Wagner Without Fear

by William Berger

  Comment: In this celebrated scene, Brünnhilde repeats the Siegfried the Brave motif when she is begging Wotan for a ring of fire to deter cowards. She knows who the hero will be, and Wotan must also get the reference. His pronouncement that the fire will keep out any who fear the tip of his Spear is also sung to the same theme. It is an imposing moment, requiring the bass to sing magisterially at the top of his range, and this at the end of a long evening of singing. Only the great basses can pull it off with conviction.

  Wotan’s pathetic situation is magnificently depicted in the orchestra. After he commends Brünnhilde to “One freer than I, the god,” the orchestra picks up a sad strain, which has come to be called the motif of Wotan’s dejection. It is a figure with no inherent logical musical resolution, played first by the woodwinds in a piano to fortissimo crescendo, and repeated to the accompaniment of swirling strings. The theme is then repeated two more times, now with the strings joining the woodwinds in carrying the theme to the point of unbearable tension. Just when you think the orchestra cannot get any louder, the horns, which have been playing long, low harmonies, “slice” the unending crescendo, so to speak, with a new theme. This is the slumber motif, which will be quietly repeated later as the curtain descends on the sleeping Brünnhilde amidst the magic fire. In other words, Wotan’s dejection is so huge that it has no resolution except oblivion. Conductors often stretch this out to the limits of human endurance, and who can blame them? It’s a moment to which everyone in the audience responds. It describes a predicament one can see, for instance, at any neighborhood bar, where the hard-cores greedily seek numbness from their problems. The slumber theme is later directly associated with Brünnhilde, but it is Wotan who passively walks through the balance of his role in the Ring as if drugged. In any case, emotional expression in the orchestra has never surpassed what Wagner achieved here. Composers of film music and Broadway musicals, with their one-after-another false climaxes, should be required to spend a few years studying these five pages of the score.

  For all the extreme emotionality of opera, for all the piles of corpses and dead young lovers and sad people experiencing great crises, there are few scenes anywhere that affect people as powerfully as this one. And yet what is there in this scene that is so devastating? What is the separation of two individuals compared to the cosmic cataclysm of the rest of the story?

  The tragedy is not yet Brünnhilde’s, and no longer Siegmund’s. This is about Wotan, but Wotan as Everyman rather than the imperious symbol of the Rheingold finale, crossing into Valhalla with Spear held high. He is experiencing the tragedy everyone must go through at some point or other—that of letting go because one has to, not because one wants to. On the most literal level he is leaving his favorite daughter forever, right after losing his only son. This is sad enough in itself. He is also clearly leaving the one person who understands him. Wotan has, to state it mildly, put some extreme expectations on his children. They were to defend the status quo, defend his own position, and right the wrongs he committed. They had to correct history. This is the moment in his life when Wotan realizes that his children are a disappointment to him—not because they have fallen short of his love (on the contrary, he has come to realize that he loves Siegmund and Brünnhilde more than he knew he could, and precisely because they have acted contrary to his plans), but because he himself has been living delusionally in regard to his children. If we are to understand Brünnhilde as the embodiment of Wotan’s will, another tragic dimension is added. This is the moment in life when he gives up, period. Indeed, this moment, rather than the finale of Götterdämmerung, marks the end of the gods’ reign. In Act II of this opera, Wotan said that he now waits for “the End,” but it was clear from his music and his actions that he still cared a great deal, and would have loved, if there were a way, to retain his power. From here on, he has given up even wanting anything. This is the End. The rest, from his point of view, is epilogue.

  BASICS: WHEN TO EAT, DRINK, AND VISIT THE RESTROOM

  Performances of Die Walküre usually begin early, at 6:00 or 6:30 p.m. It’s impractical to eat before then, plus you’ll be hungry again later in the evening, just in time for your stomach to growl with the Valkyries in Act III. Do whatever you need to do to be comfortable for the first act so you can completely give yourself over to the great love scene without bodily distractions.

