatic” – Siegfrieds Tod having been planned first, as a single drama – contrast to the Heldentenor of Siegfried (and his father). If any Ring character speaks of and with evil and with a strength that is not merely “natural,” a strength at which he must work, it is Hagen. If Wotan’s presence is heard throughout the score of Götterdämmerung, so too is Hagen’s, a persistent presence, both violent and corrosive. Listen to the oath of blood brotherhood between Siegfried and Gunther, and Hagen’s motif reminds us whose work this – literally – fatal oath is.

Example 7.9 Hagen motif

Hagen ensnares Siegfried, Gunther, Gutrune, the Gibichung vassals and their womenfolk, even Brünnhilde, in his plot to win the Ring – and comes very close to succeeding. He slays Siegfried, avenging the perjury that he, Hagen, has engineered. Hagen dies, however, at the potential moment of victory, majestically tossed aside by Brünnhilde. His final words, the last of the Ring, are splendidly ambiguous: “Stay away from the Ring!” (Zurück vom Ring!) Is it, as the Rhine waters overcome him, that he would still possess it; or are those words a warning, recognition of what destroyed his life and others’? In this tragic catharsis, one does not preclude the other.

The Gibichungs: Gunther and Gutrune

Gunther and Gutrune were born to Hagen’s mother, Grimhild, but not to Alberich. They are, rather, legitimate heirs to Gibich, Gunther now ruling over his father’s realm. Their vanity preoccupies them with honor, line, recognition, and royal status. Hagen manipulates that, promising consorts their status would merit, consorts they would yet never win for themselves: Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Moreover, for Gunther, to have the effortlessly heroic Siegfried as his blood brother would further bolster his authority. Brünnhilde views them both only with scorn, Gunther no match for her, Gutrune a mere Mannesgemahl (paramour) to Siegfried. There is something of the old-fashioned world of chivalry, of Lohengrin, to Gunther’s music, while Gutrune’s, tellingly, pays reference to Auber’s La muette de Portici, a representative of the French opera Wagner likened to a “coquette” (Opera and Drama).Footnote ⁴⁰

The Valkyries

I left the Valkyries, above all Brünnhilde, to last, since the final scene is essentially – with any number of qualifications – hers. The Valkyries – Helmwige, Gerhilde, Ortlinde, Waltraute, Siegrune, Rossweisse, Grimgerde, and Schwertleite, and Brünnhilde – are daughters of Wotan and Erda. They are body-snatchers, collecting fallen heroes to have them form part of Wotan’s Valhalla host. Brünnhilde was always Wotan’s favorite; she is the Walküre of the opera’s title. She describes herself as “Wotan’s will,” and will on that very ground excuse her disobedience in having attempted to save Siegmund. In a sense, that is true: She does what he would have wished to. However, it is in explicit disobedience of his stated orders and in her consequent punishment that she attains selfhood and, crucially, humanity. That marks, on balance, an ascent from her previous state of divinity. Seeing and reflecting on Siegmund’s love for Sieglinde is the agent of Brünnhilde’s transformation. When Siegfried awakens her, in a variation upon the Sleeping Beauty tale, she becomes human. That is traumatic, at first, as indeed would be any waking from a deep sleep, but she too comes to love Siegfried as his parents had loved one another.

Brünnhilde’s tragedy is that she, more conscious of her humanity than Siegfried, believes in their love far more strongly. She takes the Ring, in a cruel irony, as a ring of marriage. Thus, when her sister, Waltraute visits her rock, Brünnhilde will not give it up; she would never do so, no matter how dire the need of her sisters, her father, the gods, even the world. This Götterdämmerung scene between the two sisters, one still divine, one now human, is almost a cantata in itself. It proves so moving because neither can understand the other. To Waltraute, desperately attempting to do good, attempting to avert the end of the world, Brünnhilde is unconscionably selfish; to Brünnhilde, the gods are a loveless old order, who betrayed and shunned her. They will still not accept the coming of a new order, based, after Feuerbach, on love: what Wagner sometimes referred to as “communism.”Footnote ⁴¹ Her subjugation and rape by one who had “loved” her, to win her for his new blood brother, are effected by a steely orchestral violence that speaks of terror and sheer barbarism. No wonder that Brünnhilde, cowed yet never broken, wishes vengeance upon Siegfried and that she, in the post-Meyerbeerian trio at the end of the second act, joins with Gunther and Hagen to seal Siegfried’s fate.

Only at the end, after his death, does Brünnhilde come to understand what has happened, not only to Siegfried, but to the whole world. She may not think herself “wise,” but she is. In a striking, Schopenhauerian anticipation of Parsifal, she has been “enlightened through compassion.” Wagner’s “Schopenhauer” ending to the Ring only fulfills what his composition has told us throughout the Immolation Scene. Those who would treat the “drama” as only words, and would thus say that Wagner had not even read Schopenhauer when writing the Ring poem, could not be further away from understanding him, his method, his dramas, and their meaning(s). When Brünnhilde offers a benediction to Wotan, bidding the god to rest in peace, to the tender sounds of what Valhalla might have been, she helps draw the sting of Alberich’s curse. Definitively naming the final motif of Götterdämmerung is a fool’s errand; by this stage, all motifs have developed, have acquired multiple, contested meanings. Nevertheless, Wagner’s own rare naming of that closing melody – heard previously in Sieglinde’s Walküre annunciation of Siegfried – as the “glorification of Brünnhilde” has much to be said for it.Footnote ⁴² Such naming, however, like the close of the drama itself, marks the beginning rather than the end of discussion. A world may have ended, not without “glorification”; another, to be informed and interpreted by what is past, has just begun. Or, to quote one of Wagner’s most distinguished interpreters, Pierre Boulez, while at work on that “Centenary” Ring:

Das Rheingold

The essence of Das Rheingold is a ruthless struggle for power, and for a very particular and topical kind of power – the ability to create wealth and thereby dominate the world. That power is embodied in the Ring Alberich has had made out of the gold which, in the opening scene, he has stolen from the Rhine and the Rhinemaidens. One of the Rhinemaidens, Wellgunde, had foolishly told Alberich about the potential power of the gold; but then her sisters agree that, since the essential condition of obtaining that power is a renunciation of love, there is no danger of the lustful dwarf meeting that requirement. They are wrong. Alberich chooses power and curses love. He seizes the gold and makes off with it. Immediately, the Rhine goes dark.

Whether this is represented in the staging or not, it is important that we, the listeners and spectators, understand the significance of what has happened. The theft of the gold is a crime against Nature, a violation of the natural order. As Shaw wrote, the Rhinemaidens value the gold “in an entirely uncommercial way, for its bodily beauty and splendor.”Footnote ¹⁹ But Alberich sees nothing of that. For him it is only a source of wealth and power. He takes the kind of crude utilitarian approach to nature which Dickens satirized in his exactly contemporary novel, Hard Times (1854).

This is not the only violation of nature that has taken place in this old-established society. Wotan’s spear, we learn eventually from the Norns at the opening of Götterdämmerung, was created by tearing a branch from the World Ash Tree – an act that eventually killed the tree and the wisdom of which it was the source. As Mark Berry has noted, “this rape of nature appears to be purely Wagner’s invention, with no warrant in his mythological sources.”Footnote ²⁰

As will later be seen, the obverse of these spoliations of nature is Siegfried’s exceptional rapport with the natural world. It is one striking indication of Wagner’s intuitive genius, as well as his intellectual receptiveness, that in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution in Europe in full swing, he should have made humanity’s relations with the natural world a central theme of his magnum opus.Footnote ²¹

Alberich’s renunciation of love in favor of power epitomizes what is wrong with the god-dominated social order of Das Rheingold. For his chief rival, Wotan, has made a similar choice. At the time when he decided to build Valhalla, the grandiose home of the gods, he was short of cash, so he offered the builder-giants his sister-in-law, Freia, instead. Bonds of relationship or affection count for little compared to his desire for glory. Fricka, his wife, rightly denounces him as a “cruel, heartless, unloving man” (Liebeloser, leidigster Mann). With the help of Loge, he resolves to pay off the giants with Alberich’s store of gold, which will be obtained “by theft,” as Loge bluntly puts it. But he and Alberich both understand – as the giants do not – that it is not existing wealth that matters but the power to go on producing it, a power that resides in the Ring. So when Alberich tries to keep the Ring while surrendering the wealth that has already been created by his army of slaves in Nibelheim, Wotan tears it off his finger. Were it not for the warning of Erda, the voice of far-sighted wisdom, he too would have held onto it and allowed the giants to make off with Freia after all. The gods then watch, horrified, as the two giants, Fafner and Fasolt, quarrel over the Ring, with Fafner striking his brother dead.

The world of Rheingold is full of violence, deceit, and contempt for morality. Alberich steals the gold from the Rhinemaidens; Wotan steals it from Alberich. Later on in conversation with Mime in the first act of Siegfried, Wotan describes himself as Licht-Alberich (Light Alberich), as opposed to Alberich, who is Schwarz-Alberich (Black Alberich). In other words, they are two sides of the same coin. At its center, this is the battle for power, the power to create wealth through industrialized production. Shaw was surely right to see that this mythical world is a thinly disguised picture of nineteenth-century European society. The gods represent the traditional aristocracy, occupying the leading roles in society but in danger of being supplanted by the new capitalist owners of productive industry. Nibelheim, the subterranean world where Alberich holds sway over his fellow toiling dwarfs, is the new world of factory-based industry.

This is not Shaw foisting on Wagner an interpretation alien to the composer’s intentions. When Wagner visited London in 1877, a year after the first performances of the Ring, he and Cosima took a trip down the Thames from Charing Cross to Greenwich. Cosima recorded that it made a “tremendous impression.” Wagner said, “this is Alberich’s dream come true – Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog.”Footnote ²² But Wagner had composed the music for Nibelheim more than twenty years earlier, and what he had in mind was closer to the Manchester of the 1840s, the city Engels knew and wrote about in Condition of the Working Class in England (1844).

As Wotan and Loge make the descent to Nibelheim, we hear the rhythmic pounding of massed anvils – something which, as Berry has said, is “quite unlike anything music has previously experienced – quite unlike anything the preindustrial world could have conceived.”Footnote ²³ Mime tells them that things were different in the past: “Once we were carefree, / worked at our anvils, / forged for our women / trinkets and jewels … But now … for him alone / we sweat and we slave … so by day and night / we serve the greed of our Lord.”Footnote ²⁴ There may have been a tendency in the early years of industrialization to idealize the nature of work in preindustrial society, but there was no doubt that the rigidity and regimentation of work in the new factories and mines came as a shock, and this is what Mime’s lament articulates. Wagner was well aware of this. In 1849, he wrote in Art and Revolution, “our modern factories offer us the miserable spectacle of the deepest degradation of man: perpetual soul- and body-destroying toil, without joy or love, often almost without aim.”Footnote ²⁵

Das Rheingold is full of these kinds of topical touches and references, both musically and verbally. The manner in which Wotan and Loge trick Alberich and so capture him is one example. Alberich, a typical nouveau riche, cannot resist showing off his latest gadget, the Tarnhelm, which allows him to change shape at will, and so the more sophisticated representatives of the traditional ruling class are able to catch him out.

Opera, or music drama, consists of words as well as music, and the grand music with which Wagner ends Rheingold as the gods enter Valhalla should not impress us too much. As Carl Dahlhaus said, “the radiance of Valhalla is a deception worked by the music.”Footnote ²⁶ Meanwhile, Loge stands apart from the gods, and comments “they are hastening on to their end, / though they think they are great in their grandeur.” The Rhinemaidens, still lamenting the loss of their gold, have, literally, the last words in Das Rheingold: “Goodness and truth / dwell but in the waters / false and base / all those who dwell up above!”

Die Walküre

The contrast between Das Rheingold and the opening act of Die Walküre could hardly be greater and is bound to strike anyone who hears and sees them in close sequence. The public, conflict-ridden world, in which it is groups as much as individuals who compete with each other, is apparently left far behind, and we are in a different but very familiar domestic world, that of an unhappy loveless marriage into which a romantic stranger brings the prospect of love and escape for the bullied wife. It is the sole act in the entire Ring where only humans appear, making the strongest possible break with the nonhuman cast of Rheingold. So, it is not surprising that Die Walküre has always been the most popular of the four Ring dramas, and that act one is quite often given separate concert performances. There is also the extraordinary freshness and intimacy of the music. Is there anywhere in music a more eloquent and tender expression of awakening love? The music is quite without the oppressive sultriness of Tristan und Isolde. It is youthful ardor, not all-consuming obsession, that is being portrayed.

