Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  The figure of Siegfried likewise changes dramatically as the youthful and carefree fairy-tale hero fearlessly thrusting aside all his enemies and once hailed as the freest of the free is progressively turned into a tragic hero driven to his death in the tradition of classical tragedy, incurring guilt through no fault of his own. Although only the last part of the Ring deals with Siegfried’s death—Siegfried’s Death was the original title of Götterdämmerung—the final scene of Siegfried already brings with it the peripeteia of Siegfried’s tragedy, for the hero who forces his way through the fire to Brünnhilde’s rock seems to be drawn by unseen strings or at the very least to be driven by a higher calling.

  With the strikingly symbolic union of the ideal couple of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, the action of the Ring allows itself an idealistic flight of fancy entirely alien to the spirit of Attic tragedy, making a sudden fall all the more inevitable and precipitous. It is significant that on completing the Ring, Wagner told Cosima: “Siegfried ought to have turned into Parsifal and redeemed Wotan, he should have come upon Wotan (instead of Amfortas) in the course of his wanderings—but there was no antecedent for it, and so it would have to remain as it was.”3 This would imply that the kiss with which Siegfried wakes Brünnhilde is not unrelated to the kiss with which Kundry awakens desire in Parsifal, bringing disaster in its wake: “Strong is the magic of him who desires, but stronger is that of him who renounces.”4

  Shaw was one of the first writers to note that while he was working on the score of Götterdämmerung, Wagner had already “accepted the failure of Siegfried and the triumph of the Wotan-Loki-Alberic trinity as a fact” and conceived a “new protagonist” in Parsifal: “The change in the conception of the Deliverer could hardly be more complete.”5

  First of all, however, existing society has to confront its own state of bankruptcy: until it has become clear that even the most hallowed and sublime love is bound to have what Wagner himself called an “annihilating” effect on a hopelessly corrupt community,6 it is not yet time for Parsifal to step up to his new position as ruler of the kingdom of the Grail.

  Is it any wonder that it was so difficult for Wagner to find his way back into the Ring and that it was particularly hard for him to deal with the transition from the euphoric ritual at the end of Siegfried to the mood of apocalyptic doom that imbues the whole of Götterdämmerung? He also had to portray the still ebullient Siegfried as the plaything of fate, without depriving his hero of all his remaining dignity. And then there was the character of Hagen, who had to be depicted with greater detail and clarity than an agent of evil is normally worth. There is a difference between dealing with such opposites as a poet and doing so as a composer who may have to spend days on end wrestling with only a handful of bars while he gets under the skin of his protagonists.

  It is surely not necessary to dismiss the Siegfried of Götterdämmerung as an “idiot,” as Slavoj Žižek has done.7 Nor do we need to take the fashionable view of him as a guileless fool with a hobbyhorse meant to represent Grane. Least of all is it necessary to have him staggering across the stage as a slovenly dropout. And yet it is undoubtedly true that he is only a shadow of his former self, so that it is hardly surprising to find that by his own admission Wagner—already with half an eye on the Siegfried of Götterdämmerung—felt “no pleasure” at the prospect of having to work on the instrumentation of the jubilant final duet in Siegfried.8

  When he started work on Götterdämmerung only shortly afterward, Wagner complained at having to ensure that “every note” needed to “convey the end of the world,”9 but this should not be invested with undue importance, for it may merely be an expression of the fifty-six-year-old composer’s general disgruntlement at his lot as a music dramatist and head of a family. It is nonetheless significant that he had done everything in his power to procrastinate and to defer the herculean task of completing the Ring.

  The projects that had provided him with a degree of distraction between Die Meistersinger and his resumption of work on the Ring speak for themselves: they include a theme headed “Romeo & Juliet” (WWV 98), a series of prose sketches for a play about Martin Luther (WWV 99), and a prose draft titled simply “Comedy” (WWV 100) featuring characters such as a theater prompter Barnabas Kühlewind, a “dissolute student and debutant actor” by the name of Kaspar Schreiblich, and a “heroic actor” called Napoleon Baldachin.

