The Nibelung’s Ring: The Rhinegold 2

In the last post in this sequence, two weeks ago, we watched Alberich steal the magic gold from the bottom of the Rhine.  This reenacted in symbolic form the process by which our Western civilization, like every other civilization in recorded history, abandoned the traditional human relationship with nature as a community of persons and started treating it as a passive source of commodities instead. Alberich’s act thus sets the drama of modern history in motion.

This interpretation, as we saw two weeks ago, isn’t something that modern commenters invented. Wagner consciously drew up the scene in those terms. As a passionate believer in the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach, not to mention up to his eyeballs in the nearly forgotten world of  mid-nineteenth century German political and cultural radicalism, he plotted The Rhinegold in the confident expectation that the world of commodification and exploitation Alberich’s deed created was about to crumple before the heroic Siegfrieds of the German radical counterculture.  He began writing the music while he was still trying to deal with the way the revolutionaries of 1848 and 1849 had been brushed aside by the forces of the existing order of society.  It was only years later, when he was most of the way through the work of composing Siegfried, that he grasped just where the drama of his age was heading, and the revelation nearly broke him.

We’re far from that point as Alberich scrambles down from the waters of the Rhine into the subterranean realm of Nibelheim, the world of the Nibelung dwarfs. He’s got the magic gold, he’s forsworn love, and so of course his first action is to hammer the gold into a magic ring—the Nibelung’s Ring of the series title—which gives him power over Nibelheim and its inhabitants. Of course he abuses that power shamelessly; as we’ve seen, when Wagner talks about renouncing love, the word “love” includes every kind of human relationship that’s not mediated by money, so no human (or Nibelung) ties restrain Alberich from doing whatever he wants. The results are just as ugly in this case as they generally are.

(Once again, if you haven’t read the libretto, stop now and read scenes 2-4 of The Rhinegold, which you can download here. None of what follows will make much sense unless you know what’s going on.)

Wagner doesn’t follow him there right away, however.  As the first scene of The Rhinegold gives way to the second, the camera of his imagination pans up, not down, leaving behind the world of nature for the world of the gods and giants. There’s Wotan, dreaming about the wonderful castle in the air he’s having the giants build for him, and there’s his wife Fricka, trying to wake him up by reminding him of the price he’s promised the giants:  Freia, the goddess of love.

You caught the parallel between the two scenes already, right?  Just like Alberich, Wotan’s renounced love in exchange for power. If anything, Wotan’s done it in a more extreme form. Remember that Wagner’s take on the gods was defined by Feuerbach, who interpreted deities as emblems of human ideals.  Alberich renounced love (that is, personal relationship with other people and the natural world) in a purely practical sense, driven by his own desperation, but Wotan bargained away the ideal of love in order to pursue his dreams of omnipotence.

Ah, but Wotan doesn’t intend to follow through on his side of the bargain. That’s the thing to keep in mind about Wotan. For all his pretensions of divine glory, he’s basically a slimeball. Alberich, for all his nastiness—and you haven’t seen more than a tiny fraction of that yet—isn’t the villain of The Ring; Wotan is. Yet he’s not a cardboard-cutout villain, one of those dreary figures so common in modern fantasy fiction whose sole purpose for existence is to give the protagonists somebody to despise and destroy. He is The Ring’s villain but also its tragic hero, the character whose actions set the plot in motion and drive it step by step, despite all his best and worst intentions, to its apocalyptic end.

(He’s also Richard Wagner, by the way.  The Seattle Opera production a few decades back that dressed Wotan as Wagner and the rest of the cast as opera singers and backstage personnel, and made the sets represent a German opera house of Wagner’s day, was engaged in the sort of postmodern posturing all too common in modern opera, granted, but this once, that usually silly habit actually had a point.  Look at Wagner’s life and writings up to the point at which he started writing the music of The Ring, and the parallels are impossible to miss. Like Wotan, Wagner built a castle in the air, engaged in dubious activities to try to make it a reality, and had it all come crashing down in flames around him. Unlike Wotan’s story, though, Wagner’s didn’t end there.)