But this domestic romance has its part to play in Wagner’s grand scheme. Against Alberich’s renunciation of love and Wotan’s heartless indifference to the fate of Freia, Wagner was determined to assert the centrality of love to the human and enlightened society that he wished to see replace the existing order based on greed, privilege, and ruthless pursuit of power.

Unlike some composers, Wagner read extensively and was particularly open to philosophical ideas. Given the ferment of theories and arguments circulating in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, it is not surprising to find Wagner, in his letters and in his occasional pamphlets and essays, struggling, not always successfully, to make sense of what he has read and heard, and to reconcile perspectives that might well seem to the outside observer to be incompatible or contradictory.

One writer who made a powerful impact on Wagner was Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Essence of Christianity was published in 1841. Feuerbach is probably best known as a transitional figure between Hegel and Marx, but his influence was felt more widely than that, as his impact on Wagner shows. Wagner dedicates his 1849 essay, The Artwork of the Future, to him. Two aspects of Feuerbach’s thinking seem to have particularly impressed the composer. One was his attempt to preserve the morality of Christianity while discarding the theology – a project which may well have helped to determine the nature and purpose of Parsifal, which, although not composed until more than three decades later, was gestating in Wagner’s mind once he had read Wolfram von Eschenbach’s poem Parzifal in 1845. The other aspect was Feuerbach’s emphasis on the sensuous and sensual character of human life once it is freed from the rigid and harsh dictates of conventional religion. For Wagner, this places love between a man and a woman at the heart of human existence, because it is in this way that they become complete and fully human. He explained this to Röckel in that extraordinarily revealing letter of January 25–6, 1854: “The full reality of love is possible only between the sexes: only as man and woman can we human beings really love … the true human being is both man and woman, and only in the union of man and woman does the true human being exist, and only through love, therefore, do man and woman become human.”Footnote ²⁷

This is the thinking that lies behind the romance of Sieglinde and Siegmund. But we can hardly avoid noticing that this love is both adulterous and incestuous. Sieglinde is married to Hunding, and Siegmund is her twin brother. This is neither incidental nor accidental. It is true that an incestuous coupling between a brother and sister is there in Wagner’s principal source for Die Walküre, the Volsung Saga, but in the saga it is, as George Gillespie puts it, “a matter of convenience.”Footnote ²⁸ Signy (who becomes Sieglinde in Wagner’s adaptation) needs a heroic son and heir, and disguises herself to have sex with her brother. But in Wagner’s version, the discovery by the pair that they are brother and sister does not give them pause. On the contrary, it becomes a further reason to celebrate their emotional and sexual union, as they do in the ecstatic music that brings act one to a close. Wagner was determined to underline his belief that traditional taboos should not be a barrier to that form of love.

There is nothing in Wagner’s – or Wotan’s – presentation of this episode which implies disapproval. When Fricka, the guardian of conventional moral rules, protests at the breach of holy matrimonial vows, Wotan retorts “Unholy / call I the vows / that bind unloving hearts,” and he defends incest in similar terms. “When came it to pass / that brother and sister were lovers?” asks Fricka indignantly. To which Wotan replies “Now it’s come to pass! / And learn from this / that a thing may happen although it’s not happened before.” But still, in the end, Wotan yields to Fricka. Whatever his personal views, he must enforce the rules of the social order he presides over. Siegmund must not be protected against Hunding’s revenge. As Fricka correctly perceives, Siegmund is not the free agent who is needed to inaugurate the new social order. He is an agent of Wotan’s scheming, and he ends up as its victim, and, as Deryck Cooke said, “surely … the most contemptibly betrayed of all Wagner’s heroes.”Footnote ²⁹

Siegmund, however, is not just a victim, he is also an exemplar of the committed, courageous love which Wagner wants to set at the heart of a better society. One of the momentous turning-points in the Ring saga occurs when Brünnhilde, in obedience to Wotan’s instructions, comes to Siegmund to tell him he must die and join the fallen heroes in Valhalla. When he learns that Sieglinde cannot accompany him, he refuses Brünnhilde’s summons. Come what may, he will stay with his sister and wife. Brünnhilde is so impressed and moved by this act of devotion that she decides to defy her father and do whatever she can to help the couple. In so doing, she identifies herself with humans against the gods, and this identification is reinforced when Wotan, by way of punishment for her disobediences, deprives her of divinity in the closing scene of this part of the drama.

Wagner was always careful with the titles of his works, and while to many listeners this second installment of the Ring seems in essence to be the tragedy of Siegmund and Sieglinde, it is the transforming impact of this drama upon Brünnhilde – Die Walküre – that he wants us to focus on. It is this that makes the story of Siegfried and his union with Brünnhilde possible.

But it is part of the complexity of Die Walküre that the central figure in the last two acts is neither Brünnhilde nor the Walsung pair, but Wotan, who orders Siegmund’s death and expels his daughter from the community of the gods. It is clear that Wagner is profoundly moved by the plight of a god – a figure of authority who has grown weary of power and finds himself circumscribed by the rules he has himself made: “since by my treaties I rule / by those treaties I am enslaved.” Twice in this second part of the epic drama he is compelled to abandon and punish two of his (many) offspring to whom he is particularly attached. The destruction of Siegmund marks the defeat of his attempt to set in motion the heroic, independent action which will save the gods from their otherwise impending doom. No wonder that, as he confesses to Brünnhilde in act two, all he longs for is “the end” (“nur eines will ich noch: das Ende, das Ende!”).

It would be tempting to see in this portrayal of the god’s unhappiness and despair evidence of the influence of the famously pessimistic thinker Arthur Schopenhauer, who made such an impact on Wagner once he had been introduced to his writings. But it was not until late in 1854 that the author Georg Herwegh persuaded Wagner to read the philosopher. The text, or libretto, of the Ring had been completed nearly two years earlier in December 1852. Nevertheless, Wagner read Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea) four times by the summer of 1855, the same time he was composing the music of Die Walküre.

Yet it is hard to be sure exactly what it was that Wagner took from Schopenhauer, and how far the philosophy actually changed his outlook. Carl Dahlhaus remarked shrewdly that “His convictions were always inclined to develop out of his works, rather than vice versa,”Footnote ³⁰ and it seems likely that Wagner found in Schopenhauer both confirmation and clarification of a streak of existential bleakness that was already part of his Weltanschaung and that found expression in Wotan’s sense of hopelessness and futility, voiced so powerfully in his act-two scene with Brünnhilde. It also clearly affected the ethos of the narrative of Tristan und Isolde, which he composed in the late 1850s.

For all that, Schopenhauer is a paradoxical figure. His name is almost synonymous with pessimism, but it would be quite wrong to think of his outlook as one of listless fatalism. On the contrary: he is an energetic, clear-sighted and cogent campaigner for recognition of the somber truths of existence as he sees them, and an advocate of the virtues we need to endure that existence. As for suicide, he is firm in his belief that everyone has a right to end his or her life, but it is not something which he advocates whatsoever.

Schopenhauer’s grasp of the facts of mortality and the passing of time was bound to strike a chord with Wagner, who was already meditating on these themes, as his letter to Röckel of January 25/26, 1854 makes plain: “we must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word; fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness.” And these thoughts are directly related to his portrayal of Wotan: “Wotan rises to the tragic heights of willing his own destruction. This is all that we need to learn from the history of mankind: to will what is necessary and to bring it about ourselves.” After his parting with Brünnhilde, Wotan “is in truth no more than a departed spirit.” As the Wanderer in Siegfried, he is essentially an observer, with no significant power to interfere. Wagner is nonetheless fascinated by him: “observe him closely! He resembles us to a tee; he is the sum total of present-day intelligence.”Footnote ³¹ But the future, and the last two parts of the Ring, belong primarily to Siegfried.

Siegfried

Wagner presents Siegfried as the tragic hero of the Ring, but also as the man of the future. He is explicitly and directly contrasted with Wotan, “the sum total of present-day intelligence, whereas Siegfried is the man of the future whom we desire and long for but who cannot be made by us, since he must create himself on the basis of our own annihilation.” The term “annihilation” may reflect the influence of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin was in Dresden in 1849 at the time of the uprising, and he and Wagner talked a good deal in the course of their insurrectionary campaign. Bakunin was famous for declaring that “the urge to destruction is a creative urge,” and there are indications in Wagner’s writings that he shared that response at times. It is plausible to see the destruction of Valhalla at the end of the Ring as the dramatic expression of this idea: an annihilation that is the precondition for the emergence of the new and better moral and social order. There certainly seemed to be a great deal of Wagner in Siegfried, and for a time it appeared as though Wagner was beginning to revitalize culture through his music. That astonishingly original and independent thinker Friedrich Nietzsche, befriended by the Wagners as a young man, for a while believed that Wagner, his music, and his conception of heroism, embodied in Siegfried, represented the radical break with nineteenth-century orthodoxy that he himself advocated. Though later disillusioned with Wagner – disliking the influence of Schopenhauer and seeing Parsifal as the composer’s abject surrender to established Christianity – while Wagner was writing the Ring, Nietzsche saw the composer as the best hope for the future of music.

Having begun the text of the Ring with its final part, then called Siegfrieds Tod, Wagner was surely well aware that this tragic narrative, in which he is trapped by Hagen into betraying Brünnhilde, and is in turn betrayed by her, does not provide many opportunities for Siegfried to reveal his heroic and uncorrupted character. This was particularly so since its first draft did not include the Prelude showing Siegfried and Brünnhilde celebrating their love together. Hence the need to preface the tragedy with Der junge Siegfried, which later became simply Siegfried.

This is the story of how the young hero, who knows nothing of fear, first reforges Notung, the sword which Wotan had originally given to Siegmund but smashed with his spear when Siegmund tried to use it to defend himself against Hunding. Siegfried then uses the sword to slay the dragon Fafner, obtain the Ring, and then kill Mime, who was planning to kill him. Guided by the Woodbird, he brushes the Wanderer Wotan aside, and passes through the ring of fire to be united with Brünnhilde.

Siegfried is the most positive, extrovert and straightforward of the four parts of the Ring, and Wagner expected it to become the most popular part of it. You can see why. It has less of the complexity and ambivalence that run through the other dramas, and with the first meeting of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, it concludes on a note of relatively unqualified hope and confidence. There is even some humor in it, notably in the exchanges between the Wanderer and Mime in act one.

The problem of Siegfried lies with Siegfried himself. Wagner never lost his belief in him. While he was still working on Götterdämmerung in 1872, he told Cosima, “Siegfried lives entirely in the present, he is the hero, the finest gift of the will.”Footnote ³² But this comment unwittingly draws our attention to one of this supposed hero’s crucial limitations: He “lives entirely in the present” – so much so that he comes across as almost entirely unreflective, impulsive, and unable to listen to anyone. The encounter with Wotan is particularly disturbing in that respect. Of course, Siegfried cannot allow this stranger – his grandfather, as it happens – to bar his way up the mountain to Brünnhilde. But it is somehow typical of Siegfried that he abuses the Wanderer for his age and threatens him with violence and death if he persists in obstructing him. He finds it hard to listen even to Brünnhilde: “You sing of the past, / but how can I listen, / while I have you beside me, / see and feel only you?” Lack of curiosity seems to be part of living “entirely in the present.”

Then there is his treatment of Mime. We know that Mime, like his brother Alberich, is fixated upon recovering the Ring, which lies unused in Fafner’s possession. We know also that he plans to get Siegfried to kill Fafner and bring back the Ring. Then Mime will obtain the Ring, by either drugging or killing Siegfried. But not until Fafner is dead, does Siegfried know this. It is possible to argue that Siegfried’s contempt and loathing for Mime, so brutally expressed in act one, reflects his intuitive apprehension of the dwarf’s evil intentions. But we can’t help noticing that much of his abuse of Mime, here and in act two, focuses not on Mime’s character but on his appearance and physical characteristics.

At the opening of the drama, Siegfried knows nothing of his parents. He has been brought up and looked after by Mime, but there is not the least sign of gratitude or respect for this on Siegfried’s part, and he totally rejects the suggestion that Mime could be his father. “No fish had a toad for a father!” he says – which sounds like an assertion of racial or ethnic superiority.

