by Martin Geck
The “natural” impact of the music is further intensified during the final Magic Fire Music by the introduction of the additional element of fire. In his famous Moscow production of Die Walküre in 1940, Sergei Eisenstein introduced color into his staging of this section of the score, the only time he did so in the work, for, as he explained,
Wagner’s score is not too rich in its coloration, but it flares up, burns, bathed in light, organically and in the spirit of movement within the music.
In the Magic Fire, Loge’s theme runs like a thread of blue through the purple of fire, the underlying element.
Now that theme melts in the fire.
Now it seems to have smothered the fire.42
That Wagner was concerned to “conceal intellect from feeling”43 does not, of course, preclude the possibility that he saw himself explicitly as a rational composer. Notwithstanding the claims of such an intelligent musicologist as Wolfgang Rathert, the complexity of Wagner’s “musical fabric” is by no means merely the “product of a mysterious process snatched from the subconscious” but is also the expression of the “rational calculation and aesthetic playfulness” that Rathert associates with Brahms and Schoenberg.44 On this point Wagner resembles Leonardo da Vinci, whom he described—astutely—as “a man of breeding who could play around with things.”45 In his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo argued that
When the work is equal to the knowledge and judgment of the painter, it is a bad sign; and when it surpasses the judgment, it is still worse [. . .], but when the judgment surpasses the work, it is a perfectly good sign; and the young painter who possesses that rare disposition, will, no doubt, arrive at great perfection.46
This can also be applied to the music of Wotan’s Farewell in the sense that Wagner knows that even in this deeply moving scene Wotan remains an ambiguous figure, on the one hand showing great tenderness toward his daughter as he banishes her to a fire-girt rock from which only the “fearlessly freest of heroes” can rescue her, while at the same time dreaming a “typically male dream”47 of winning a “second chance” for himself and his “grandiose idea” by relying on just such a hero.48 And whereas—according to the surviving record of Wagner’s rehearsals of the Ring in 1876—Wotan lowers his sword when taking his leave of Brünnhilde as a token of his definitive abdication,49 he also rebels against the whole idea of any such abdication in Siegfried, an irrational reaction that flies in the face of Wagner’s own claim that Wotan is “in truth no more than a departed spirit.”50
Operagoers who attempt to judge Wotan by rational criteria will inevitably find themselves caught up in a descending spiral of ever greater ratiocination, so sympathetic is the inwardly torn leader of the gods. Such an approach may satisfy us intellectually, but this would certainly not be in the spirit of Wagner, who expressly falls back on the medium of music to transform a spoken drama with an intellectual content into a work in which art acquires an altogether religious aura. In 1870, when he broke off work on Götterdämmerung to write his essay Beethoven, appealing to Schopenhauer in his attempt to propose a “philosophical explanation of music,” it is no accident that he introduced into the debate Johann Gottfried Herder’s category of “devotion.”51 Music cannot communicate anything that is not “sublime,” but only “the character of all the world’s appearances according to their innermost essence.”52 Wagner cites the Ninth Symphony as an illustration of this claim:
Its first movement undoubtedly shows us the idea of the world in its most terrible light. Elsewhere, however, this very work affords us unmistakable evidence of the purposely ordaining will of its creator; we are brought face to face with it when [in the final movement] the composer stops the frenzy of despair that overwhelms each fresh appeasement and, with the anguished cry of one awaking from a nightmare, speaks that actual word whose ideal sense is none other than: “Man, despite all, is good!”53
The Wagner of the Ring is moved by Beethoven’s “desperate leap” out of a world of horror into “the new world of light,”54 but he does not regard this as a model that he himself can emulate, for, like Wotan, modern man is doomed to die. And yet there is one thing that Wagner most emphatically takes over from Beethoven’s music: the “most sublime joviality” of this music passes no moral judgment on the world but is, rather, “the world itself” in its interplay of “grief and joy, of weal and woe.”55 Wotan’s music, too, attests to the existence of this “world itself” and, hence, to our own existence: avoiding all recriminations, it holds up a mirror in which we can recognize ourselves—in our delusions of grandeur and fears, our noble feelings and base trickeries, our good intentions and our failed actions, our joys and sorrows. Those listeners who, having examined Wagner’s music in detail, still cannot abide Wotan’s music are bound to ask whether they can live with themselves in all their own contradictions.