To grasp what Wagner intended to say—as distinct from the self-portrait that got into The Ring the way it usually slips into every writer’s major works—it’s here again crucial to remember Ludwig Feuerbach’s insistence that the gods are human ideals, symbolic representatives of the vision of human possibility central to each culture. Wotan, the king of the gods in Wagner’s version of Norse mythology, fills this role for modern Western civilization.  He is its image, its ideal, its archetype, observed with a keen and unsympathetic eye. “Take a good look at him!” Wagner wrote of Wotan in a letter to a friend.  “He resembles us to a hair; he is the sum of the intellect of the present.”  To the extent that each of us participates in modern intellectual culture, dear reader, you are Wotan, and so am I.

Let’s watch him at his antics, then, and see how clear a mirror he holds up to ourselves and our society.  Wotan’s renunciation of the organic order of things begins well before he cut a deal with the giants that he never intended to keep. His first act, long before the orchestra starts up, was breaking a long straight branch off the World-Ash-Tree—that’s one word in German, in case you were wondering—and using it as raw material for his magic spear, on which the contracts that undergird his power are carved in runic letters. As we’ll learn in the prologue to The Twilight of the Gods, the World-Ash-Tree never recovered from the wound.  It sickened and died, and the magic spring over which it once grew ran dry.

Next came the deal with the giants, which as noted already he never intended to keep. His plan was simply to have Loge, the fire-god of reason and logic, find some wiggle room in the contract so that Wotan didn’t have to hand over Freia to the giants.  Now, though, the giants have finished their work.  Valhalla, the castle in the air Wotan planned, is finished—there it is on the backdrop of the scenery, with a rainbow bridge leading to it.  Now the giants want their wages. Fricka, Wotan’s wife, upbraids him—she spends a lot of time doing that—for cutting such a bad bargain.

Freia, the goddess of love and eternal youth, comes running in a panic, because she doesn’t want to go with the giants. The two giants, the brothers Fafner and Fasolt, show up, demand that she be handed over, and remind Wotan that his power depends entirely on the contracts carved on his spear, including the one that binds him to pay for his castle. Two more gods, Donner and Froh, turn up to squabble with the giants. It’s quite the quarrel, and more than once threatens to break into open violence.

Finally Loge shows up. Wotan demands that he untangle the whole mess. Wagner knew how to write a trickster god; Loge teases, temporizes, evades and delays; he explains that he wandered all over the world, looking for something that would be more desirable than love. Everyone he met agreed that love is the best thing ever.  Except, says Loge, there’s this Nibelung dwarf who renounced love to win the gold from the bottom of the Rhine, and now he’s made it into a magic ring and used it to become fantastically wealthy and powerful.

Alberich thinks this is better than love, Loge goes on, but of course you, Wotan, won’t see things that way—in fact, the Rhinemaidens asked me to tell you about this so you can get their gold back for them. He has a lot of the same sort to say about the gold. By the time Loge’s finished with his description, the giants and gods are drooling over the thought of getting Alberich’s wealth—well, except for Wotan, who is more ambitious than the rest of them. Power matters to him more than wealth, and so he wants the Ring and he wants it bad.

That is to say, every one of them makes the same choice Alberich did, with less motivation.

Loge then slyly points out that it would be easy enough to steal the gold from Alberich.  That’s as much as the giants need to hear. They state their terms:  if Wotan gets the gold from Alberich, they’ll accept that in payment in exchange for Freia—and they take her as hostage to force Wotan to keep his promise. Lacking her, the gods lose their strength and glory, and so Wotan and Loge go scrambling down to Nibelheim to get the gold.  In the process, they see the brutal factory existence to which Alberich has consigned his fellow Nibelungs.