The suggestion that Mime, like Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, is an anti-Semitic caricature arouses indignation in some quarters, but it is hard to see why. It is readily acknowledged that many other of the composer’s convictions and preoccupations find their way into his work. For example, the outrage in the Grail community at Parsifal’s shooting of a swan is naturally linked to Wagner’s campaign against vivisection and his compassion for animals. Why then should we be surprised if there are strands of racism and anti-Semitism in his music dramas? In his essay Jewishness in Music Wagner dwelt in particular on Jewish speech patterns: “We are repelled in particular by the purely aural aspect of Jewish speech.”Footnote ³³ Mime, in his vocal style and his characteristic attitudes and behavior, would seem to embody what Wagner says about Jews in this offensive essay.

This is not, as some might say, a post-Nazi, post-Holocaust suggestion, although it was only to be expected that, in the wake of Nazism and Hitler’s enthusiasm for Wagner, the composer’s anti-Semitism would receive more attention and closer scrutiny than it had before. The composer Gustav Mahler, subjected to much anti-Semitic hostility in Vienna, took this interpretation of Mime more or less for granted: “No doubt with Mime, Wagner intended to ridicule the Jews (with all their characteristic traits – petty intelligence and greed – the jargon is textually and musically so cleverly suggested) … I know of only one Mime, and that is myself.”Footnote ³⁴

Wagner was consistent in his defense of Siegfried. Yet the manner of his defense in his long letter to Röckel indicates that either Röckel or others had, even before Wagner had begun work on the music of Siegfried, made some of the criticisms we have already mentioned. “My hero should not leave behind the impression of a totally unconscious individual,” he writes defensively, “on the contrary, in Siegfried I have tried to depict what I understand to be the most perfect human being, whose highest consciousness expresses itself in the fact that all consciousness manifests itself solely in the most immediate vitality and action.”Footnote ³⁵

Action is the expression of a consciousness, which we might otherwise expect to be expressed in words. But Siegfried is a singer in a music drama who has no choice but to use words. It is an unconvincing defense. We should notice too, that when Siegfried and Gunther swear an oath of friendship and mark it with a drink containing each other’s blood, Hagen, son of Alberich, does not join in. As he explains, “My blood would spoil all your drink / my blood’s not pure / and noble like yours.” Whenever Hagen appears he is “represented by idiosyncratic music that illustrates his difference … and in doing so represents … Wagner’s thoughts on the mixing of race.”Footnote ³⁶

However, when it comes to Siegfried, the composer uses all his resources to give him the style and sound of a hero. And Siegfried is perhaps at his most convincing in the scenes with Brünnhilde at the close of Siegfried and in the Prelude to Götterdämmerung. This is consistent with Wagner’s emphasis on the need for co-operation, even unity, between men and women: “Nor even Siegfried alone (man alone) is the complete ‘human being’: he is merely the half, only with Brünnhilde does he become the redeemer.”Footnote ³⁷ However, it is not until the final act of the tetralogy that it becomes clear in what sense Siegfried and Brünnhilde become “the redeemer.” Until then the puzzle is to determine in what sense Siegfried can be seen as a heroic figure. At the beginning of Götterdämmerung, Brünnhilde urges him to go off and do “new deeds,” but it is far from clear what these might be. Hagen gives us further insight: “Merrily seeking / adventures and fame, / he sails the Rhine, / he roams the world.” Siegfried is to take on the role of the archetypal hero, gaining fame through feats of physical daring. When he meets the Gibichungs, he greets Gunther with “now fight with me, / or be my friend!” – the kind of machismo or bravado one comes to expect from an unthinking hero, where there are either friends or foes, and nothing in between.

It is certainly true that Siegfried knows no fear, and this enables him to kill Fafner and to pass through the ring of fire which protects Brünnhilde on her mountain top. But this looks like an aspect of naïveté or cluelessness. True courage, or heroism, is shown by those who know both fear and the risks they are running but nevertheless act bravely.

If we are looking for heroism in the Ring then, as Berry has suggested, it is Siegmund who offers the best example.Footnote ³⁸ His refusal to follow Brünnhilde to Valhalla when he discovers that his wife and sister cannot accompany him is an act of real courage, and one that inspires Brünnhilde to similar defiance. Thus the way is paved for the generation that will act as free individuals, independent of the gods.

Götterdämmerung

The problem is that both Siegfried and then Brünnhilde fall into the lethal trap that Hagen has set for them. After the Prelude to Götterdämmerung, Siegfried bids farewell to Brünnhilde and sets off in exultant mood for the Rhine. But the music fades and darkens. Confidence and happiness are left behind, and we enter the dark world of the Gibichungs and Hagen’s relentless plotting.

It is unclear how we should interpret the drink or drug which the Gibichungs give to Siegfried, which induces him immediately to forget Brünnhilde and focus his attention on Gutrune. Is Siegfried entirely the victim of their manipulation, or does his response reflect gullibility, and even the shallowness of his commitment to Brünnhilde? It is equally unclear what happens between Brünnhilde and Siegfried, disguised as Gunther, during the night that follows the horrible scene at the end of act one. One of them is lying about it in act two. Perhaps this merely illustrates the depths of their entanglement in Hagen’s elaborate plan. Siegfried now plans to marry Gutrune, and Brünnhilde ensures his death by betraying him to Hagen and Gunther.

It hardly represents an auspicious start to the human order which is to replace the old, decayed order of Wotan and the gods. Yet Wagner’s final title for the climactic finale to the Ring is Götterdämmerung. He was clear that the gods were doomed, and their end is a central theme of the drama, even though, apart from their ambassador, Waltraute, Brünnhilde’s sister, they make no appearance in it. Waltraute’s evocation of the plight of Wotan and his fellows waiting for the end is some of the most touching music in the score. But it leaves Brünnhilde unmoved, just as Siegfried is deaf to the Rhinemaidens’ plea to him to return the Ring to them. Yet in the end Brünnhilde does return the Ring to the Rhinemaidens, and this, understandably, provoked Röckel’s question: “why, since the Rheingold is returned to the Rhine, the gods nevertheless perish?”Footnote ³⁹ To this Wagner has no clear response, except to say, in effect, that the end of the gods is written into the entire sequence from the moment when Loge predicts their doom at the end of Rheingold. It is too late to save the gods and Valhalla but not too late for the Rhinemaidens to celebrate the return of the gold and the atonement of Alberich’s original crime, accompanied by the drowning of his son, Hagen, still grasping at the disappearing Ring in the work’s final bars.

The more taxing problem for Wagner was how to distill something positive and uplifting out of the immediate tragedy of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, with the pivotal event in the final act being the murder of Siegfried, which Brünnhilde herself has facilitated. No wonder that the composer drafted and redrafted the peroration with which she was to bring the drama to a close. There were, it seems, at least six different versions.Footnote ⁴⁰

Some things are clear in the sustained funeral oration. Brünnhilde does not spend any time or energy rebuking herself for her role in this final tragedy; but she does pay loving and generous tribute to Siegfried who, as she acknowledges, was faithful as well as faithless: “the purest hero, / though he was false!” She bids a warm and moving farewell to Wotan, while starting the fire which will consume Valhalla and its inhabitants. She joins Siegfried by immolating herself in the flames. Like Senta in The Flying Dutchman, Isolde in Tristan and Isolde, she is united with her lover in death.

Of the variant endings, two have attracted particular attention. One, drafted in 1852, exalted love as the one thing that mattered and endured beyond all life’s worldly goods and customs. It is a rejection of Wotan’s world of power and rules, and has a recognizably Feuerbachian tone to it. But, after he had been introduced to the thinking of Schopenhauer, Wagner had rather different ideas about how to end the work and produced a very different text. Now Brünnhilde is to sing of leaving behind the world of desire and delusion: “Grieving love’s / deepest suffering / opened my eyes: / I saw the world end.”Footnote ⁴¹

In the end, neither of these passages was included in the final musical version of the text, although both were printed as footnotes, together with Wagner’s own comments on them. Wagner declared that he preferred the later ending, and those many Wagnerians who have wanted to forget, or even erase, the young composer’s involvement with revolutionary ideas and even action, have been happy to think that the Ring conveys a final message of pessimism: It is the world’s end that we see being acted out and staged.

But there are problems with this gloomy interpretation. It is Valhalla that we see being destroyed, not the earth itself, meaning the world of the Rhine and of Siegfried and the now-human Brünnhilde. Carl Dahlhaus has drawn our attention to a letter Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck at the end of 1858, in which he suggests that Schopenhauer had failed to see how love, the love of men and women, can achieve “a total pacification of the will” and a release from its discontents.Footnote ⁴² At that time, at least, Wagner must have thought that the Feuerbachian conclusion of 1852 was the more valid one. But, above all, there is the music itself. The dark, intense tragedy of Siegfried’s funeral march is left behind, and the whole drama ends in a mood of overwhelming exaltation, with the dominant motif being the radiant one with which Sieglinde greets Brünnhilde’s news that the child she is pregnant with will be the hero Siegfried. However devastating the tragic outcome of Götterdämmerung may be, the music suggests that Wagner has not lost his belief in the saving power of love.

In the end, it may be wisest to recognize that, as Dahlhaus says, “Wagner himself was by no means certain what his own works meant.”Footnote ⁴³ This uncertainty is hardly surprising. The Ring is a vast work, of immense range and complexity, which the composer was writing and composing over a period of more than twenty-five years. Its musical unity is a unique achievement, and the continuity of the narrative across four very different dramas almost equally remarkable.

Once we understand how serious and committed Wagner was to remaking opera as music drama or, indeed, a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, we can hardly be surprised to find how deeply they are permeated by his philosophy of life. He was open and receptive to a wide range of ideas, and they were fed into his work. Some of them, such as his obsessive prejudice against Jews and his preoccupation with race or blood purity, are objectionable. But they are there, alongside his critique of greed, industrial slavery, and lust for power, not to mention his radical take on incest and his celebration of sexual love between men and women. Wagner never intended that his music dramas should be mere entertainment, and the best compliment we can pay him is to treat them with the wholehearted seriousness with which he composed and created them.

Siegfried and the “Forest Murmurs”

The principal heroic agent of the Ring cycle, Siegfried, conforms to several mythic or fairy-tale tropes of heroism, such as slaying a fire-breathing dragon and awakening a beautiful sleeping maiden, whom he marries. The foundations of these mythic tropes are present in Wagner’s sources, the Volsunga Saga and the poems of the Elder Edda.Footnote ² The direct link between these heroic deeds in the sources, as in the opera, is the advice of some forest birds, whose speech or song the hero is enabled to understand when he accidentally ingests a drop of blood from the dragon he has slain. From this motif of the hero’s momentary access to the (quasi-musical) voice of nature, represented by the voices of these forest birds, Wagner reinforces the harmonious rapport with the natural world in general as a defining trait of his hero, Siegfried. It is precisely in his finely tuned consciousness of nature and of his relation to it as human being that Wagner’s Siegfried embodies a paradigmatically Romantic attitude, as compared to his mythic-legendary prototype, Sigurd, in the sources. Wagner’s Siegfried, that is, represents a post-Enlightenment conception of premodern man in harmony with his natural environment. Sigurd in the Volsunga Saga and the Edda poems conjoins a preternatural strength and agility with a certain practical, instinctual relation to the natural world. In both sources Sigurd says that he is called “the noble beast” when the dying Fafnir interrogates him as to his identity and motives.Footnote ³ Even though he nominally inhabits the same primordial mythic landscape as Sigurd, Wagner’s Siegfried is a “child of nature” in the modern (Romantic) sense. He is raised alone in the forest, while Sigurd is raised in a court. He carefully observes the natural world around him, applying empirical and deductive reasoning to observed data (for example, the mating practices of birds and animals), while Sigurd merely acts on the basis of simple factual information imparted to him by others. Above all, in the episode of the “Forest Murmurs,” Siegfried meditates on impressions of the natural world in order to gain insight into his own identity, or “self.” Sigurd, by contrast, has no “self” to speak of, beyond the collection of more or less random actions that constitute his identity as mythic hero.