Wagner, too, did not always find this easy. While poring over the second complete draft of the third act of Siegfried, he told Cosima that “All these primitive hotchpotches (Wotan storming in) I no longer care for at all.”56 In general, however, he was able to identify with the character through the medium of his music, without turning himself into a monster in the process: “Dedicated to his Brünnhilde / Wagner-Wotan,” runs the autograph signature on a photographic portrait of him inscribed to his 1876 Brünnhilde, Amalie Materna, and depicting him in a pose that might be deemed appropriate to the ruler of the gods.57 But that is not the end of the story, for in a letter he wrote to his Dresden friend Theodor Uhlig on November 18, 1852, Wagner signed himself “Your Nibelung prince Alberich.”58 Although Wagner may have been striking a note of self-irony here, there is no doubt that his salutation also reflects a certain sympathy for Wotan’s antagonist. When Alberich curses love in Das Rheingold in his hope of inheriting the world, we hear the renunciation motif, which in the subsequent course of the Ring is repeatedly heard at moments of what we might call “noble” renunciation, notably, when Wotan bids farewell to Brünnhilde: this is music that indiscriminately humanizes every form of anguish.59 In the face of this “naïveté,” music can be both comforting and seductive. Wagner’s music, in particular, invites us to register both and, therefore, to confront life’s contradictions, an aspect of his works that provided Thomas Mann with a lifetime of creative stimulation.
Fortunately, operagoers have a short break between performances of Die Walküre and Siegfried to prepare inwardly for the fact that following the apocalyptic mood disseminated by Wotan in the course of the earlier work, the action starts up all over again, this time with a young hero called Siegfried, who is to replace Wotan and flourish his sword in token of a better world. Siegfried fills even Alberich with fear, causing the latter to complain to his son, Hagen: “Even my curse grows feeble in the face of the fearless hero; for he does not know what the ring is worth; he makes no use of its coveted power.” There is something of a beautiful fairy tale to all of this, and, indeed, Wagner consciously presents it in the form of just such a tale.
In this context it is worth recalling a passage in Walter Benjamin’s essay The Storyteller, which seems to have been written with Siegfried in mind:
The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest. In the figure of the fool it shows us how mankind “acts dumb” toward the myth; in the figure of the youngest brother it shows us how one’s chances increase as the mythical primitive times are left behind; in the figure of the man who sets out to learn what fear is it shows us that the things we are afraid of can be seen through; in the figure of the wiseacre it shows us that the questions posed by the myth are simple-minded, like the riddle of the Sphinx; in the shape of the animals which come to the aid of the child in the fairy tale it shows that nature not only is subservient to the myth, but much prefers to be aligned with man.60
Wagner takes his time in telling this fairy tale, which he describes in radiant colors: he shows us Siegfried as a strapping youth forging an invinci
ble sword, Nothung, disposing of his scheming foster father, Mime, and finding his way from the Forest Bird to the dragon, Fafner, whom he kills. The dragon’s blood allows him to understand the language of the Forest Bird, which tells him to take the ring and magic helmet from the Nibelung hoard. Siegfried then defeats Wotan as he bridles against his destiny, before finding Brünnhilde on her flame-girt rock, then kissing her and coupling with her. The music, too, seems to escape from the weight of myth in these scenes and to assume naïve and fairy-tale qualities. Not only Siegfried’s Forging Songs but Mime’s whining complaints—described by Siegfried as a squawking “starling’s song”—suggest that a naïve form equals an innocent, unspoiled world. Siegfried blows a “merry tune” on his little silver horn; the Forest Bird avails itself by preference of a natural pentatonic scale; and, last but not least, there is the sound of twittering birds in the idyllic scene traditionally known as the Forest Murmurs.