  And last but not least, there was the dramatic shift in the whole design of the Ring project. In September 1850 Wagner had still been pursuing the idea of presenting Siegfried’s Death to a hand-picked audience in a “roughhewn theater made of planks and beams.”10 After three exemplary performances, to which the audience would have been admitted free of charge, the theater would have been torn down. Since then, there had been numerous plans for an architecturally imposing festival theater, initially in Munich, later in Bayreuth. And Wagner had barely started work on the score of Götterdämmerung when Emil Heckel founded the first Wagner Society in Mannheim. It was no accident that this event took place so soon after the founding of the second German Reich. In keeping with a motto that was then doing the rounds, the society may be said—not without a certain malice—to have been established under the banner “Singers, gymnasts, and riflemen all support the Reich.”11

  By the time Wagner resumed work on the Ring, he was indeed already well on his way to denying his past as an exiled political outlaw and becoming a “state musician,” as Karl Marx mockingly dismissed him at the time of the first Bayreuth Festival.12 How can this new “statesman-like” role be reconciled with the scenario of doom and destruction that is to be found in Götterdämmerung? (We shall have more to say on this point at the end of the present chapter.)

  We have already quoted Thomas Mann’s answer to this question: Wagner, he wrote, was “a man wholly concerned with the work in hand, a man devoted absolutely to power, the world and success.”13 But in view of the contradictions that we have already noted, it is entirely possible that Wagner would not have found the mental reserves needed to complete the Ring if, like some tempestuously youthful Siegfried, he had not already laid down the compositional outlines of the work sixteen years earlier, an aim he achieved by means of the leitmotif technique that governs the cycle from start to finish and which time and again came to the composer’s rescue.

  Even before his lengthy interruption, Wagner had already transferred whole passages from Das Rheingold to Siegfried in the sense of what Tobias Janz has described as a “collage of quotations.”14 But whereas he proceeded along such mechanical lines in the prelude to act 1 of Siegfried that he was able to write out the orchestral sketch in ink without the need for a preliminary sketch in pencil, his whole approach to the older material became positively playful once he resumed work on the score in 1869. Among other things, he took advantage of the experience he had gleaned in dealing with the brass choir while working on Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger: whereas the “great Ring tutti” is used almost exclusively as a “special sonority” in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre,15 it becomes an almost permanent feature of the later sections of the Ring, where it appears in all its luxuriant splendor.

  Although being at the mercy of his leitmotifs until the bitter end meant that Wagner’s leeway as a composer was limited, the Ring was in any case conceived in such a way that by the end its actors increasingly forfeit their freedom to act and can operate only within certain limits. Is it a disadvantage that the composer, too, has to bow to these constraints or at least groans beneath the task of having to find the right music for the increasingly complex web of past, present, and future?

  In one of his posthumously published fragments on Götterdämmerung, Nietzsche noted: “In many a sequence of harmonies in Wagner’s music I find something agreeably resistant, like turning a key in a complicated lock.”16 Here Wagner is held up as a master not of primary invention but of the brilliant organization of nonsimultaneous procedures as if they were simultaneous. The score of Götterdämmerung conta
ins barely a note that is not derived from the existing store of leitmotifs. In this way it reflects reminiscence and presentiment within one and the selfsame process.

  This sometimes makes the writing so complex that as listeners we cannot always follow all the details. Wagner would undoubtedly have condoned this, for it means we must entrust ourselves completely to the emotional impression. And an impenetrable structure turns abruptly into blindly sensual sounds—a highly modern aspect of Wagner’s music. Which of us can hear in the somber transitional passage after the episode known as Hagen’s Watch in the first act of Götterdämmerung that the following motifs are overlaid and for the most part interwoven: the motifs associated with anguish, the dominance of gold, the Nibelung’s hatred, Hagen, the ring, Siegfried’s horn, Siegfried himself, the treaties carved into Wotan’s spear, Brünnhilde, and the curse?