Act 1 of Siegfried introduces the eponymous hero under the foster care of the Nibelung dwarf Mime with whom he shares an isolated forest dwelling. Now on the threshold of adulthood, Siegfried is growing restive. While both Mime and Siegfried inhabit the same space hidden in the depths of the forest, Wagner makes it unmistakably clear by means of verbal, musical, and behavioral cues that the Nibelung smith is fundamentally alienated from his natural environment just as Siegfried is fundamentally in tune with it, longing to learn more about “the world” at large. Siegfried has determined that Mime, a dwarf with no apparent mate of any species, could not be his natural parent.Footnote ⁴ Anything outside the narrow confines of his cave or hut, where he has assembled a primitive forge, Mime finds threatening or suspicious: the wild bear young Siegfried brings home as a playmate in the first scene, the inquisitive “Wanderer” who intrudes in the second scene, even the rays of morning sunlight that penetrate the forest branches as he peers outdoors at the beginning of the third scene, whose flickering mobility puts him in mind of the terrifying giant-turned-dragon, Fafner. Siegfried, on the other hand, is driven by newly awakened instincts to separate himself from this unnatural foster parent and to follow some proper, naturally ordained destiny in the world outside:

Mime decides to channel Siegfried’s instinctual drive towards freedom and adventure to his own ends by persuading the “fearless” youth to find and slay the dragon Fafner.

So it is in act 2 that young Siegfried finds himself in a quintessential Romantic pose, lying under a spreading linden tree on a summer morning, a short distance from Fafner’s lair, Neidhöhle, deep in the forest. Mime has been instructed to hide out of sight while Siegfried awaits the appearance of the dragon. Wagner contrives this moment of solitary sylvan reverie for the young hero in order to prepare the following episode of his sudden access to the language of birdsong in such a way as to imbue it with new layers of symbolic and psychological meaning. As he lies in the multisensory embrace of this natural setting, listening to the soft rustle of the leaves above him and the flowing water beside him, Siegfried meditates on his unknown father and mother and how he might resemble them, or at any rate his father. “But – what must / my mother have looked like? – / That I cannot / conceive of at all!”Footnote ⁶ The rustling background of natural sounds recedes for a moment as he contemplates his mother’s death in childbirth, which Mime had reluctantly revealed to him in act 1. As he yearns for an image of his mother (“Ach, möcht’ ich Sohn / meine Mutter sehen!”)Footnote ⁷ the orchestra recalls music that accompanied young Siegfried’s observations on the mating of forest animals in act 1 (“Es sangen die Vöglein so selig im Lenz”), with hints of the motif underscoring the process of attraction and recognition between his Volsung parents in act 1 of Die Walküre. As Siegfried resumes his meditations, the musical recollections reach back still farther: a rising chordal arpeggiation in the strings from which emerges a solo violin line, sinuously outlining a C major triad, echoes music first heard in Das Rheingold when Loge described his travels throughout the natural world (“So weit Leben und Weben, / in Wasser, Erd’ und Luft”)Footnote ⁸ in search of some possible exchange for the captive Freia (Example 9.1).

Example 9.1 “Woman/nature” motivic complex from Loge’s narration in Das Rheingold, scene 2, as recalled in the “Forest Murmurs” episode of Siegfried, act 2

Framing these musical recollections of natural impulses only dimly apprehended by the youthful Siegfried are passages of quiet, diatonic oscillations in the strings centered on E major, clearly mimetic of the immediate natural environment and cued in Wagner’s libretto by the term “Waldweben.” The term is conventionally translated as “forest murmurs,” though the literal sense (“forest-weavings”) suggests a kind of patterned sonic texture analogous to the visual and sensible layering of the forest ambience.Footnote ⁹ When the music returns to the E major rustling (“increasing forest murmurs,” the stage directions indicate), a nexus of bird-call figures in oboe, flute, and clarinet is added above this “leafy” sonic layer, rhythmically free and emphasizing pentatonic collections, especially the sixth degree upper neighbor to the tonic triad (common topical evocations of “natural” song). Indeed, these birdsong figures, which capture the growing interest of the meditative listener, are distinctly related to the contours of the Rhinemaidens’ singing from the beginning of Das Rheingold, their prelapsarian song that is recalled periodically throughout the cycle, up until the eventual return of the Ring to them in the closing moments of Götterdämmerung (see Examples 9.2 and 9.3).

Example 9.2 Woodbird motif in “Forest Murmurs” episode of Siegfried, act 2

Example 9.3 Woglinde’s “lullaby”-melody from the opening of Das Rheingold, scene 1

This nexus of musical reminiscence and mimesis serves to prepare the mythical episode of Siegfried’s sudden, magically induced ability to apprehend the “speech” of the Woodbird in a new, Romantic, and psychologizing light.Footnote ¹⁰ The magical agency of the dragon’s blood now merely serves to externalize an instinctual faculty Siegfried has already sensed. The murmuring of leaves and water put him into a heightened state of awareness, discerning the higher, more musically defined voices of nature (birdsong) as a kind of speech, if not yet fully articulate. When he does achieve that understanding later in the scene, after slaying Fafner, the message is merely the pragmatic fairy-tale advice to locate the dragon’s treasure and to guard against the schemes of his foster parent, as in the source tales. In Volsunga Saga and the “Lay of Fafnir” the birds also direct Sigurd to seek out a sleeping Valkyrie on the mountain Hindarfell (though not without some confusion as to who she is or what the consequences of this adventure will be). Wagner, of course, adopts this detail, too, and has his Woodbird direct Siegfried to the sleeping Brünnhilde at the conclusion of act 2. In Wagner’s opera, however, Siegfried’s ability to understand the song-speech of birds is predicated on his instinctive sense that nature is endowed with a “voice” that might vouchsafe important truths to those able to listen. Moreover, Wagner extrapolates a broader theme from the birds’ advice to the hero to seek the sleeping Valkyrie. Siegfried begins by meditating on his lost mother, identified with the sensory stimuli of enveloping nature, and ends with new intimations of sexual desire. “O welcome song! / O sweetest breath!” he responds to the Woodbird’s final piece of advice regarding the mysterious sleeping maiden; “Its meaning burns in my breast / with searing heat! / How it thrills my heart with kindling desire!”Footnote ¹¹ The archetypal female gendering of nature thus forms the basis for Siegfried’s psycho-sexual Bildung, which will be pursued at length in the final act of the opera.Footnote ¹²

Critics and audiences have typically found it difficult to recognize the idealized heroic traits Wagner intended to embody in his hero, but Siegfried’s capacity to hear and understand the “voice of nature” represents a partial exception. Siegfried models elements of an original – and also future, utopian – relationship of man to nature. (His father Siegmund, by contrast, is represented mostly in an adversarial relation to nature, beginning with his first appearance seeking shelter from a raging storm and his pursuing foes.) Framing the human perspective is a larger eschatological nature mythography involving the nonhuman or prehuman beings of the Ring cycle: the gods, giants, and Nibelung dwarves, above all Alberich and Wotan, as well as the emblematic nature figures of the Rhinemaidens, the Norns, and the earth-goddess, Erda.

Figures of Nature in the Mythic and Musical Conception of the Ring

The medieval Nibelungenlied that was Wagner’s starting point for The Ring of the Nibelung, and which he and his contemporaries regarded as the great national epic of the Germans, represents a largely “disenchanted” version of the Siegfried story. The mythical and historical layers of the material are transposed to a courtly milieu that is at least notionally Christian, with no reference to any aspect of the Norse-Germanic pantheon or the whole mythic cosmology detailed by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose (or Younger) Edda. In developing the text of his Ring dramas, Wagner found himself drawn to the more authentically mythical Icelandic sources, primarily the Eddas and the Volsunga Saga, where the characters and their actions retained a starker, more vivid outline with elements of mythic symbolism preserved in greater relief. In place of the chivalric trappings that dominate the background of the Nibelungenlied, the Icelandic sources depict a primeval northern landscape inhabited by heroes as well as giants, dwarves, divinities, and such intermediate beings as valkyries, Norns, or dísir. After first seeking out the more primitive, authentic roots of the myths, Wagner aimed to reconstruct a framing cosmology more simple (or “condensed,” as the theories of Opera and Drama would put it) than that of the Eddas and hence also more susceptible to his own symbolic and psychological purposes. From the pantheon of Norse divinities, he retained – besides the storm- and battle-god Wotan (Odin) and his mate Fricka (Frigg) – the love or fertility goddess Freia (Freyja) and her brother Froh (Frey), associated with elements of agricultural fertility such as rain and sun; Donner (Thor), the principal antagonist of the giants whose hammer creates the sound of thunder; and the elusive trickster Loge (Loki), an ambivalent shape-shifting figure in the sources and son of a giant, made by Wagner into an emblem of fire. Aside from Froh and Donner’s conjuring of the storm and rainbow bridge at the conclusion of Rheingold and Loge’s lingering presence in the “Magic Fire” sequence of Walküre and other isolated fire or flame references, Wagner is not principally concerned with the nature attributes of his gods. Instead he constructs two trios of female figures to personify nature as a fundamental live-giving and death-dealing power: the Rhinemaidens and the Norns (the latter closer to the Greek Moirai of Hesiod’s Theogony than to Norse models). And behind them he adds the oracular earth goddess, Erda, who lacks any distinct model in Norse mythology. Wagner’s Valkyries, Brünnhilde and her eight sisters, are styled as the daughters of Wotan and Erda, and so might also be counted among the nature figures of the Ring mythology.Footnote ¹³

The three Rhinemaidens are the first characters we meet in the Ring cycle, following the first and most radical of the nature “tone-painting” effects in the entire score, the famous 136-bar prolongation of the E♭ major triad constituting the orchestral Prelude to Das Rheingold. The Prelude is a sonic representation of the underwater setting in the river Rhine, but at the same time suggests a condition of nature before or outside of the dramatic time of the story. Offsetting the harmonic stasis of the Prelude is a carefully gradated increase of register, orchestral texture, and dynamics. Not only do we aurally experience the primal, undifferentiated state of nature inhabited by these Rhinemaidens, but Wagner conveys a sense of the very beginning of time itself (as a dynamic, measured “flow”) and at the same time the very beginning of music (as a sustained major triad, or “chord of nature,” built up from the overtones of a fundamental bass), and of language, in Woglinde’s opening lines that move tentatively between alliterative baby talk and articulate speech: “Weia! Waga! / Woge du Welle, / walle zur Wiege! / Wagalaweia! / Wallala weiala weia!”Footnote ¹⁴ Wagner’s Rhinemaidens are an amalgam of classical water nymphs and legendary mermaids, also exhibiting something of the siren-like traits associated with mermaids when Alberich intrudes on their underwater idyll. As a group of three, they recall the classical image of the three Graces (evoked by Wagner as an emblem of the original unity of music, dance, and drama in The Artwork of the Future),Footnote ¹⁵ a bright and cheerful counterpart to the dark, doom-saying trio of the three Norns. At both a symbolic and a practical musical level, they embody that “chord of nature,” the major triad, from whose extended sounding they first emerge. When the three first sing together, addressing Alberich (“Was willst du dort unten?” – “What is it that you want, down there?”) – their three voices describe a C major triad, which they continue to echo in most of their ensemble singing at the center of the scene.

By contrast, the three Norns in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung constitute a “minor triad,” emerging from recollections of the original Rhine/Nature motif of the Rheingold Prelude in darkened E♭ minor context, which quickly loses the tonal stability of its prototype as the Norns brood over the troubled state of the gods and their world. Instead of the bright, diatonic C major refrain of the Rhinemaidens at the center of the opening scene of Rheingold (“Heia jaheia! … Rheingold! Rheingold!”), the Norns’ “weaving” refrain attaches to tonally occluded diminished seventh or ninth harmonies at fluctuating pitch levels. Unlike the Rhinemaidens, they never sing in harmony, only in morose dialogue, until joining in portentous octaves for their final, resigned pronouncement (“Zu End ewiges Wissen! / Der Welt melden / Weise nichts mehr”)Footnote ¹⁶ before sinking down to rejoin their mother, Erda. In every respect, the Norns are the sadder-but-wiser counterparts to nature’s ingénues, the Rhinemaidens.

The role of the oracular earth goddess Erda confirms something suggested also by the role of the Rhinemaidens and the Norns in Wagner’s conception of the Ring mythology: his desire to give a more emphatic, focused identity to the natural world or the “force” of nature than he found in the somewhat random amalgamation of nature spirits in the existing record of Norse-Germanic mythology (let alone the sagas and later heroic poems, where these become increasingly scarce). Like the Rhinemaidens, Erda is a figure of Wagner’s own invention, or rather an extrapolation from the common stock of world mythology. As Deryck Cooke points out, he took the name from Jacob Grimm who, in his Deutsche Mythologie (1835, rev. 1844) postulated a Germanic earth-goddess (“Erda” is a simple cognate of the modern German noun Erde, earth), inferred from a reference in the Germania of Tacitus to “Nerthus,” a symbol of “mother earth” worshiped by some Germanic tribes of the first century AD.Footnote ¹⁷ It was Wagner’s own idea to make her the mother of his three Norns, and also of the nine Valkyries, fathered by Wotan. These figures have in common their oracular function in relation to the destinies of men, or also (in the case of Wagner’s Erda) of the gods. This explains why he does not give the same genealogy to the Rhinemaidens. As nymph- or naiad-like beings, they are unencumbered by any commitments to gods or humans, even though they do later warn Siegfried of his impending doom should he not return to them the gold, in the form of his Ring.