The opening act of Die Walküre in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1940 Moscow production. Center stage is the tree of life as a symbol of the all-pervasive world spirit. To the left of the tree are Sieglinde and Siegmund. While she recalls her wedding with Hunding, when “the men from his clan sat here in the hall,” a “mime chorus” acts out her narrative, ensuring that the events she recounts are raised to a higher level than that of the merely individual. (Photograph courtesy of VAAP, Moscow. Photographer: Evgeny Fedorovsky.)
And yet even the Siegfried motif itself hints that this idyll is deceptive, for its characteristics are march-like rather than natural, and the powerful minor-key coloring that it loses only at the moment of Brünnhilde’s awakening implies that Siegfried will end his life not as a carefree victor but as a tragic hero.61 And, indeed, it becomes clear on closer inspection that Siegfried’s role as a superior version of Wotan consists for the most part in his wrestling with problems inherited from his grandfather. Although he appears on the surface to act spontaneously, he is ultimately no more than a product of that baleful history from which none of the characters in the Ring can escape. This history is ever-present in the music, for the characters of Das Rheingold and, more especially, the motifs associated with them occur at every turn in Siegfried, not least in the riddle scene in act 1. Although Wotan demonstrates that he knows more about the world than Mime, who is drawn into their wager against his will, and even though he manages to flaunt the Valhalla motif, it is no longer possible to believe that Valhalla is an important factor in the events that are currently unfolding in the world. While Wotan indulges in all manner of reminiscences, the leitmotifs that are heard in this scene and which include those associated with the World Ash, the treaties carved into Wotan’s spear, the giants, the Nibelungs, the Wälsungs, and Nothung open up old wounds. This collage of quotations—the term is legitimate in the face of the many passages recapitulating the action of Das Rheingold—makes it clear just how much has gone wrong in the past.62
To what extent Wotan undermines his own position by painting an unduly rosy picture of his past in his scene with Mime becomes clear from his confrontation with his grandson in the final act of Siegfried. Although Siegfried is supposed to be his better half, Wotan responds in a way that reveals his delusions of grandeur in no uncertain terms, for instead of directing him to Brünnhilde, he bars his way, albeit in vain. On a superficial level, Siegfried’s triumph over the unknown Wanderer is also Wotan’s triumph signaling the necessary “fratricide” that frees him from the weight of the past, but on a deeper level Wotan’s irrational behavior means that his grandson can have no future. By allowing his longed-for heir to go his own way, blind to history and oblivious to the world, instead of passing on his own unproductive knowledge of the world in a way that will benefit Siegfried, he sends him off down a cul-de-sac. Lacking the complex, circumspect understanding that the Greeks termed and gave to the Titan Pro-Metheus (“fore-thinker”), Siegfried is mercilessly exposed to all the intrigues of the world.
The encounter between Wotan-Wanderer and Siegfried may be vaguely reminiscent of Oedipus’s meeting with Laius, whom Oedipus unwittingly murders. More important than this parallel, however, is the observation that as the action unfolds, Siegfried changes from a naïve fairy tale to a myth gravid with portents of destiny, a sea change which, according to Carl Dahlhaus, must have contributed to Wagner’s decision to set aside the score until further notice and write Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg instead.63 In order to illustrate the startling nature of the break between the existing sections of the Ring and those parts that were yet to be written, I shall introduce a break of my own at this point in my narrative and, thrusting aside this chapter on Wotan, turn instead to Tristan und Isolde and, thence, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
A Word about Sergei Eisenstein
Writing in his—never fully authenticated—memoirs, Dimitri Shostakovich dismissed as shameful Sergei Eisenstein’s acceptance in November 1939 of an invitation to stage Die Walküre at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater: the famous film director, Shostakovich argued, was simply too afraid of crossing swords with senior Soviets, perhaps even with Stalin himself.1 The project was certainly political through and through: in the wake of the nonaggression pact signed by Germany and the Soviet Union in August 1939, the two countries intensified their cultural exchange program. With hindsight we can see that there was something distinctly macabre about the Soviet Union’s attempt to make political and cultural capital out of Die Walküre, not least because only a short time later the Ride of the Valkyries was to play such an inglorious role in German war films and newsreels.
