The Nibelung’s Ring: The Rhinegold I

In this and the posts to come I’m going to be presenting a social, political, and economic interpretation of what’s going on in the operas composing Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. Now of course the usual reaction to such interpretations is to back away from the crazy person as quickly as possible, and there’s good reason for that.

Crackpot interpretive schemes go back a long, long way. From the Pagan mystics who redefined the raucous behavior of the Greek gods as prim metaphysical parables, through the economist who published a lengthy book trying to prove that Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark was all about the business cycle, to today’s ongoing efforts to turn ancient mythologies into fourth-rate science fiction about ancient astronauts, this kind of allegorical interpretation can be very entertaining in a giddy sort of way, but it tells you more about the contents of the interpreter’s head than it does about the thing being interpreted.

There’s an exception to that rule, however, and that’s when the creator of the work under discussion intended the allegory. Nobody argues about whether there’s a subtext of Christian theology in John Bunyan’s famous The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example. Bunyan himself put one there, and made it impossible to miss. The main character’s name is Christian, he sets out on his journey after meeting another character named Evangelist, and away we go. It’s a fine romp, with villains, monsters, and perils aplenty, and you don’t have to be a Christian yourself to enjoy it, but there’s no question that Protestant theology is what it’s all about.

Richard Wagner was a little more subtle than John Bunyan. (It would admittedly take heroic efforts to be less subtle than Bunyan.)  He didn’t name his characters Proletariat, Intelligentsia, and so on; instead, he took names, incidents, and decor from the Dark Age legends we discussed in an earlier post in this sequence. Nonetheless, as we discussed in a different post, Wagner was powerfully influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who redefined gods as collective cultural ideals. In his voluminous letters and other writings, Wagner made it as clear as anything can possibly be that this was what he had in mind when he went to work on The Ring. His gods, giants, nature spirits, and Nibelung dwarfs were symbolic stand-ins for the major players in nineteenth century European culture.

We have, as it happens, another witness to the same point, and it so happens that the witness in question shares three things with Richard Wagner. First, he was an immensly influential cultural and artistic figure in his time; second, he was just as far over onto the leftward end of the political spectrum as Wagner was; and third, he had one of the few egos of the age as insanely overinflated as Richard Wagner’s. Yes, we’re talking about George Bernard Shaw, playwright, essayist, literary critic, insufferable intellectual snob, and crazed Wagner fan.  Among Shaw’s prodigious literary output, accordingly, is a short work entitled The Perfect Wagnerite. (It’s long out of copyright and so you can download a free copy here.)

Now in fact Shaw was an imperfect Wagnerite, though since he was Shaw there was no possible way he could have noticed this, much less admitted it.  He was astute enough to catch the grand political and cultural subtext to The Ring, and thorough enough to read Wagner’s own writings and get the details of the allegory straight from the Nibelung’s mouth. In the present context, he suffered from two great limitations.  The first was that he was utterly unable to imagine that anybody who disagreed with him could be right.  The second was that he never outgrew the Feuerbachian optimism that was knocked out of Wagner by the aftermath of the failed 1849 revolution, and so his response to Wagner’s mature thought was to insist airily that Wagner was wrong and knew it, and had abandoned his social and political themes and lapsed back into ordinary opera in the third act of Siegfried and the entirety of The Twilight of the Gods.

There’s a tremendous irony in this notion of Shaw’s, and it’s one we’ll discuss in detail once we get to The Twilight of the Gods. For the first two and two-thirds operas, however, Shaw’s a helpful guide. Here’s what he says about our theme:

“The Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its water-maidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring, enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today, and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It could not have been written before the second half of the nineteenth century, because it deals with events which were only then consummating themselves. Unless the spectator recognizes in it an image of the life he is himself fighting his way though, it must needs appear to him a monstrous development of the Christmas pantomimes, spun out here and there into intolerable lengths of dull conversation by the principal baritone.”

He’s right, too, and goes on to demonstrate this in fine detail. With this in mind, we proceed to the first, shortest, and most transparently Feuerbachian of the four operas of The Nibelung’s Ring, The Rhinegold.  If you haven’t read the libretto yet, stop now, download it here, and read the text of the first opera before we go on.

Ready? The orchestra is finishing the prelude and the curtains are going up on Wagner’s world.

It’s a world on three levels. There’s the world of nature, here represented primarily by the Rhine flowing endlessly from the Alps to the North Sea.  Later on we’ll meet some of nature’s other inhabitants, but the ones that matter in this opera are the Rhinemaidens, three water spirits named Woglinde, Wellgunde, and Flosshilde. Their great joy is a lump of magic gold, the Rhinegold of the title, which sits on a crag deep under the river, and their job is to guard it.  They don’t take that job very seriously, because they know that only someone who has renounced love can take it and turn it into a ring of power, and the thought that anyone would do that seems absurd to them. So they dance and play in the water and wait for the sun to shine on the gold.