Erda’s warning oracle to Wotan in scene 4 of Das Rheingold is built around a darkened, minor version of the rising triadic Nature motif (Example 9.4a) that first evolved, in major form, in the Rheingold Prelude. The basic ontological kinship of the Norns and the Rhinemaidens is signaled by the citation of the original, rhythmically flowing major-mode version of that motif (Example 9.4b) when Erda refers to them as her offspring. In a gesture that ties together the beginning and end of the whole cycle within the framework of her appearance to Wotan, Erda’s darkened version of the rising Nature motif is briefly inverted, functioning as a predominant Neapolitan sixth within the diffused cadence to her arioso “warning,” as she alludes to the inevitable demise or “twilight” of the gods (Example 9.4c).

Example 9.4a Erda/Nature motif (minor form) from Das Rheingold, scene 4 (Erda’s warning)

Example 9.4b Nature motif (major form) from middle of Erda’s warning, Das Rheingold, scene 4

Example 9.4c Twilight of the gods motif as inversion of Nature motif, Das Rheingold, scene 4

The basic gesture of Erda’s prophecy of the gods’ eventual doom derives from the impressive, far more enigmatic, prophecy – the “Völuspá” or “Seeress’s Prophecy” – set at the head of the Elder Edda as transmitted by the thirteenth-century Codex Regius. Erda’s identification of herself as a Wala or Urwala relates to the prophesying voice of this poem and to the common background she shares with her daughters, the Norns and the Valkyries, in the nebulous population of female prophetic spirits inhabiting the Norse mythological poems in general.Footnote ¹⁸

When Erda is summoned by Wotan at the beginning of act 3 of Siegfried, the world has changed and the rule of the gods is in sharp decline. Starting with the orchestral Prelude to the act, Erda’s minor-mode version of the rising Nature motif is overlaid with other motivic ideas (initially the galloping rhythms of the Valkyries) associated with Wotan’s movements as “Wanderer” upon the surface of the earth. Those once imposing emanations from the depths of earth or water are now harried and confused by the impatient rhythms of Wotan’s wandering, the once secure triadic harmonies destabilized by the “searching” chord progression also associated with his earthly disguise (the so-called “Wanderer chords”), and by the chromatically led chord progression of Brünnhilde’s punitive slumber over rising minor thirds in the bass. It is to Brünnhilde’s “sleep” chords that Erda slowly awakens here. “Deeds of men becloud my mind,” she complains to Wotan; “I’ve grown confused / since I was wakened: wild and awry / the world revolves!”Footnote ¹⁹ Wotan questions Erda, but as in his adversarial questioning of Mime in act 1, his purpose is not to gain information but to clarify for himself, and for Wagner’s audience, the changes that have been wrought to the order of things during these later chapters of the gods’ history. The original stability of the natural world is no more. As his own end approaches, Wotan puts his faith in a dawning era of human “heroes,” represented by the union of Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Wotan and his kin must pay for their sins against the natural order, while the new human generation enjoys the promise, for now, of restoring harmony with nature through the all-powerful agency of love. This promise, however, must withstand the test of the Ring, that talisman of the “sins of the fathers.”

Primal Transgressions: The Ring and the Spear

The two essential nonanthropomorphic emblems of nature or the natural state in the Ring cycle are the Rhinegold, in its original condition guarded by the Rhinemaidens in the depths of the river, and the World Ash Tree (Weltesche), located in a mythic space outside the action of the drama. The emblematic role of the gold is largely Wagner’s own idea, developed in connection with the central parable of the Ring forged from this material to confer dominion over “the world” (though drawing, of course, on hints in his mythic sources and traditional iconography of world mythology and folklore, more generally). This role is explicitly drawn in the very opening scene of the cycle, in the prologue-like drama that takes its title from that object (Das Rheingold), just as the cycle as a whole is named for the Ring forged by Alberich from that gold. The exposition of the World Ash Tree as a symbolic-mythic object is much more oblique, largely deferred until the Norns’ scene in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung. Wagner’s Weltesche is more directly based on the mythic sources, namely the ash tree “Yggdrasil” described in Sturluson’s Prose Edda as structuring the domains of men and gods alike and harboring two sacred springs among its manifold roots. It seems that Wagner only gradually became aware of the potential implications of this second nature emblem, the only living, “organic” one of the two.Footnote ²⁰

From the beginning, he had envisioned a parable about the corrupting power of gold when it is transformed from a merely beautiful natural element (the gold of the Rhinemaidens) into an object of arbitrary exchange value (i.e. money) that confers socioeconomic power on the person or class who controls it, as symbolized by Alberich’s Ring. This idea is clearly present in the “Nibelung Myth as the Sketch for a Drama” and the libretto of The Death of Siegfried (the first form of Götterdämmerung) in the fall of 1848, whereas there is no mention of a “World Ash Tree” or its connection with Wotan’s law-giving spear in either of these texts. The first mention of the tree occurs in Wotan’s responses to Mime during their contest of mythic knowledge in act 1 of Siegfried. Answering Mime’s question as to “which is the race that dwells on cloud-covered heights,” the Wanderer (Wotan’s incognito) explains how Wotan rules “the world” by virtue of the spear he fashioned from a branch of the World Ash Tree, having engraved upon its shaft the runes of law or “sacred treaties” (heil’ger Verträge Treue-Runen). He claims that the spear will “never fail” or decay, even though the trunk of the World Ash may someday die away. Only in the much expanded Norns’ scene in its final version as the Prologue to Götterdämmerung is a causal connection spelled out and emphasized, however, when the Norns describe how the now withered branches of the World Ash have been piled high in Valhalla as fuel for a bonfire that will initiate the ultimate “downfall” of the gods.

In completing the libretto of the Ring cycle, and in the process of its composition, Wagner seems to have wanted to highlight parallels between Wotan and his nemesis, the Nibelung dwarf Alberich.Footnote ²¹ From the beginning of the cycle, we understand how Wotan has fatally transgressed against his own laws or treaties in forcibly taking the Ring from Alberich for his own use. When the Norns sing darkly of the impending demise of the gods in the Götterdämmerung Prologue however, we understand that Wotan, too, has committed a symbolic crime in desecrating the World Ash Tree. Wotan’s seemingly well-intentioned rule by means of a “social contract” or legal code turns out to be predicated, no less than Alberich’s power of economic oppression through the Ring, on a primal act of violence against the state of nature.

As Robert Donington pointed out, gold possesses numerous symbolic valences in myth, apart from its specific role as the foundation of monetary currencies.Footnote ²² Most of these conjoin in some way the rarity and purity of the elemental metal (hence, its potential to regulate systems of exchange value) with such physical attributes of brightness and solidity: associations with fire, sunlight, royalty, or the transformational processes of alchemy with its aim to convert lesser, mixed substances into this single pure one. In the opening of Das Rheingold, however, it is the flowing water of the river Rhine that embodies a primordial natural life force. The Rhinegold, in its natural state, serves to relay the life-giving light of the sun below the water’s surface, embodied in the bright C major tonality of the Rhinemaidens’ song in praise of the gold. Otherwise, the gold is necessarily an inert, inanimate substance. Its theft by Alberich casts the world of the Rhinemaidens into darkness but does not threaten its existence as part of a functioning ecosystem, so to speak. Wotan’s violence to the World Ash Tree, by comparison, threatens to precipitate a larger apocalypse. If we read this as the downfall of the gods and their now morally compromised regime, as Wagner’s text mainly implies, the consequences are ambivalent. The preordained downfall of the pagan gods in the mythological sources (Ragnarök, the apocalyptic battle between the Aesir and their foes) may represent a compromise of sorts between poets, singers, and scribes, on the one hand, and the authorities of an emergent Christianity, on the other. In Wagner’s reimagining, the gods’ downfall is a direct result of Wotan’s moral compromises and ultimately his quasi-Schopenhauerian resignation of the will to power and even life. Interestingly, the prototype of the World Ash Tree, Yggdrasil, is described in the Prose Edda and the eddic poem Grímnismál as being under constant threat, though from seemingly fixed forces in the mythic cosmology: four harts (sharing some dwarfish names) nibble forever at its budding leaves, while the serpent Nídhögg eats away continually at its roots. These images suggest nature in a steady state of dynamic tension. Wotan’s act of violence against the World Ash is, by contrast, a single, volitional act that will lead ultimately to the demise of the tree, associated with the demise of the gods. Like the negative symbol of power in Alberich’s Ring, the positive symbol of power in Wotan’s law-giving spear is also predicated on a willful act of violence against a symbol of nature in its primordial state. Whether the apocalyptic consequences of Wotan’s actions are ultimately necessary, even good, depends on how we read the promise of the Ring cycle’s ending.

Nature Motifs and “Topics”

Writing in December 1871, as he was nearing the completion of the score of the Ring cycle, Wagner recalled with satisfaction the way a kind of musical “return to nature” had launched the entire compositional enterprise. “With Das Rheingold I entered upon a new path, by which I had first to invent the malleable nature motifs [die plastische Naturmotive] that, by means of a continually more differentiated evolution, were to form the support for all the affective tendencies of the highly ramified action, as well as of the characters who enact it.” “The peculiarly natural freshness,” he continues, “emanating from this procedure carried me along tirelessly through all the exertions of this work, like high mountain air, such that by the spring of 1857 I had completed the music of Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and the larger part of Siegfried.”Footnote ²³ By beginning the cycle with a symbolic musical suggestion of a primordial state of nature in the Rheingold Prelude, Wagner was able to suggest a birth, or rebirth, of music from its most basic elements: a fundamental bass tone (the opening low E♭); the perfect intervals of the fifth, fourth, and octave; the major triad; and the diatonic major scale. Each of these fundamental musical elements is introduced in turn before the curtain rises.

In the great experiment of constructing an entire score from a network of expressive-referential motifs, or leitmotifs, Wagner was able to give the impression of these evolving gradually from simple, mainly triadic cells into more complex melodic-harmonic structures. That process accorded well with the fundamental mythic-dramatic gesture of the cycle, replayed at multiple levels throughout: a state of natural innocence or purity beset by corrupting psychic and social forces of greed, envy, and the lust for power. This gesture is most clearly enacted, appropriately, in the opening scene of Alberich and the Rhinemaidens. The Rhinemaidens swim and sing over a constantly flowing rhythmic motion established in the Prelude, and to triadic harmonies that move only cautiously away from the E♭ tonality established there. (Wagner likely thought to start by following the precepts of the “poetic-musical period” he had attempted to theorize earlier in Opera and Drama: shifts in tonality should be gradual and motivated by affective and rhetorical shifts in the dramatic text being set.)Footnote ²⁴ Alberich’s intrusion on their aquatic pastoral prompts a series of tonal contrasts, as well as interruptions of the smooth rhythmic flow, as they observe the clumsy, misshapen dwarf and engage in a teasing dialogue with him. These shifts away from the “natural” tonal and motivic foundations of the scene are merely incidental, though, up to the center of the scene when the Rhinegold suddenly illuminates the underwater setting. The Rhinemaidens themselves plant the seeds of musical doubt and difference when they explain, in a naïvely expository gambit, the potential power of a Ring forged from their gold, and the “impossible” or unnatural conditions attached to this: a complete renunciation of love. A nontriadic motivic outline (the minor seventh contour of the “Ring”), a more emphatic nod towards the minor mode (the ominous formula of the “Renunciation of Love”), and a chromatic destabilization of the bass line following each of these introduce the essential ingredients Alberich will seize on to alter the course of the scene and set the entire drama in motion. Of course, from both the larger dramatic and the musical-compositional perspective, this dialectical challenge to the primal state of nature is essential. Without it there would be no drama to enact, and the composer would lack the necessary means to “reinvent” a musical language in which to enact it. This process of gradually “differentiating” an initial premise of natural purity or wholeness and breaking that down into more complex particles to contrast and recombine within an evolving narrative-epic scheme is essential to both the message and the means of The Ring of the Nibelung.

