The Nibelung’s Ring: The Twilight of the Gods 1

As the orchestra warms up for the final opera of the Ring cycle, the great conflict in Richard Wagner’s mind has been settled at last. Gone is the giddy utopian fantasy Wagner took from Ludwig Feuerbach, which led him to the brink of disaster in 1849, and forced him to flee for his life to exile and poverty in Switzerland.  In its place is the more profound and tragic vision of Arthur Schopenhauer. All those dreams of a perfect society that motivated Wagner in his youth have given way; the opera that was once titled Siegfried’s Death, which would have ended with a ringing cry of “Wotan’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world,” has become The Twilight of the Gods and will end with the fall of Wotan and everything he represents.

There’s a mordant irony in the fact that this is also the point at which George Bernard Shaw, whose bestselling book The Perfect Wagnerite made many of the same points I’m discussing more than a century ago, insisted that Wagner lost the plot. He claimed that Wagner, having seen his dreams of a shining socialist future disproved in the fiasco of 1848-1849, had given up on the Feuerbachian scheme that provided structure to the first three operas in the cycle, and written the music for the remainder as grand opera pure and simple, intended only to entertain its audiences. Thus his commentary on The Twilight of the Gods is dismissive and, in places, rather nasty.  There are reasons for the nastiness, and we’ll get to those.

I’ve already encouraged any of my readers who doubt the importance of radical political and economic ideas in Wagner’s operas to read Shaw’s book, and I’ll reiterate this encouragement here. Shaw provides a good clear survey of Wagner’s ideas; his crisp prose is much less work to read than wading through volume after volume of Wagner’s own letters, though this is of course the final option for the unconvinced.  The point that needs making here, however, is that Shaw gave those ideas their due in the first three operas but insisted that the fourth couldn’t possibly have any more to say on the same theme.

His argument is of course subtler than that. He believed that the failed revolutions of the middle and late nineteenth century had disproved once and for all the theories of revolutionary socialism upon which Wagner had based the plot of his operas. The supposedly glorious Siegfrieds of 1848 and 1849 had failed miserably, and their equivalents in later attempts at revolution had done an even worse job of fulfilling the revolutionary vision. Shaw argued, however, that all was not hopeless.  A devout believer in the religion of progress, he held that the natural unfolding of human social evolution would lead inevitably to the coming of socialism by less violent means, simply because (in his view) it was so much more efficient than unchecked capitalism that even capitalists would come to agree with him. In The Perfect Wagnerite, he sketches out the course of events as he foresaw them in terms of Wagner’s own allegory:

“In real life, Fafnir is not a miser: he seeks dividends, a comfortable life, and admission to the circles of Wotan and Loki. His only means of procuring these is to restore the gold to Alberic in exchange for scrip in Alberic’s enterprises. Thus fortified with capital, Alberic exploits his fellow dwarfs as before, and also exploits Fafnir’s fellow giants who have no capital. What is more, the toil, forethought and self-control which the exploitation involves, and the self-respect and social esteem which its success wins, effect an improvement in Alberic’s own character which neither Marx nor Wagner appear to have foreseen. He discovers that to be a dull, greedy, narrow-minded money-grubber is not the way to make money on a large scale; for though greed may suffice to turn tens into hundreds and even hundreds into thousands, to turn thousands into hundreds of thousands requires magnanimity and a will to power rather than to pelf. And to turn thousands into millions, Alberic must make himself an earthly providence for masses of workmen: he must create towns and govern markets.”

All of this may seem unduly generous to the Alberichs of our day, but there’s a point to it.  If you know your way around the gyrations of socialist thought, in fact, it is easy enough to recognize where all this is pointing. It points to Fabian socialism, and in fact Shaw was an early and influential member of the Fabian Society, the organization that gave its name to the branch of socialist thought we’re discussing.  For the sake of readers less well versed in the ideological vagaries of the leftward end of Western intellectual history, on the other hand, a few words of explanation may be useful.

The Fabian Society is the world’s most historically influential organization that you’ve probably never heard of.  It was founded in London in 1884 by a group of left-wing intellectuals who had become convinced, as Shaw was convinced, that socialism could only be brought about gradually, with the permision and cooperation of the ruling classes themselves. The name of the society came from the Roman general Fabius Maximus Cunctator, who defeated the Carthaginian general Hannibal by avoiding pitched battles and using indirect tactics.  Its coat of arms in its early days—I swear I’m not making this up—was a wolf in sheep’s clothing; this compares interestingly with its official claim, also on record since its earliest days, that it proposes no policies and that the opinions of its members are solely their own.  Its role in creating the ideology of the modern political and cultural left was immense, and its efforts to spread welfare state policies and social democracy worldwide had an equally immense impact on the history of the twentieth century.

The policies it promotes—or, to go along with its preferred camouflage, the policies its members promote—can be summed up neatly as top-down socialism. Instead of overthrowing the existing order of society, Fabian socialists want to reform it by convincing the very rich that it really is in their best interests to curb their ruthlessness, provide welfare benefits for the poor, and grant various amenities to society as a whole, while retaining and increasing their own power and wealth and continuing to exploit society. This is obviously a very popular form of socialism among privileged intellectuals, since it allows them to tell themselves that they’re working for a better world while still being careful to do nothing to upset the arrangements that backstop their privilege and the income associated with it.