  But the omnipresence of the leitmotifs ensures that the mythic dimension of the Ring is preserved, even though the plot seems superficially to have been reduced to an intrigue dealing with human concerns. Although Wotan no longer appears in person, he continues to play an important role as what Carl Dahlhaus terms “a phantom of the imagination by the grace of the music.”17 And, as Bernhard Benz has observed, “the action of the heroic tragedy that is visible onstage collapses beneath the weight of the myth about the gods, which controls and guides it on a subliminal level.”18 In short, there is no reason to try to turn Götterdämmerung back into what it once was when it was still called Siegfried’s Death: an ordinary heroic opera with a plot geared to a logical goal. Instead, the music ensures that the different layers of time flow into one another as they do in myth: the whole manifests itself in the moment, and the moment is refracted in the mirror of the whole. Such art is unique in the whole history of musical theater—and this is true whether we regard the result as authentic or merely as self-serving.

  In completing the Ring, Wagner was at the mercy of specific constraints that were both determined by the history of the work’s creation and at the same time inherent in the work itself. All the more impressive, therefore, are the freedoms that he was able to create for himself and the new impulses that he was still able to give the work. The best example of this is his treatment of the character of Hagen, who appears for the first time in Götterdämmerung, with the result that the composer had a relatively free hand in fleshing him out. We have already quoted Wagner’s complaint to his wife in July 1871, at a time when he was just starting work on act 2: “Where am I to find my Hagen, with his echoing, bragging voice?”19 As always, he had half an eye on the theatrical impact of his characters from the very outset. Hagen was to be full of himself, without ever appearing to be a mere peasant. After all, he wields a spear—albeit not Wotan’s spear—as a token of his rule. And it is he who pulls the strings, at least until he is dragged down into the depths of the Rhine by the Rhinedaughters as a result of his uncontrollable desire to gain possession of the ring.

  Wagner reveals exceptional mastery in using music to invest Hagen with features of nonidentity and exposing him as both a villain and a victim, an authentic individual and cunning intriguer or cynical seducer. In his monologue, Hagen’s Watch, we meet the antihero alone in the Gibichung Hall—Siegfried and Gunther have left in high spirits with the intention of using trickery to bring Brünnhilde back to Gunther’s court as the Gibichung ruler’s future wife. Ignobly born, he is deeply unhappy by nature and strikes a powerful note in his monologue:

  Ihr freien Söhne,

  frohe Gesellen,

  segelt nur lustig dahin!

  Dünkt er euch niedrig,

  ihr dient ihm doch—

  des Niblungen Sohn’.

  [You freeborn sons, carefree companions, merrily sail on your way! Though you think him lowly, you’ll serve him yet, the Nibelung’s son.]

  But the music shows us another Hagen, a Hagen who, according to Dieter Schickling, represents a “ravaged human race without parents.”20 By his own admission, his blood “curdles” within him, “stubborn and cold,” while his monologue is accompanied by dull and hesitant chords that are difficult to make any logical sense of in terms of their meter and rhythm. His vocal line, too, attests to a lack of direction, becoming more coherent only when he seizes control of Siegfried’s motif and recalls the “doughty hero” who is to bring his “own bride” to Gunther’s court and, in doing so, bring him closer to Alberich’s ring. The reference to Siegfried as a “doughty hero” is, of course, contemptuous.

  But is this also true of his appropriation of Siegfried’s motif? After all, this is not the only leitmotif heard during Hagen’s Watch, where the orchestral melody features a veritable floodtide of such motifs. As with so many other passages in the Ring, it resembles a dreamlike, speeded-up traversal of the whole action of the cycle. Hagen, it is true, has his own motif in the form of a falling diminished fifth, but this is perceived more as a harmonic foundation to this episode than as a musical figure in its own right, not least because it is often harnessed together with a variant of Siegfried’s horn motif that “mutilates the original in the most dreadful way imaginable” (music example 27).21

  In other words, it is only superficially that Hagen is able to play the part of the intriguer hoping ultimately to triumph over everyone and everything. On a deeper level he longs to be a second Siegfried. When the real Siegfried loses all knowledge of his origins as a result of the potion that Gutrune serves him, Hagen is the only person at the Gibichung court who knows about the dark tale of the Nibelung’s ring and, more especially, about his father, Alberich, who once forged this ring and then lost it to Wotan. Two scenes later, Alberich recalls that he brought up his only son “to feel stubborn hatred: now he’ll avenge me and win the ring in contempt of the Wälsung and Wotan.”