A clear example of this process at the larger level has already been pointed to in the return of the original Rhine/Nature motivic material from the Rheingold Prelude in a tonally darkened, motivically denser context in the opening of the Prologue to Götterdämmerung. There the upward flowing triadic figure from Das Rheingold is displaced from a single tonic foundation by being combined with the slow spreading chordal formula of Brünnhilde’s “Awakening” from act III, scene 3 of Siegfried, transposed down a half step to start on an E♭ minor triad. The Nature figure is sounded first on a C♭ major triad, and a second time on D♭ minor (enharmonic equivalent of Erda’s original C♯ minor). But the third time the opening chord of the “Awakening” series is sounded, the questioning “Fate” figure from the Brünnhilde-Siegmund scene in Die Walküre intervenes. Then the Nature figure is inverted, also complicated harmonically and texturally, to create a new figure associated with the weaving of the Norns’ threads or cord. (The gesture of inversion evokes the earlier inversion of “Nature” in Erda’s prophecy to generate the idea associated with the “downfall of the gods,” echoed throughout the present scene.) Thus, even before the Norns begin to sing their gloomy round of questions and answers, we have a distinct aural sense that the natural world is hopelessly out of joint and that the bright promise of Brünnhilde’s rebirth in human form, witnessed in the last act of Siegfried, will have to contend with the implications of Wotan’s disintegrating rule.

That intimation is confirmed by the next thing that happens to the Nature figure in this scene, when the First Norn begins to speak of the World Ash Tree. The motif has found its way back to the originary E♭ tonic but darkened to E♭ minor at the mention of the tree, which now seems to acquire a motivic identity of its own – (“An der Weltesche wob ich einst” – “At the World Ash once I wove”). This motif, however, turns out to be a minor-mode variant of the Valhalla motif (Example 9.5), initiating a motivic dialogue between the Nature and Valhalla motifs that continues throughout the First Norn’s tale of the tree’s fate at Wotan’s hands: the tree is dead, the holy spring beneath it exhausted.

Example 9.5 World Ash Tree motif (minor-mode variant of Valhalla), Götterdämmerung, Prologue

Only now do we learn the history of Wotan’s transgression against nature, parallel to Alberich’s in the first scene of the cycle. Where Alberich paid the price of foreswearing love, Wotan has sacrificed one of his eyes for a draft from the well of “wisdom” at the base of the tree. Wagner makes no attempt to interpret that variously suggestive mythic motif. Alberich’s negotiation with nature was transparent; Wotan’s is opaque. The figures of nature invoked in the Norns’ Prologue and the manner of their musical embodiment suggest, at any rate, that the natural order that preexisted the arrival of humankind in this mythic world has been fatally compromised, along with the rule of Wotan and his kin.

Wagner’s initial attempt at a completely “leitmotivic” method of composition in the Ring cycle was thus an attempt to imitate nature itself as an organic process of growth or evolution. Musical motifs are introduced in their simplest form – the ideal type being based on the notes of a major triad or part of a diatonic major scale – and become more complex with the passage of musical and dramatic time, the unfolding of events or history. At its most basic, we see this in the minor-mode variant of the Rhine/Nature motif for Erda in Das Rheingold and that of Valhalla for the World Ash Tree in the Götterdämmerung Prologue: the minor-mode forms are simple derivatives of the major-mode originals. The same applies to the C minor version of the gold motif sounded at the moment of Alberich’s theft. Wagner himself cited the C major fanfare-like motif of the gold (Example 9.6) as a paradigm of what he called “a simple Nature motive” in the late essay “On the Application of Music to the Drama,” together with the “no less simple motive” of the gods’ fortress, Valhalla (though in fact that includes three harmonized chords: Example 9.7).Footnote ²⁵

Example 9.6 Rhinegold motif as example of triadic “Nature motif” type, Das Rheingold, scene 1

Example 9.7 Valhalla motif as example of triadic “Nature motif” type, Das Rheingold, scene 2

His point is that the combined variant of the two motifs, accompanying Wotan’s sardonic “blessing” of Alberich’s corrupt will to power at the climax of his great monologue in act 2 of Die Walküre (Example 9.8, bb. 3–4) can only signify in light of a musical and dramatic past.

Example 9.8 Wotan’s sardonic “blessing” of Alberich (Nibelungen-Segen), Die Walküre, act 2

Passionate or negative affects have as their premise simpler, uncomplicated, “natural” ones that have been subjected to evolutionary, historical forces. Likewise, an extended, complexly ramified musical semantics such as Wagner strove to achieve in the leitmotif network of the Ring cycle was predicated on an initial constellation of musical motifs whose signification would be relatively transparent.Footnote ²⁶ A background of natural landscapes and nature deities proved to be a useful starting point for this project, as well as the possibility of drawing on a more or less well established lexicon of musical nature or pastoral topics.

The semantic grounding of Wagner’s leitmotivic vocabulary in broader traditions of melodic and stylistic signification nowadays discussed under the rubric of musical “topics” (topoi) has always been recognized, if never comprehensively studied.Footnote ²⁷ A whole family of “nature” motifs could, following Deryck Cooke, be extrapolated from Wagner’s reference to the simple triadic Naturmotiv of the gold. Some of these ideas have roots in the pastoral topics common throughout the era of Western tonal practice through such common traits as harmonic stasis, gently rocking compound meter, oscillating or undulating figuration, and the like. The Rheingold Prelude, we could say, starts from an intensification of the classic drone effects of pastoral music, and even Wagner apparently associated Woglinde’s opening sing-song with a lullaby, probably with regard to its pentatonic melodic outline and lilting 6/8 meter.Footnote ²⁸ We have seen the relevance of pastoral topics to the “Forest Murmurs” episode of Siegfried and its nexus of references to nature and woman. Other seminal “nature motifs” (in the sense of fundamental triadic gestures) derive from horn-call and fanfare topics, most obviously Siegfried’s own personal horn-call motif, but also the motif of his father’s sword Nothung, Donner’s cry “Heda, heda, hedo!” with which he summons the storm clouds, and the motif of Freia’s youth-giving golden apples (based on the traditional “horn-fifths” pattern and sounded by a pair of French horns). The motif of Wotan and his fortress Valhalla is a processional march figure (fully realized as such in the “Entry into Valhalla” episode that closes Das Rheingold), and the famous Valkyrie motif is essentially a trumpet-call or fanfare set to “galloping” dotted rhythms. In the Ring, as in the source repertoire of musical topics, the functional association may be with outdoor activities (hunting, military marches, battles, horse riding) rather than natural phenomena as such.Footnote ²⁹ Despite the origins of such topics in feudal-courtly activities, they function here as signs of a primitive state of being or consciousness susceptible to evolutionary complexity, moral corruption, or dramatic complication.

The example Wagner drew attention to in the essay “On the Application of Music to the Drama” is instructive as to how topical gestures and “tone-painting” serve as the matrix for motivic transformations at every level of musical-dramatic form. The Rhinemaidens’ cry in praise of their gold (“Rheingold! Rheingold!”) lacks any specific topical reference but suggests vocal exclamation as natural acoustic sign (see Example 9.9).

Example 9.9 Rhinemaidens’ cry (“Rheingold! Rheingold!”), original “Nature motif” version, Das Rheingold, scene 1

It is embedded in the outer limbs of a song-like structure (bb. 536–61 of scene 1) whose bouncing dotted rhythms suggest a folk-like “round dance” or Reigen, framed by the fanfare topic of the gold motif (trumpet, C major). In his essay, Wagner points to the way this “Rheingold” cry “resurfaces in manifold, changing contexts” throughout the drama as a paradigm of his new idiom of “dramatic composition.” Thus, when Alberich wields the Ring in scene 3 of Das Rheingold (“Zitt’re und zage, / gezähmtes Heer! / Rasch gehorcht / des Ringes Herrn!” – “Tremble and quail, / downtrodden herd: / be quick and obey / the lord of the ring!”), the distorted form of the original “Rheingold cry” heard here envoices both the victims of the cursed Ring and the power of the oppressor (see Example 9.10).

Example 9.10 Minor/diminished variant of Rhinemaidens’ cry as the Nibelung “servitude” or “enslavement” motif, Das Rheingold, scene 3

This form echoes throughout the score as a reminder of Alberich’s determination to reclaim his stolen power. By the time this figure (called by Cooke “the Power of the Ring”) returns as the anchoring refrain in the somber monologue-cum-interlude of “Hagen’s Watch” in act 1 of Götterdämmerung, we sense that the roles of victim and oppressor have merged in Alberich’s ill-fated son. Ultimately the “cry” is restored to its major, diatonic form: predictively in Waltraute’s narrative (“von des Fluches Last / erlöst wär Gott und Welt” – “from the weight of the curse / both god and world would be freed”) and more conclusively in Brünnhilde’s closing monologue (“Ruhe! Ruhe, du Gott” – “Rest now, rest now, you god”).Footnote ³⁰ These cadential events embody a synthesis of the fundamental dialectic of nature and the power-driven transgressions against it: the appoggiatura-based “cry” is restored to its diatonic form but with added cadential impetus (the dominant chord) and transposed to the key (D ♭) associated with Wotan and Valhalla.

The gendering of Wagner’s Ring began even before he had composed a note of it. In his longest theoretical tract, Opera and Drama (Oper und Drama), written in 1850–1 when he was pondering how to set the libretto of Siegfrieds Tod, he famously declared the text of a drama to be the male “sperm” (Samen) that fertilizes music-as-woman in the “most heated moment of love’s arousal.”Footnote ¹ (Commentators in English usually translate Samen as “seed” – perhaps prompted by memories of the word’s Biblical use – though Wagner’s metaphors are here anthropomorphic, not horticultural.) When it came to describing the “unified artwork” that was to be the result of this procreative act, Wagner’s preferred designation was “das vereinigte Kunstwerk,”Footnote ² derived from the word Vereinigung (union) that he otherwise used in correspondence with the opposite sex to denote coitus.Footnote ³ The neutral term Gesamtkunstwerk, although more popular in the Wagner literature, was not one of which Wagner himself approved.Footnote ⁴

The sexual directness of Wagner’s language throughout Opera and Drama admittedly provides some welcome spice amidst the turgidity of his prose. There is even a masturbatory quality to the repetitiveness and increasingly fanciful nature of his metaphors. Italian opera is a “woman of pleasure,” French opera a “coquette,” and so forth,Footnote ⁵ and Wagner uses a host of other sexualized images to describe aesthetic processes, from impotent (zeugungsunfähig)Footnote ⁶ to “ejaculate” (Erguss, also translatable as “outpouring,” though the context leaves little option but to assume a sexualized interpretation, as in the German word Samenerguss).Footnote ⁷ But one sometimes gets the impression in Opera and Drama that Wagner is writing in a stream of wet-dream consciousness, with one potentially outrageous idea leading quite naturally to another without too much prior planning. His gendered, sexualized metaphors and similes of these years have a wandering, transsexual quality – in Artwork of the Future (Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft 1849), the immediate precursor to Opera and Drama, music, dance, and poetry are all women, being sister muses.Footnote ⁸ Poetry only undergoes gender-reassignment a year or so later. It was also at this time that Wagner began to employ an intentionally (pseudo-)scientific vocabulary in his aesthetic tracts, probably to afford them a scholarly veneer, thereby giving him increased street credibility among the university professors and intellectuals with whom he was increasingly socializing in his Zurich exile.Footnote ⁹ It is also possible that his sexualized vocabulary had the added intention of shocking his readers sufficiently for them to refrain from questioning his supposed erudition. And some of them were shocked indeed. For, when he approvingly discussed issues such as the incest of Oedipus and Jocasta or homosexual love among the Spartans, it was not always clear to everyone where his metaphors ended and his own convictions began.Footnote ¹⁰ As Laurence Dreyfus has observed, Wagner’s glowing description of Greek “male love” (Männerliebe) later drew the horrified ire of such implacable critics as Theodore Puschmann.Footnote ¹¹