Down below the world of nature is Nibelheim, the world of the Nibelung dwarfs.  They’re straight out of European folklore: short, scrawny, tough, and hard-working.  They like to make things, and if you happened to visit Nibelheim before the beginning of the opera you’d find them laboring away, coming up with all kinds of clever items to meet their personal needs or just for the fun of it. We’ll meet a couple of the Nibelungs shortly, Alberich and his brother Mime (that’s pronounced Meemeh, by the way—he doesn’t wear white makeup and gloves or pretend to be trapped in a phone booth).

Finally, up above the world of nature is the realm of gods and giants.  The giants are big, strong, and dumb. So are some of the gods, which is not surprising since they’re closely related to the giants—even in the Eddas, a lot of gods have giant wives or ancestors. Then there’s Wotan, whose actions set the whole story in motion.  He’s not satisfied with the way things are, and in the usual way of things, his ideas for changing them start with putting himself in charge of it all. Back before our story opens, he maneuvered himself into the position of king of the gods; he married Fricka, the goddess of social custom, so he would have that immense power on his side; he dominated Loge, the tricksy fire-god of intellect, to have that second immense power on his side; he cut a branch from the World-Ash Tree, and onto it carved in runes the contracts and agreements that define his power; and he has just hired two giants to make him a palace.

All three of these realms, divested of their fairy-tale accoutrements, were everyday realities to people in nineteenth-century Europe, and they are just as essential to our lives today. The world of nature isn’t quite as full of treasures now as it was in Wagner’s time, since we’ve stripped so much of it to the bare riverbed, but nature and its guardians are still present. You don’t have to think of them as nature spirits if you don’t want to. Tribal peoples who live close to nature fit the pattern just as well—and as we’ll see, they and the natural world itself are just as vulnerable to the machinations of Nibelungs and gods alike as they ever were.

The division between the other two worlds was much more obvious in Wagner’s time than it is today. In those days the line between the lower and upper social worlds was explicit.  Did you have enough investment income that you didn’t have to work for a living?  If you did, you were on the gods’ and giants’ side of the line, and if you didn’t, you were on the side of the dwarfs. Read any novel from that time and you can see that line; it’s about as subtle as the Great Wall of China. That’s why Marxists are so obsessed about capitalism.  When Marx wrote, possession of invested capital was literally the most important fact in European social life. Equally, one of the reasons why Marxism is so irrelevant these days is that we’ve moved on to a managerialist system, in which access to power and wealth depends mostly on bureaucratic rank, though capitalists of the old school linger on the way aristocrats did in the era of capitalism proper.

As the curtain rises we’re just before the dawn of the capitalist era. The Nibelungs are peasants, and the giants are aristocrats and gentry. The gods?  They’re cultural figures: intellectuals, artists, celebrities, priests, and prophets, all those dazzling figures who not only entertain the giants but provide the ideas and images that define the world for the other characters. What holds this world together, in the final analysis, is love.

Does that seem unbearably romantic?  It’s nothing of the kind. The medieval world out of which the capitalist world evolved was held together, from top to bottom, by personal relationships. That’s the foundation of feudalism. A feudal system is a network of personal commitments made between individuals. The baron and his vassal clasp hands, the baron grants the vassal a certain piece of farmland, the vassal grants the baron his services during wartime, and the glue that holds the feudal world together hardens around them.

All this descends straight from Gunther’s day. In the twilight years of the Roman world, when runaway corruption had gutted the last trace of the ideals that once made Rome strong, when the currency had become debased to worthlessness and government had been reduced to a system of organized plunder, the only thing that still held fast was the personal commitment of members of a band of warriors to each other and to their leader. The comradeship and mutual loyalty of men who have faced death together is a powerful bond; it’s not always powerful enough to resist the corrosive pressures that emerge during the fall of a civilization, but those warbands that fail to maintain it crumple in the face of battle and are erased from history.  Those who succeed in the face of that challenge become the seed crystals around which a new world takes shape.

That bond of personal commitment, in turn, becomes the template around which the rest of society takes shape.  It structures the relationships of every person and every social group to the others, and it also structures the relationship between humanity and nature. You can see this in the sort of old-fashioned farmers who still get their hands elbow deep into the soil: their relationship to their land is personal, not abstract. You can see it even more powerfully among surviving tribal peoples, for whom every feature of the land is a person, with whom human beings not only can but must establish and maintain mutually respectful relationships.

This kind of personal relationship, uniting individuals with one another, with their society, with their ancestors and gods, and with the natural world, is the basic form of human society.  It’s the form from which every more complex and abstract system arises, and the form to which every such society reverts once it goes through the usual arc of rise and fall, and ends where it began. To begin that arc of rise and fall, in turn, the one thing that has to happen is precisely what starts the action of The Ring:  someone has to break the web of relationships in a way that can’t be repaired by those who are still committed to it.  Someone has to renounce love.

That’s what happens, of course, in The Rhinegold.  As the curtain rises, we see the Rhine, with the Rhinemaidens cavorting through the water around their golden treasure. Then a Nibelung named Alberich comes scrambling up among the rocks on the bed of the Rhine and catches sight of the Rhinemaidens. Of course he falls instantly in love with them.  Of course, since they’re lovely nature spirits and he’s an ugly little Nibelung dwarf, they aren’t interested. Nor are they nice about it. They tease him, flirt with him, and then mock him for his ugliness. In its own way, despite the beauty of the music and the humor of the drama, it’s a brutal scene, and the effect on Alberich is just as brutal, as his clumsy affection crumples into bitterness and misery.