But Eisenstein, who at this date in his career was by no means universally acclaimed as a film director in the Soviet Union, thought along very different lines when he started work on his production, noting in a mixture of German and English:
I expect our interpretation will turn out like this: from the inhuman to the human. [. . .] The theme of humanity. At the center: Brünnhilde opens up to human feelings [. . .] when she sees how human beings love each other: their love is characterized by compassion and self-sacrifice. What is fascistic about this play, I wonder?!!!2
Eisenstein was fascinated not by the compassion that comes “from above” and that Hanns Eisler found so objectionable in Parsifal,3 but by the kind of compassion that draws Brünnhilde away from the implacable world of the gods and to the sentient section of humanity. In adopting this approach, Eisenstein was giving one of the principal messages of the Ring its due, a message summed up in the redemption motif with which the cycle ends. Even more importantly, he was rehabilitating Wagner and defending him against the exaggerated charge of inhumanity.
The invitation to stage Die Walküre found the uncommonly well-educated Eisenstein by no means unprepared, for his mentor Vsevolod Meyerhold had already drawn his attention to the cinematic features in Wagner’s works. Later Eisenstein explained that Stuart Gilbert’s book on James Joyce, which he read in 1930, had encouraged him to explore the similarities in the leitmotif techniques of the Irish writer and of Wagner. In his essay “The Incarnation of Myth,” which appeared in the periodical Teatr in the run-up to his production of Die Walküre, Eisenstein reveals a knowledge and understanding of Wagner that are impressive by any standards. He had also read the Poetic Edda, of course, and argued that the tree that appears in the opening act of Die Walküre represented “a system of the world; a principle of life in general, an image of the process of life.”4
Dominating his sets, the tree was a “pantheistic emblem of the creation” embodying “the spirit of nature that is all-pervasive.” A powerful stage prop became one of the pillars of the plot: “The tree’s—Wotan’s—performance reaches its climax when it merges with the theme of spring in an image of the creation of the world, and opens up its centre for Siegmund and Sieglinde’s ecstasy of love.”5
Eisenstein was profoundly sympathetic to Wagner’s revolutionary views and it was entirely in their spirit that he hoped that a future post-individualistic society would rediscover th
e sense of unity that he believed had existed in prehistoric times, when everything was still connected to everything else. As a result he was keen to rid Die Walküre of all individualisms and psychologisms. To take an example: in her role as the guardian of restrictive moral laws, Fricka is surrounded by a collective in the form of what Eisenstein described as “the golden-fleeced chorus of half-rams, half-people, neither wild animals nor human beings, who have betrayed their personal passions and voluntarily assumed subject status instead.”6 These “mime choruses” mediate between “the individual human and his milieu” and in that way illustrate a state in which humankind is not yet completely separated from nature.7
Nature’s sympathetic concern for the plight of human beings was to be illustrated above all by the final scene of Die Walküre through the image of the Magic Fire: “Here the emotion of the characters, poured into the element of music, is personified by a fire which engulfs the entire firmament.” Following in the footsteps of Wagner’s total artwork, Eisenstein speaks of the “synthetic merging of emotion, music, action, light and colour” as one of the basic ideas underpinning his production.8
Die Walküre opened on November 21, 1940, fifteen years after the launch of Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin. Within months, the Hitler-Stalin pact had been consigned to the rubbish bin of history, the ensuing war offering ample cause for “compassion” of the kind found in Die Walküre, but all too little opportunity for any demonstrations of that quality.