Nevertheless, as Jean-Jacques Nattiez and others have pointed out, these metaphors in Wagner’s Zurich aesthetic tracts were neither born of a whim, nor merely discarded as soon as he set about the business of actually composing, for they found their way into the music of the Ring when Wagner began work on it in late 1853. At the opening of Das Rheingold, thus Nattiez, the Rhinemaidens represent the sister arts of the Kunstwerk der Zukunft and their singing signifies first “the birth of harmony,” then “the birth of that melody which issues from harmony,” and finally “the birth of language.”Footnote ¹² Elsewhere, Nattiez also contends that Wagner’s obsession with androgyny – namely that “the true human being is both man and woman” – finds expression in scenes such as that of Brünnhilde and Siegfried in the third act of Siegfried.Footnote ¹³ Nattiez argues persuasively that these two characters here embody music and poetry respectively, the former to be penetrated and fertilized by the latter as they merge into a single being.Footnote ¹⁴

We must bear in mind that any discussion of sexuality or gender in nineteenth-century music inevitably draws on anachronistic vocabulary and meanings (even down to “sexuality” and “gender”).Footnote ¹⁵ The Wagnerian universe is also famously vast, and the free flow of thought we find in the Zurich writings, along with the floating meanings of his metaphors, often makes it difficult to pin him down to any fixed interpretation of his words. In this context, Barry Emslie has even bravely suggested that Wagner at some point “lost control of the [Ring] cycle … its meanings … had spread to the point of disorder.”Footnote ¹⁶ And since he wrote Der Ring des Nibelungen over the period of a quarter century, it also reflects all the other shifts that took place in Wagner’s aesthetic and moral beliefs over that time. For example, he discovered the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach in mid-1849, several months after having drafted the libretto of Siegfrieds Tod, and his impact can be felt in the primacy that Wagner assigned to the redemptive power of love in his Kunstwerk der Zukunft (which he dedicated to the philosopher).Footnote ¹⁷ Wagner regarded this spiritual redemption as indissolubly intertwined with the physical love that culminates in the sexual act, so he now changed the ending of Siegfrieds Tod to let Brünnhilde extol the victory of love. This so-called “Feuerbach ending” was in turn replaced after Wagner discovered the work of Arthur Schopenhauer in 1854; the latter’s insistence on music as the true representation of the world-as-it-is shifted Wagner’s aesthetics in favor of the primacy of music above poetry, while his famous pessimism prompted Wagner to revisit Brünnhilde’s death again. Out went love-affirming, to be replaced by world-denying (though in the final work, Wagner did not set to music all the words of this ending, preferring to let his music speak instead).Footnote ¹⁸

The importance of sexuality in Wagner’s oeuvre was itself a reflection of the significance he openly assigned to it in his own life. His sexual desires also determined fundamental personal and career choices at certain junctures in his biography – most notably his abandonment of Zurich, wife, and home in August 1858 after his failure to convince Mathilde Wesendonck to elope with him, and his similar abandonment of Munich nearly a decade later when his affair with Cosima von Bülow made it impossible for him to remain there.

In superficial terms, Wagner’s attitudes to gender and sexual politics actually seem to have remained remarkably constant in both his life and works. He was in many ways typical of his time, being firmly convinced of man’s place above woman in the biological and social hierarchy. Woman’s role was to be passive, except when giving herself to man (here his aesthetic metaphors clearly overlap with his personal beliefs). Thus “the nature of woman is love: but this love is a receiving love and a love that, in receiving, gives itself unconditionally.”Footnote ¹⁹ A brief perusal of Wagner’s many writings, his letters, and Cosima’s diaries can provide innumerable further examples to bolster such a picture of Wagner the sexist patriarch, surrounding himself with willing, subservient womenfolk – witness his mistrust of “the whole nonsense of [women’s] emancipation” and his mocking of Malwida von Meysenbug’s supposed “emancipated” status, both recorded in Cosima’s diaries and presumably representative of the attitudes with which von Meysenbug will have been regularly confronted.Footnote ²⁰ Numerous commentators have identified similar traits in Wagner’s music dramas. For example, “weak” men in the Ring – such as Mime – are assigned supposedly “feminine” tasks, like child-rearing and cooking (it is also generally agreed that this “feminizing” also goes hand in hand with Wagner’s anti-Semitism).Footnote ²¹ Wagner’s heroes, by contrast, are broad and manly; they forge swords, pull them out of trees, and use them to win women and do away with dragons. It is terribly tempting to see them merely as wish fulfillments of their creator – as if, when in front of the shaving mirror, Wagner imagined himself as a tall, blond bombshell instead of the diminutive, hook-nosed, graying brunet who was actually staring back at him. This litany of apparent stereotypes continues with the women of the Ring, who are repeatedly commodified. Much of Rheingold focuses on how Freia, the goddess of love, is used as a potential means of payment to the giants who built Valhalla, her value carefully measured out in gold. In Die Walküre, Wotan admits to Brünnhilde that he had “forced” (zwang) Erda to have sex in order to acquire her knowledge. And before Die Walküre even begins, Sieglinde has been abandoned by her father (Wotan again), then subjected to de facto rape in a forced marriage with the unwanted, brutish Hunding. Brünnhilde is also Wotan’s daughter, of course, and she only just manages to escape a similar fate when abandoned by him too in the course of the same opera. Only at the end does Wotan change his mind about letting her become the chattel of the first man to find her. But two operas later, in Götterdämmerung, Brünnhilde becomes a chattel all the same when she is forced to marry Gunther. And the latter’s sister, Gutrune, is little more than a plaything to the men around her, acquiescing meekly in their macho treatment of her.

Eva Rieger has further shown how Wagner employs basic, traditional elements of “affect” in music to denote either masculine or feminine. Brünnhilde in Siegfried is accompanied first by harps, a traditionally “feminine” instrument, Siegfried’s principal motif is associated with the horn (with all its longstanding male, hunting/sexual connotations), while masculine traits are repeatedly conveyed through the music by means of ascending, diatonic motifs, often in the brass (such as the “sword” motif). And the sheer number of motives assigned to Siegfried in itself signifies his dominant status.Footnote ²² So, while at every turn in the plot of the Ring Wagner stresses the redemptive power of love – whether for Siegmund and Sieglinde or Siegfried and Brünnhilde – he still “retains the masculine claim to power in love relationships, for it is, to him, the natural order of things.”Footnote ²³

Nevertheless, as all commentators agree, from Rieger to Nattiez and beyond: If the Ring were merely a tale to reflect and bolster the age-old patriarchy, it would hardly be worth commenting on in the first place and would not exert its undeniable fascination. Beneath what might seem even the most boorish of gender stereotypes (such as Siegfried baiting Mime with his bear), Wagner draws his characters with remarkable subtlety. Time and again, it is in fact the women who act, not the men; and time and again, it is the women who assume the task of restoring order where men threaten to trigger chaos. At the beginning of the first act of the Walküre, for example, Siegmund is the archetypal loser, always saying the wrong thing at the wrong place at the wrong time and never getting the girl. It is Sieglinde who decides to put things right, drugging her husband in order to sneak out and join her soulmate. It is she who prompts Siegmund into action, finally getting him to pull out his sword (both literally and in all its metaphorical meanings). In the second act, it is Brünnhilde who intervenes to change the course of events, defying the patriarchy by trying to protect Siegmund and then, when she is unsuccessful, spiriting Sieglinde away from the wrath of men. And when Siegfried in Götterdämmerung falls for one of the oldest tricks in the operatic playbook (the poisoned chalice) and gives himself up to his inner boor, Brünnhilde instead assumes a tragic grandeur, orchestrates her revenge, and takes control of the action up to and including the final conflagration. No other female operatic character had hitherto ever been assigned such dramatic, structural significance in an operatic tragedy (not even Isolde, who concludes Tristan und Isolde with a death scene that is also climactic and recapitulatory). However conservative, patriarchal, and time-bound Wagner’s personal views might have been on gender differences and women’s rights in the real world, his works nevertheless found adherents among feminists of the day who admired his female characters for both their agency and their frequent refusal to bow to convention.Footnote ²⁴

We can discuss Wagner’s characters in such relatively abstract terms on account of one of the unusual facts about the Ring’s composition, namely that it was conceived in exile and composed largely without any idea of where, when, or by whom it might be performed. Many of the major operas of Mozart, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, and others were written with particular singers in mind, and this had an impact on how their roles were composed. But the roles in the Ring could better reflect Wagner’s undiluted, personal intentions – including aspects of their gender and sexuality – because he was unconstrained by the voice or physicality of any specific performer. The likes and dislikes of his characters are often his own. For these same reasons, it has long been common to draw parallels between Wagner’s operatic characters and his biography. This in itself is nothing new, for there were ample examples in pre-Ring operatic history of composers who seem to have projected specific traits into their stage characters in order to reflect aspects of their own lives. Witness Beethoven’s Leonore, whom we might view as an idealized image of his love interest Josephine von Brunsvik, or Verdi’s Violetta, whose common-law marriage with Alfredo in Traviata reflected Verdi’s own liaison with Giuseppina Strepponi. But Wagner’s case is different. Not only was “Wagner’s oeuvre – both his writings and his music … suffused with subjective experience,” but he himself drew direct parallels between his (sexual) relationships and those depicted in his works.Footnote ²⁵ He had written the prose sketch for Die Walküre before he first met Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck in February 1852, but he came to regard the love triangle in the work as intentionally redolent of the real-life relationship between the three of them. He joked with Minna about her kinship with the bickering Fricka,Footnote ²⁶ who tries to keep the young lovers apart, and underlined his own identification with Siegmund by including cryptic messages to Mathilde on the composition sketch. These have since been convincingly deciphered by Wagner scholars as “G.s.M.” – “Gesegnet sei Mathilde” (Blessed be Mathilde) or “I.l.d.i.m.” – “Ich liebe dich immer mehr” (I love you more and more).Footnote ²⁷ And when he organized a private first performance of the first act in 1856, with Theodor Kirchner accompanying at the piano, Wagner sang the role of both Hunding and Siegmund to a tiny audience that included Otto and Mathilde.Footnote ²⁸ He thus played out the roles of cuckold and cuckolder in front of the very man whom he himself dearly wished to cuckold.

The supercharged atmosphere in the love music of Walküre act one, like that of Tristan’s second act, is impossible to explain without considering Wagner’s increasing obsession with Mathilde Wesendonck during the time of its composition, not least because the complex web of his relationships epitomizes the problems we face whenever attempting to establish the links between Wagner’s biography and his oeuvre. Despite Wagner’s desire for a “union” with Mathilde (thus his letter to her of July 6, 1858),Footnote ²⁹ it is almost certain that his love for her was never consummated (had she acquiesced, Wagner’s unwillingness to compromise would inevitably have led to her being cast out of society, thereby losing her rich husband, her children, and their newly built, palatial villa). Teasing out the precise details of their “affair” has long been difficult because we do not have all the sources. Wagner apparently returned Mathilde’s letters to her in the 1860s with the request that she burn them (which it seems she did).Footnote ³⁰ The act of reciprocity that he seems to have expected on her part was not, however, forthcoming. So, after his death, his widow Cosima made renewed efforts to ensure that Wagner’s letters to Mathilde were destroyed for good. Despite the clear chronological gap between the Wesendonck episode and her own affair with Wagner, Cosima had never ceased to despise Mathilde as a rival (witness her disparaging remarks about Mathilde’s poetry).Footnote ³¹ But she was thwarted one last time when it transpired that Mathilde had arranged for Wagner’s letters to be published after her death (one can only marvel at the deviousness of it – how better for her to assert her status over a rival, once and for all, than to do it from beyond the grave?). This necessarily one-sided “correspondence,” with Mathilde’s voice largely absent, was understood by commentators as reflective of Wagner’s primacy in their actual relationship (an assumption bolstered by gender bias and by the perceived superiority of the composing genius above the amateur writer-housewife).