Loge tricks Alberich into showing his magic power by turning into various critters. Once he turns himself into a toad, Wotan grabs him, and the two gods go hurrying back up to their own realm with their captive. Wotan demands all his treasure as ransom for his release. Alberich grudgingly consents, and up come the Nibelungs carrying heaps of treasure. Then Wotan demands the Ring.  That’s where we get to see the difference between Alberich and Wotan, and the comparison is not in Wotan’s favor. Alberich knows the price he’s paid for the Ring; he cuts through Wotan’s dishonest moralizing rhetoric in a furious outburst, accusing Wotan of wanting to take the gold all along but being too much of a coward to pay the price; and he warns Wotan that it’s one thing for a Nibelung to renounce love but a far more terrible thing for a god to do the same thing.

Wotan doesn’t care. He wrenches the Ring by force from Alberich’s hand and puts it on, then tells Loge to set Alberich free. Once freed, Alberich pronounces a terrible curse on the Ring: it will bring misery, dread, and death to anyone who wears it.  Then he stumbles back down to Nibelheim, leaving Wotan to gloat over his magic ring.

Next the giants come back. They gather up all the gold—but then they want the Ring, too. It takes the combined efforts of all the gods, as well as a sudden appearance of Erda the earth goddess, to convince Wotan to hand it over.  Of course Alberich’s curse takes effect immediately; Smeagol and Deagol—excuse me, Fafner and Fasolt—quarrel over the Ring at once. Fafner kills Fasolt right there in front of the gods and everyone, and he takes the treasure and the Ring and leaves the scene. Wotan, shaken by the sudden eruption of the curse, still manages to convince himself that he can regain the Ring and avoid the consequences.  He and the other gods cross the rainbow bridge into their new castle. Loge, in an aside to the audience, shakes his head and comments that the gods are going straight to their doom.  Meanwhile, far below, the Rhinemaidens mourn their lost gold. Theirs are the last voices heard before the opera ends.

It’s easy enough to translate all this out of the florid imagery of mythology into the Feuerbachian terms Wagner had in mind while he was writing it.  We discussed two weeks ago how love, in Wagner’s symbolism, stands in for the whole range of personal relationships that unite human beings to one another, to their communities, and to nature:  the foundation, as we’ve seen, of human social and ecological existence in the early stages of every civilization and the baseline to which the survivors return when every civilization falls. What Wagner wants to discuss in the language of mythological opera is how the Western world abandoned that foundation.

The fascinating thing, at least to me, is that he got the history right. Remember, here again, that Wotan and the gods represent the ideas and ideals of society, and in another sense the intellectual and celebrity classes.  Wotan in particular is the Western intellectual mainstream, “the sum of the intellect of the present” in Wagner’s own phrase, and it’s a matter of straightforward historical fact that the foundations for the modern industrial world were laid centuries in advance by the thinkers of the Western world, who spent most of a millennium making the commodification of the world thinkable.

As Lynn White pointed out many years ago in a crucial essay, “The Origins Of Our Ecological Crisis,” that process began with the rise of Christianity. That’s not to say that Christianity did it all by itself—quite the contrary—but by denouncing the old gods and spirits of nature as evil and reimagining the world as an artifact rather than a natural growth, the Christian churches laid a foundation on which later materialists would build.  The nominalists, whom I discussed in an earlier essay, took things a step further to reducing the mental realm to a collection of arbitrary labels; from there, with the resurgence of philosophy in the wake of Descartes, all the necessary ideological framework for the desecration and commodification of nature fell into place.

Alberich’s terrible deed, as I suggested, was driven by the hard political and ecological realities of European life during the Little Ice Age, but Wotan broke off his branch of the World-Ash-Tree long before. What’s more, ambitious god that he was, he’d already pawned the goddess (that is, the ideal) of love and beauty in order to get his castle in the air built to his satisfaction.