  Act II is long and tends to lose those who have come for the good tunes. On the one hand, you’ll want to eat something at intermission, if Siegmund and Sieglinde haven’t made you too excited (don’t laugh—it happens). On the other hand, don’t eat or drink too much or you’re guaranteed to sleep through Wotan’s monologue, which would be a shame. This will take a bit of foresight. Most of Wagner’s long acts are the first or third, and one can plan accordingly, but this one is right in the middle.

  The Metropolitan Opera opened the 1986 season with a gala performance of its new production of this opera, scaring many of the glitterati who attend opening nights more out of devotion to social success than for the German monologues. Several of these were seen solving the “when to eat and go to the restroom” problem by leaving the opera house after the exciting first act, going to nearby restaurants (dressed beyond all respectable bounds), and returning just in time for “The Ride of the Valkyries” in Act III. Unfortunately, there was no law in effect to prosecute these loathsome poseurs for their criminal actions.

  The third act, like the first, is just over an hour, and makes no demands on your constitution.

  ROUGH SPOTS AND HOW TO GET THROUGH THEM

  The popular Act I is often performed, unstaged, in the concert hall, so you can imagine that it won’t be very hard to get through. Attention can wander during Siegmund’s monologue, although it shouldn’t. The monologue is divided into three parts, each separated by a set of interjections from Hunding and Sieglinde. Each of the three parts should have its own “tone” and “shape,” and yet there should be a single overall structure to it as well. Watch how well the tenor is convincing you of this. Moreover, see if he can muster a level of sympathy in you in spite of Siegmund’s naive victimology. If he can, he’s an artist. If he can’t, just hang on and mark time with Hunding’s and Sieglinde’s questions. The whole thing isn’t all that long, and you will be rewarded for your patience with one of the all-time great love scenes afterward.

  It’s Act II that separates the art lovers from the dilettantes. The second act of Walküre is a workout. It’s shorter than the long acts of Parsifal, Meistersinger, and Götterdämmerung, but for whatever reason this opera has the reputation of being more “popular” than the others. Those who had hoped to breeze through a hit parade are then strained to and beyond their limits by this nearly two-hour segment.

  Act II is best considered as a series of discrete, mostly one-on-one confrontations. These are (1) Wotan/Brünnhilde, (2) Wotan/Fricka, (3) Wotan/Brünnhilde, (4) Siegmund/Sieglinde, (5) Siegmund/Brünnhilde, and (6) everyone (except Fricka, although she’s referred to). All of these dialogues, so to speak, are interesting in themselves, though the bulk of the act is composed of numbers 2, 3, and 5. Number 2 (Wotan/Fricka) is a moral-philosophical argument, so naturally one is better off knowing what is being said. Fricka, however, comes at her husband with all guns blasting. This is reflected in the music, and only a narcoleptic could fall asleep here. Wotan’s monologue, it cannot be stressed too often, really requires a bit of perusal ahead of time. Even if the performance you are attending will provide a simultaneous translation, you’ll want to give some attention to the singer and the nuances of characterization one is coming to expect from today’s “smart” basses. Number 4, with Siegmund and Sieglinde, is another opportunity for you to fall in love with Siegmund. If the tenor is an oaf, don’t worry. Just ignore him and listen to the orchestra—there’s plenty of lyricism there to get the point across. Everyone can appreciate the subsequent Annunciation of Death scene, and then the act concludes with surprising swiftness.

  Act III—
no problem. Wagner raises the curtain with one of the all-time great potboilers, as if to say, “All right, you’ve been good kids for the last couple of hours. Here! Have a tune!” He follows this up with an orgasmic outburst from Sieglinde and eight other howling sopranos. Having thus secured everybody’s attention, he settles in for about thirty minutes of the most beautiful, moving, and human music ever written. If you have any problem getting through Act III of this opera, give up. There’s no hope for you. Next time, stay home and watch music videos—the three-minute kind.