To be sure, even Mathilde claimed to have been a “blank page” waiting to be impregnated by the ink of Wagner’s pen.Footnote ³² But recent research suggests that her “whiteness” was a scam and that she might even have been the more dominant partner in their relationship. Mathilde-as-ingénue was quite possibly a pose to enhance her attractiveness among the many (male) writers, musicians, and intellectuals who jostled for attention in Zurich in the 1850s (most of them having fled to neutral Switzerland, like Wagner, after failed revolutions in Germany, France, or Italy). We know that Wagner was merely the most prominent among Mathilde’s admirers and that she was not averse to using threats of suicide to keep her husband compliant.Footnote ³³ When Wagner finally left Zurich in August 1858, it was the culmination of a slow-moving catastrophe that had begun in the spring, when Minna intercepted a letter that he had written in a fit of jealousy over Mathilde’s latest flirt, the Italian scholar Francesco de Sanctis.Footnote ³⁴

Mathilde’s post-Wagner inamorati even included the composer Theodor Kirchner, Wagner’s accompanist for the Walküre back in 1856, though her subsequent attempts to lure Johannes Brahms into taking up residence in Wagner’s former Asyl were unsuccessful (it seems Brahms was wary of how Clara Schumann might react).Footnote ³⁵ When Wagner’s stepdaughter Natalie Planer described Mathilde many years later as a “coquettish, heartless creature … this celebrated, meek-as-a-lamb, sweet little devil … [this] poisonous reptile … self-serving, calculating … this woman addicted to fame,” her opinions were ignored as the rantings of an abandoned, embittered woman.Footnote ³⁶ But perhaps Natalie’s own outsider status had enabled her to see beyond the façade. The truth about Mathilde probably lay somewhere between Wagner’s “angel”Footnote ³⁷ and Natalie’s “devil,” but given that Wagner saw Sieglinde as an embodiment of his beloved, a more nuanced biographical interpretation in which Mathilde is considerably more than a “white sheet of paper” can perhaps also help us to understand why her operatic avatar is in fact so self-assured.

Wagner’s desperation to bed Mathilde apparently led him to cease all sexual activity with his wife Minna (presumably in hopes that it might prompt Mathilde to step into the breach).Footnote ³⁸ Since he seems to have possessed a voracious sex drive, this was a drastic step (he also avoided all self-help methods because, like many in his day, he was terrified that “onanism” would result in physical and mental debilitation).Footnote ³⁹ Reading between the lines of a letter from Wagner to his sister Kläre Wolfram of August 20, 1858,Footnote ⁴⁰ he was convinced that Mathilde had taken a similarly renunciatory step with Otto. So there is considerable irony – to us at least – in that Wagner was busy realizing music’s full potential for depicting the sexual act (in the first act of the Walküre and in Tristan) at the same time that he was refraining from it in real life. This would seem to belie Wagner’s own belief in a direct correlation between satisfying his sexual needs and achieving full creative potency – in a letter to Mathilde Maier in 1863, he went so far as to maintain (without irony) that he felt a “gaping hole” (klaffende Lücke) when without a woman.Footnote ⁴¹ During these wife-less times in the 1860s, it seems that he came to expect his female domestic staff to provide the necessary extra service in their stead.Footnote ⁴²

If there is an ironic logic in the apparent connection between Wagner’s sexless plight and his composition of intensely sexualized music in the 1850s, it is compounded when one considers his not dissimilar situation a decade later. Just a few weeks into their long-awaited marriage, Cosima seems to have decided that her production of a son and heir meant that she had satisfied her conjugal responsibilities. In her diary of November 11, 1870, she noted how her sex drive had withered, though Wagner’s hadn’t, and she worried about her “anxiety” (Beklemmung) when nevertheless acquiescing in her supposed marital duties.Footnote ⁴³ So, in late 1870 and early 1871, just when he was completing the score of Siegfried with its ecstatic closing love duet, Wagner seems to have found himself once again without a willing sexual partner in real life. Despite what seems to us an obvious parallel with his situation when composing the Walküre and Tristan over ten years earlier, it is impossible to determine if, and to what extent, this seemingly inverse serendipity was the result of some (sub)conscious causality on his part. We should remember that marriage in Wagner’s operas – whether Lohengrin–Elsa, Wotan–Fricka, Marke–Isolde, or Siegfried–Brünnhilde (whom we might regard as “married” given the exchange of the Ring) – usually ends in infidelity, lovelessness, or incompatibility (or some combination of the three). So it is a moot point as to whether this reflects Wagner’s own opinion of the institution or whether, on some level, he felt a need to reenact his characters’ fate in both his own marital relationships.

A discussion of the Ring, gender, and sexuality cannot ignore Wagner’s attitudes to those whose orientation did not conform to the norms of the day. His characters repeatedly break sexual taboos – witness the brother–sister pairing of Siegmund and Sieglinde. While Wagner clearly regarded their union as coherent within the terms of myth, he also showed few qualms in his private life about sexual tendencies or practices that the society of his time would have termed deviant. Wagner himself had a fetishistic, latently transvestite side – his fondness for pink, frilly, lace and silken underwear even became public knowledge when his letters to the seamstress Bertha Goldwag were published by Daniel Spitzer in the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna in 1877. And he seems in general to have been keenly attuned to sexual “otherness” in his fellow human beings – what even the Oxford English Dictionary today refers to as one’s “gaydar.” There is no reason to suspect that Wagner himself was “gay” (a term no less anachronistic, of course), though his correspondence with King Ludwig apes the latter’s prose in its effusive homoeroticism. Nor was Ludwig the first or the last of his kind, for throughout his adult life Wagner delighted in surrounding himself with adoring, younger male acolytes such as Karl Ritter or Friedrich Nietzsche, whose sexuality – as Wagner sensed – was often not exclusively confined to the lower end of the Kinsey Scale (if we may be forgiven yet another terminological anachronism). One of the last of his young male admirers was the painter Paul von Joukowsky, who lived alongside the Wagners during the last years of the composer’s life and was responsible for the sets of the first production of Parsifal. Joukowsky lived in a more or less openly gay relationship with a young Italian folk singer from the lower classes named Pepino, whom Wagner found equally sympathetic.Footnote ⁴⁴ As Dreyfus has explained convincingly, Wagner neither felt threatened by male–male sexual relationships nor did they appeal to him personally.Footnote ⁴⁵

In this latently homoerotic aspect of his life, sexuality for Wagner arguably became something transactional in nature. Let us not forget just how much the reception of his works profited from the advocacy of all those male admirers, from Ludwig to Nietzsche and beyond (and here, too, we find odd parallels with those characters in the Ring who use sexuality, or an avoidance of it, for personal gain). Wagner’s relationship with Otto Wesendonck during his exile in Zurich should also be regarded in this light. It is almost as if Otto provided Wagner with an opportunity to test those same ingratiating arts that he later employed so masterfully with the younger and more impressionable King Ludwig. Within weeks of meeting Otto and Mathilde in January 1852, Wagner was writing openly to Theodor Uhlig of Otto’s money and Mathilde’s beauty.Footnote ⁴⁶ Otto’s financial assistance began not long after, perhaps out of sympathy for Wagner’s plight as an exile from the German revolutions, since Otto’s own brother Hugo, a liberal member of the failed German National Assembly in Frankfurt, had been similarly compelled to flee his homeland (he emigrated instead to the United States). But Otto’s support turned into full-blown regular patronage only after the private performance of the first act of the Walküre in April 1856 already mentioned above. Given that Otto was a hard-headed businessman unaccustomed to showing generosity for the mere sake of it, and given that he must have guessed about Wagner’s designs on his wife, that occasion must surely have brought about some form of epiphany for him. Not only did he ask for a repeat performance at the next opportunity, but he also offered to provide the income necessary for Wagner to complete the Ring in peace and comfort.Footnote ⁴⁷ This seems all the more perplexing when one considers that the act of the Walküre in question ends with the most graphic musical depiction of sex before Tristan, and between siblings, no less. Even with only piano accompaniment, the surging, urgent, breathless, rising sequences leave little to the imagination. But it seems that Otto possessed a particular sensitivity to matters of latent incest. “Mathilde” was not his wife’s real name; she had been born as “Agnes,” with Otto renaming her after their marriage. “Mathilde” had been the name of both his deceased elder sister and his first wife (who had died in 1845 just a few weeks after their wedding).Footnote ⁴⁸

As is well documented, Otto never completely turned his back on Wagner, even after the events of 1858, but instead maintained polite relations in word and deed right to the end. Nor does it seem that this attitude was merely for appearance’s sake. Otto attended the first Bayreuth Festival (with Mathilde), became a member of the Bayreuth Patronatsverein, and Siegfried Wagner was on occasion a guest at their Berlin home while a student there in the 1890s. And although one might imagine that Otto would have been keen to avoid the topic of Tristan at any cost after the 1850s, he remained interested enough in it to buy a copy of Karl Simrock’s 1875 translation of the original Middle-High German text (Otto’s library has long since been dispersed, but his copy has survived with his ex libris in it – regrettably without any annotations on his part).Footnote ⁴⁹ So, however Wagner might have cast himself as Siegmund/Tristan and Mathilde as Sieglinde/Isolde, he seems to have succeeded in convincing Otto that he was more than merely Hunding/Marke.

Wagner’s heroes and heroines in the Ring were naturally not without precursors whose adherence to gender and sexual stereotypes, or their divergence from them, had an impact on the later work. We know that Wagner was particularly fond of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte, and while the gravitas of Sarastro in the latter might be considered to have influenced certain aspects of Wotan, Wagner’s godly father figure arguably inherited more of the amoral lechery of the Don from the former. With Brünnhilde we are on firmer ground. Despite the pioneering nature of her character as elucidated above, she nevertheless had a strong, female forerunner in Leonore from Beethoven’s Fidelio – indeed, Wagner later claimed that it was seeing Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient perform that role that had convinced him to devote his life to the theater.Footnote ⁵⁰ The notion of a woman willing to give up everything to get her man clearly had a major impact on him. As for Florestan, while his dungeon music (filtered through Weber’s “Wolfsschluchtszene” in Der Freischütz) might have left its mark on Nibelheim and Fafner’s lair, Wagner seems to have shown little interest in the character himself. Perhaps his (admittedly enforced) passivity was too far removed from the virility displayed by Wagner’s preferred embodiments of tenor-voiced masculinity, from Tannhäuser through Lohengrin to Siegmund, Siegfried, and beyond. Musical antecedents for Wagner’s graphic depiction of coitus at the close of the first act of Walküre and in Tristan are even less easy to find, not least because the mores of Europe in the mid-nineteenth-century Biedermeier period and before would never have allowed such acts to be intimated on the operatic stage. More pertinently, however, achieving anything approaching an accurate depiction of physiological processes in music arguably became viable only with the development of the large-scale Romantic orchestra and its multifarious coloristic possibilities, combined with the formal, harmonic opportunities for epic tension and release that emerged with the gradual emancipation of dissonance. To be sure, sexual climax is evoked in Renaissance madrigals (all those silver swans leaning on their reedy shores),Footnote ⁵¹ but the conceit there remains largely poetic and its musical treatment discreet. Even in Mozart, sexual excitement – as depicted in Don Giovanni’s “Champagne aria,” for example – refrains from culminating in anything as climactic as we find in Wagner. Beethoven’s duet “O namenlose Freude” in Fidelio is perhaps a better candidate if we are looking for Wagner’s possible models. Not only do the two lovers there sing in a call-and-response that seems prescient of Wagner’s love duets, but it also features urgent, off-beat string figures leading to an orchestral climax that might have been at the back of Wagner’s mind when he composed the final pages of Die Walküre’s first act (though the slower tempo that has become popular for Beethoven’s duet among more recent conductors tends to desexualize it beyond recognition).Footnote ⁵² In his symphonies, however, Beethoven did compose sufficient examples of musical climax that Wagner could have drawn upon when transposing the act into a dramatic setting, just as Wagner took the techniques of motivic development that Beethoven had similarly conceived in a symphonic context and adapted them for dramatic purposes in the Ring.

Wagner’s depictions of sexuality in opera might have known few real precursors, but their impact on his successors was immense and lasting. Whether in musical depictions of orgasm (Salome’s final scene in the eponymous opera or the Prelude to the Rosenkavalier, both by Richard Strauss), climactic closing death scenes for strong-willed women (Salome again, Strauss’ Elektra, Puccini’s Butterfly, Othmar Schoeck’s Penthesilea, Berg’s Lulu, or the whole of Schoenberg’s Erwartung), or in the erotic half-lights of Debussy’s Pelléas,Footnote ⁵³ the Ring left an indelible mark. When one then considers the visual art, literature, and general scholarly discourse that emerged from the treatment of sexuality in Wagner’s Ring, from Aubrey Beardsley’s drawingsFootnote ⁵⁴ to Thomas Mann’s novella Wälsungenblut, D. H. Lawrence’s The Trespasser (originally entitled The Saga of Siegmund), and the near-endless debates on Wagner and psychology,Footnote ⁵⁵ one might even argue that it opened up a new world of potential artistic experience far beyond the confines of music itself. To put it in more fanciful, though appropriately Wagnerian terms: When the doors fly open in the first act of Die Walküre, flooding the lovers with the light of a full, spring moon and prompting them to the realization of their love, Wagner was also flinging open the gates to the modern era of sexuality in art.