Wagner made that whole transaction as edgy as he did, I suspect, because it was a bargain he’d made himself. Every intellectual and every creative talent who seeks respectability and a comfortable place in society makes some version of that deal. The people who control power and wealth—the giants, in the myth; the aristocratic class, in Wagner’s day; the managerial class, in our time—are rarely intellectual or cultured themselves; their mental capacities, which range from the mediocre to the considerable, have to be applied to the challenging art of maintaining and increasing their own wealth and influence, leaving little time for anything else.  To them, the labors of intellectuals and creative talents are useful tools in the struggle for power and prestige, and intellectuals and creative talents have to recognize this and craft their creations accordingly if they want to get the respectability and the resources so many of them crave.

There’s an alternative, of course, for some intellectuals and some creative talents. You may be able to write books and articles for fringe communities, and get by that way. You may be able to paint or draw, so long as you don’t mind selling your work for postcard prices, and you can probably play music at the local honky-tonk and make some money. You can’t compose grand opera that way, though. Wagner had to sell himself to the rich and powerful if he wanted to follow his artistic vision. Given his pride, that must have twisted in him like a knife.

But there’s a further dimension to the bargain with the giants. The intellectuals and creative talents of every society create visions of what that society could be. In our society, with its fixation on progress, those are visions of the future; in societies with different relationships to time, the visions focus on the glorified past or on an idealized form of the present instead. The visions that matter aren’t created in a coldly manipulative spirit; they’re heartfelt, and express collective longings, which is why they’re embraced so fervently by so many people. Cutting a bargain with the giants in order to build your personal vision, your palace in the air—that’s a tempting deal for any visionary.  Many people fall for it, and most of them go far out of their way not to notice how much of the vision has to be bargained away in order to get some of it in place.

That’s woven into the history of every civilization, but it takes a distinctive form in each case. In ours, the first stirrings of industrialism tossed a wild card into the middle of play. All of a sudden the gods and giants had to deal with the rise of a new power, the first sketch of a capitalist class, which could cash in the explosive expansion of wealth made possible by deepwater shipping and the earliest forms of mass production for the more intoxicating coin of power. Obviously it was essential to existing holders of power to take that magic ring from its makers.

Just as in the opera, they did it partly by force, and partly by embracing the same renunciation of love that got the Ring for Alberich in the first place. That is to say, they used their control of European political systems to keep the industrialists in line, and embraced the commodification of nature in order to give themselves ample wealth to take a dominant position in the rising capitalist system. All across Europe, kings and aristocrats converted feudal relationships based on personal loyalties to financial relationships in which only money mattered.

Much of that conversion was done with impressive brutality. Most of my paternal ancestors came to the New World because of one example, the Highland clearances—the mass deportation of most of the population of the Scottish Highlands.  People whose ancestors had lived on the same land for centuries beyond counting were driven off their land by their own clan chieftains, their houses burnt and all their traditional rights taken from them, so that the lairds could lease out the land for sheep raising to feed Lowland mills with wool.

If you want to know why so many people of Scottish Highland descent these days live practically everywhere in the world but Scotland, and why most of their ancestors dropped their language and culture like a hot rock as they fled all over the globe, now you know; those who have been betrayed by the clan leaders they were taught to trust, admire and support routinely do such things. Similar scenes were enacted in quite a few European countries, for that matter. The mass migrations of impoverished European farmers all over the world had causes that don’t always get into recent history books.

Notice, finally, Wotan’s response to all this. Despite everything that happened, despite Alberich’s curse and the warnings of Erda, he still wants the Ring, and the power and wealth that it provides. That’s true of most mainstream intellectuals. In Wagner’s time it was even more true than usual, since the role of the philosophes in launching the French Revolution convinced a great many intellectuals that they ought to do the same thing, plan out a wonderful new world, and then get other people to make it happen.  That’s exactly what Wotan has in mind. He plans on getting somebody else to get the Ring for him.  That strategy didn’t work out too well for the philosophes, all things considered, and it worked even less well for their heirs in 1848 and 1849. In the operas to come, we’ll see how it works out for Wotan.