  LOBBY TALK FOR WALKÜRE: A NOTE ABOUT HORSES AND MUSIC

  People all over the world have long responded to musical representations of horses. The easily imitated clip-clop of a walking or cantering horse is the very signature of American Western songs, for example. It is used in Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, and is the main feature of the popular song “Desert Skies” by the Marshall Tucker Band, both pieces of music depicting a pleasant ride. In a slightly faster modulation, “clip-clop” is the basis of the spirited 6/8-meter folk tunes popular for dancing the world over.

  A galloping or charging horse is a different matter altogether. The sound of a gallop, whose three beats any child can easily imitate by clapping the hands together and then slapping the thigh once with each hand, has an inherent sound of urgency and excitement. People were especially susceptible to this sound before there were automobiles. The very sound of a gallop produced a gut-level reaction to the effect that “something is happening.” Perhaps we are conditioned the same way when we hear a siren, an effect that twentieth-century composers like Carlisle Floyd and Steve Reich have used to create the same sort of adrenaline rush in the audience. We do not respond quite the same way our ancestors did to the sound of a gallop, and yet it still holds some sway over us.

  The gallop can be easily and effectively imitated in music. Two metric measures, such as those used in analyzing poetry, are useful here. The first is a dactyl, which is the name of a three-beat rhythm that has the stress on the first beat or syllable, as in the verse “HICK-o-ry DICK-o-ry DOCK.” Dactyls in classical poetry sound heroic. The Aeneid is written in a dactylic meter because it is an epic. It is also chivalric, that is, about horses. (Actually it’s about war and heroism, even though horses, and one horse in particular, figure prominently in it. The point is that charging horses, chivalry, and the excitement of war were the same thing to the premodern mind.) Dactyls are harder to pull off in English, but “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is written in them: “INto the VALley of DEATH….” This is clearly about horses, and no other meter would do.

  Some people hear the gallop in the opposite direction, “short-short-STRESS.” This is called an anapest. It’s the meter of the currently popular expression “bah-da-BING.” Beat out this rhythm with your fingertips and eventually your inner musical ear cannot help but hear that celebrated musical depiction of charging horses, Rossini’s William Tell Overture. Even in our somewhat post-equine era, such music never fails to produce a feeling of exhilaration, of urgency, of what we appropriately call a “rush.” Could the creators of The Lone Ranger have chosen any other music for their theme? Even without the direct references to horses, we still get the “rush” message. Led Zeppelin must have known this when they chose a rapidly repeating anapestic riff (da-da-DUM) for the background of their “heroic” song “Achilles’ Last Stand.”

  The Valkyries are clearly to be understood as riding flying horses; that’s how they get to Valhalla. Even Wagner, who demanded the impossible out of stagings, understood that “flight” would have to be conveyed by the orchestra. However much he might have wanted the Valkyries actually to fly in his production, he occasionally accepted that there were limits to what could be done. Fortunately, he was able to use the orchestra effectively enough to convince people they were seeing flying horses.

  The “Ride” begins with rapid upward figures in the strings, like whirlwinds. The next theme introduced is, predictably, a quick dactyl to represent galloping. However, these dactyls are not played by the strings or the brass, as in the William Tell Overture, but very delicately in the woodwinds. The theme is literally created out of air. Also, the first beat is only lightly stressed. The “hooves” portrayed never “land.” The famous main theme is then introduced majestically in the brass.

  The thunderous brass theme, used by thousands of producers for films, shows, and television commercials, beautifully represents the motion of large wings in flight—thrusting “down,” gracefully returning “up.” This theme was first sketched by Wagner in the margins of a notepad, and he originally intended it for the Norns in Götterdämmerung. In that incarnation, the theme had no stresses—that is, no one note was emphasized over any other. Wagner found it dull. When he applied the theme to the Valkyries, he found that stressing the first note of each measure created the aural analogue to the vision he was seeking. (Many renditions of “The Ride of the Valkyries” fail to stress the first note, but that’s how it’s written.)