  Hagen is indeed a second Siegfried to the extent that both men ultimately perish. Both, moreover, think that they are in control of their actions, whereas they are merely figures caught up in mythic events and, as such, driven by those events. Hagen’s cry of “To me, though, he’ll bring the ring”—Wagner wanted the final g on Ring to be articulated almost like a k—is far from being a triumphant outburst, for, as Gerd Rienäcker observes, “the coveted object is perverted in the most appalling way imaginable, collapsed into a shrill dissonance before being resolved in a gesture that sinks down plaintively.”22

  27. Bars 870–77 of act 1 of Götterdämmerung (“Hagen’s Watch”), with Hagen’s motif indicated in the bass line of the first bar.

  The difference between Siegfried and Hagen is not so much moral as existential, Siegfried being the naïve individual who thinks positively but is impervious to any deeper understanding, while Hagen has been conditioned by his father into clinging to his historical knowledge about the baleful conditions that obtain in a world ultimately concerned only with who will acquire the accursed ring. This knowledge also includes the Norns’ primeval presentiment that this world is coming to an end, with the result that even Hagen’s scheming at the Gibichung court will ultimately merely contribute to its downfall.

  In consequence, Alberich must browbeat Hagen into winning back the ring. In his Stuttgart production of Götterdämmerung in 2000, Peter Konwitschny brought out this aspect of the plot in a particularly impressive way: when Alberich encounters his son asleep, it is the troubled sleep of one who most of all would like to throw off the burden of history and forget his obligation to avenge his father. But the old man becomes increasingly agitated as he reminds his son of his duty, his role suggesting a “delirious dream” on Hagen’s part: “The tempo and intonation of what he says, together with the orchestral comment on the primeval events that he evokes, obey a logic that catches us off guard, linking together the damaged and barely recognizable motifs by means of a collage effect.”23

  Hagen is not confident that his mission will succeed and is reluctant, therefore, to swear allegiance to his father. In German, the term Nibelungentreue was first used in the early years of the twentieth century by the then cha
ncellor, Bernhard von Bülow, who was referring, in fact, not to Wagner’s ignoble Nibelungs, Alberich and Hagen, but to the heroes of the original Lay of the Nibelungs. Even so, it is not inappropriate to speak of Hagen’s “Nibelung loyalty” to his father in the baleful sense that it was to acquire at the time of the National Socialists. And there is a certain piquancy to Slavoj Žižek’s description of the oneiric encounter between Hagen and Alberich as “the mother of all Wagnerian scenes” and as “Wagner at his best,”24 and to turn Hagen—and arguably Wagner, too—into a “protofascist”25 in keeping with the SS watchword, “Our honor is loyalty.”

  It would, of course, be wrong to equate Wagner with one of his characters. Nor should we overlook the fact that Žižek has singled out an ideological factor that is found almost everywhere in nationalist circles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that can look back on a tradition lasting thousands of years: even Tacitus was already hailing kinship, loyalty, honor, and the worship of women as Germanic virtues, while implicitly castigating the moral decline of his own Roman civitas. The Sachsenspiegel—a compendium of medieval laws compiled between 1220 and 1235—likewise invests qualities such as honor and loyalty with an importance tantamount to that of the law itself. And Wagner’s contemporary, Julius Langbehn, whose Rembrandt as Educator was a cult book of the German youth movement, wrote that “noble is he whose right hand never breaks the oath of loyalty that it has sworn.”26

  Wagner substantially altered the character of Hagen as he discovered him in his Old Icelandic and Middle High German sources. In the Lay of the Nibelungs, for example, Hagen is a hero in spite of his murderous deeds, whereas the Ring casts him first and foremost in the role of a traitor. Even so, Wagner avoids stereotypes and presents the character as a multifaceted figure capable of springing a number of surprises. In his scene with Alberich, for instance, Hagen seems to vacillate and to be almost introverted, and yet only a few moments later he develops a hyperactive streak, summoning his vassals with a grimly resolute call to arms: “Woe! Woe! To arms! To arms! To arms throughout the land! Goodly weapons! Sturdy weapons, sharp for the fray! Danger is here! Danger! Woe! Woe!”