Any of my readers who grew up homely and socially clumsy, as I did, know this song well enough to sing all the verses by heart, but there’s more going on here than a savage commentary on common social habits. The great vulnerability of human relationships with nature is that the affection is one-sided. You can adore the piece of ground you farm, you can pour all your heart and soul and love into it, and yet a few days of bad weather or a summer that’s just slightly too dry can mean a failed harvest and a year of privation and misery.

That’s what Alberich is going through. A lot of people went through it in Europe in the centuries prior to Wagner’s time. Europe, that bleak, mountainous, storm-swept subcontinent stuck onto the western end of the continent of Asia, is a difficult place to maintain an urban agricultural civilization. If you’re on the southern edge of it, up against the Mediterranean, it’s not so bad, though you can count on catastrophic droughts fairly often.  If you’re north of the ragged band of mountains that extends from the Pyrenees across south central France to the Alps and then down the spine of the Balkans, on the other hand, you’re in much worse shape.

It’s worth remembering that southern Germany is at the same latitude as Newfoundland and northern Germany is at the same latitude as Labrador. Only the Gulf Stream and certain unstable weather patterns triggered by that great oceanic river of warm water keep it from being subarctic wasteland better suited to musk oxen and caribou than to agricultural crops. From 1500 to 1800, those weather patterns were much weaker than usual, and at irregular but frequent intervals, Europe shivered and starved. That’s the Little Ice Age that climate historians discuss.  It was also the great driver of the age of European mass migration:  millions of families gave up everything to flee to other parts of the world where they hoped to find a better chance of survival.

The Little Ice Age was also what shattered what was left of the peasant economy of old Europe and brought about the rise of industrial capitalism.  As the Little Ice Age was hitting its stride, Europe was fighting for its life against the armies and navies of the Ottoman Empire, which made no secret of its plans to conquer the European subcontinent the way the Mughals had conquered India.  The struggle to maintain naval parity with the Ottomans was one force that drove European shipwrights to push the boundaries of their craft, inventing new ship designs that were far more sturdy and maneuverable than anything else afloat.  Another force was the desperate struggle to keep Europe fed, in which vast amounts of salt codfish from the western Atlantic fisheries played a vital role.

Merchants who invested in the new ships then discovered that they could ship sugar, tobacco, slaves, and other valuable cargoes all over the world, amassing vast profits. Those profits, in turn, allowed them to seize control of whole sectors of the economy, replacing local crafts with centralized factories whose products could be shipped all over the planet.  At first, those factories were powered by waterwheels; that’s why, for example, you’ll find a belt of old factory towns all along the North American seaboard at the “fall line”—the point at which rivers tumble down out of the foothills of the Appalachians onto the coastal plain, where upriver navigation stops but there’s still enough of a slope to give waterwheels ample power.

That was the first wave of industrialism:  the eotechnic era, as Lewis Mumford termed it in a fine and unjustly neglected book. It caused immense changes, to be sure, but its reach was limited in geographic and energetic terms. There are only so many good sites for waterwheels on the planet, and it’s only possible to extract a sharply limited amount of mechanical energy from them. Wind could pick up some of the slack—the Netherlands famously specialized in this—and also provided transport, filling the sails of tall ships. Here again, though, there’s only so much wind and it can only accomplish so much.

Then, of course, Alberich stole the Rhinegold.

Gold wasn’t actually the thing that mattered, though it certainly looked that way to George Bernard Shaw. In his time and Wagner’s, European currencies were all gold-backed. Gold was the great talisman of wealth, which is why the nineteenth century saw so many gold rushes around the world, and why one of my great-granduncles abandoned his failing farm near the shores of Grays Harbor, Washington to go to the Klondike in the hope of getting rich. Far more important, though, was coal—King Coal, as it was called at the time, the single most valuable mineral resource in the nineteenth century, the foundation of the second wave of industrialism: the paleotechnic era, as Mumford called it.

Coal was crucial. Once steam engines powered by coal replaced waterwheels powered by the local equivalent of the Rhinemaidens, the industrial system could metastatize across Europe and eastern North America, shattering what remained of the old economy of personal relationships and local loyalties, and replacing it by a system in which the only relationships that mattered were economic. That said, it’s a mistake to see the Rhinegold as any one commodity. The theft of the Rhinegold, rather, is the process of commodification as a whole—the replacement of personal relationships with market forces, in which everything (including human lives) became just another set of raw materials to be exploited for profit.

That’s the process that Alberich’s deed kicked into motion. He didn’t start the process, though, nor was he the only participant. We’ll talk about that two weeks from now.

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It occurs to me that there are five Wednesdays in this month, and by longstanding tradition, the commentariat gets to vote on what I write about for the fifth Wednesday. What do you want to hear about?  Enquiring Druids want to know.