  So we can see that Wagner accomplished a great vision in musical terms, but why is this piece of music so ubiquitous? Who really cares about flying horses? In Renaissance epics, the flying horse was a metaphor for male sexuality. This is especially true in Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, an extremely influential work. One character in that epic can never “tame” the flying horse, and is carried by it all over the world, out of control. (Dante had described the lustful, including Tristan, as blown “here, there, up, down,” by an infernal wind.) Meanwhile, another character in Orlando Furioso learns to tame the flying horse, and is able to retrieve long-lost items and secrets from the dark side of the moon.

  We don’t know how much of this Wagner consciously had in mind when he wrote Walküre, but it is surely apparent to everyone that Brünnhilde is a marvelously complicated, gender-bent character.

  SIEGFRIED

  PREMIERE: BAYREUTH, 1876.

  THE NAME

  This one is pretty simple. The lead character of the opera gives his own name to the work, and there aren’t any variations on it. But pronouncing it is trickier than you thought. The first S is voiced; thus, “ZEEG-freed.”

  WHAT IS SIEGFRIED?

  This is the opera veteran Wagnerites use to scare newcomers. “Heavy and dark,” they say, not without reason, and “not a tune in the whole thing,” which is patently untrue. “It’s all about Siegfried, who’s impossible to love, and the few other characters are familiar from the previous operas and they keep repeating themselves.” Again, true and not true.

  If the Ring has much in common with fairy tales, then Siegfried is surely the segment most emblematic of that genre. It is a classic coming-of-age drama, and the strong, young, naive hero must battle an evil dwarf and a dragon before he gets the girl. Wotan is here, no longer as the king of the gods but as a mere Wanderer, a man with more of a past than a future. He is a bit like Merlin in the Arthurian legends, sometimes good, sometimes a bit ominous, most often just commenting in his wisdom. There is even an omniscient “witch” type in Erda, the Earth Mother. At the end, there is Brünnhilde, the maiden, whose union with the hero completes his character.

  For all this, there are certain difficulties to be overcome for a full appreciation of Siegfried. Male voices and characters are all we hear for the first two acts, except for an offstage “bird” who sings briefly, and much of what we see is brooding on the past. And there are a few longueurs. As one hard-core Bayreuth veteran muttered wearily after a less-than-inspiring performance of this opera’s second act, “Wagner can go on at times.”

  Of course, its relative inaccessibility makes Siegfried the favorite opera of many who wish to be known as hyperrefined, and they are not without cause. There are great opportunities here for singers who are good character actors, and the orchestra never stops weaving magic. Seen as part of a complete Ring, Siegfried comes fully alive.

  There are also many who see Siegfried as almost the “comic relief” of the Ring, like a scherzo or “fun” third
movement of a traditional classical symphony. Wotan actually laughs in this opera, as do Alberich, Mime, and even Siegfried. Which doesn’t mean you should expect to guffaw through this work. There are lighthearted touches here, but the overall feel is one of terrible seriousness punctuated by some excellent frivolities.

  In general, Siegfried is no longer seen to be as unique, in either the positive or the negative sense, as it once was. Television, videos, and simultaneous in-house translations at the opera have all helped people to follow the subtleties of the drama. In our psychoanalytically obsessed era, many respond to Wagner’s insights, which prefigured Freud and Jung. It is not uncommon for people to be introduced to Wagner by a performance of Siegfried, since some socialite types who have bought tickets to an entire Ring are frightened off by what they’ve heard about this one and give away their tickets.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  SIEGFRIED (tenor) This is the child of Siegmund and Sieglinde, whose birth Brünnhilde prophesied in Act III of Die Walküre. Wotan also anticipated his arrival, telling Brünnhilde she must await “one who is freer than I, the god.” After Siegfried’s mother died in childbirth, he was raised by Mime the dwarf in a cave somewhere in the forest, “to the East.” Mime didn’t do a very good job. Siegfried is wild, untamed, “anarchic” (according to Shaw), “premoral rather than amoral” (according to Donington), and “free” (according to Wagner). Musically, the role is a killer. The sheer amount of music to be sung is enough to scare off even tenors who have mastered the role of Tannhäuser. The only rivals to this role in difficulty are Tristan (whose demands may be as much intellectual as physical) and the Götterdämmerung Siegfried.