Less obviously, perhaps, it’s very popular form of socialism among a certain fraction of the very rich.  Then as now, some wealthy and powerful people like to imagine themselves as humanity’s vanguard, a steely-eyed band of supremely capable visionaries, naturally superior to everyone else, boldly piloting our species toward some allegedly glorious future or other. (Think of the antics of the absurdly wealthy at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos and you’ll recognize the type at once.) To a good many of these people, the rhetoric of Fabian socialism is a giddy intoxicant, and Fabian socialists figured out early on how to amplify that effect with sufficiently lavish flattery. Shaw was among those charged with spreading the flattery with a trowel, as his glorification of Alberich in the passage quoted above might suggest.

All this may seem worlds away from The Twilight of the Gods. It is not. As the final opera of The Ring begins, Shaw and his fellow Fabians are much more a part of the story than he or they were ever willing to admit, or even to contemplate. For the moment, though, let’s step back into Wagner’s great metaphor and talk about what’s happening on stage.

The Twilight of the Gods begins with what, as far as I know, is the longest prelude in opera—long enough that for all practical purposes it is divided into two scenes. As the curtain rises on the first of these, we are plunged deep into the world of Norse mythology. The three Norns, the goddesses of fate, are busy spinning the cord of destiny in the darkness. Once they spun it in the shade of the World-Ash-Tree, but now that is gone and they labor on the rock where Brunnhilde was left in magic sleep, stretching the cord from a pine tree to a ragged rock and back again. They sing as they work, and their song sketches out the entire mythic history of Wagner’s universe, framing the action so far. It’s not a cheerful story they sing, either. In the best Norse fashion, it leads straight to the downfall of the gods.

Here for the first time we hear of the origins of Wotan’s magic spear and the consequences of its making.  It was cut from a branch of the World-Ash-Tree, and that wound caused the tree itself to die and the magic well of wisdom to run dry. While the spear remained intact, the laws and contracts written on its shaft held the world more or less in order, but now that the spear has been shattered on Siegfried’s sword all bets are off.  In some of the most harrowing lines in opera, one Norn tells the others that Wotan has ordered his warriors to cut down the dead trunk of the World-Ash-Tree and pile the pieces around Valhalla, and holds Loge the fire-god captive. When the time is right, sings the Norn, Wotan will drive the broken spear through Loge’s body, and the flames thus released will burn Valhalla and annihilate the gods themselves.

But the vision of the Norns is fading as they sing, and the cord of destiny itself is fraying.  Then it snaps. The Norns cry out in horror, gather up the broken pieces, and descend to the earth goddess Erda, taking their wisdom with them. All the laws that once held the world together—the laws of nature, represented by the World-Ash-Tree; the laws of contract and custom, represented by Wotan’s magic spear; and the laws of destiny itself—have ruptured. Bereft of these, the world hurtles toward primal chaos.

But the sun is rising over the rock, and as it rises Brunnhilde and Siegfried come out of the cave where they’ve just spent the night together. They’re giddy in love, and pledge eternal faithfulness to each other, even as Brunnhilde encourages Siegfried to go riding off to do more heroic deeds—he’s a hero, after all, and that’s what heroes do. She gives him her magic horse Grane, which she rode as a Valkyrie; he gives her the Nibelung’s ring, the ring he won by slaying Fafner, and by this act, all unknowing, seals her doom. Then off he goes to face the world, leaving her to be guarded by the flames, since—by Wotan’s curse—she is now an ordinary woman, without the powers she had as a Valkyrie. By this act, all unknowing, he seals his own doom as well.

Down below is the Rhine, and beside it is the palace of the Gibichungs. Yes, this is where we find our way at last back to what’s left of the historical events that set the whole thing in motion, the seed out of which sprouted the luxuriant tree of the medieval Nibelung legend, bearing Wagner’s operas as its most opulent bough. Gundahar, King of the Burgundians is there, having morphed into his legendary form of Gunther; his sister Gutrune is with him, and so is his dark half-brother Hagen.  The board is set and the pieces are ready for the final tragedy.

The first move is Hagen’s, and he makes it with characteristic skill. Hagen is a fascinating character. He’s the one character in the entire Ring cycle who knows exactly what’s going on and is under no illusions whatsoever about any of it. He knows what he wants—the Ring—and he manipulates the other characters ruthlessly to get it. He fails, as we’ll see, but it’s a near-run thing. How did he get this unique combination of exact knowledge and cold mastery? It’s quite simple:  like Gunther, his mother was Queen Grimhild of the Gibichungs, but his father was Alberich the Nibelung, and he learned the whole backstory at daddy’s knee.

His plan is typically subtle. Gunther and Gutrune are both unmarried.  He proposes that the best bride for Gunther is Brunnhilde, and the best husband for Gutrune is Siegfried. Gunther isn’t fearless enough to pass through the fire and win Brunnhilde for himself, but Hagen has a magic potion which will make Siegfried fall in love with Gutrune.  If Gunther agrees to the match, Hagen suggests, he can ask Siegfried to get Brunnhilde for him as a bride, and all’s well, right?  Now of course Hagen knows perfectly well that all will not be right, but this scheme will get both Siegfried and Brunnhilde within his reach, alienate them from each other, and make it easy for him to destroy them both and obtain the Ring.

Does Siegfried fall for it? Of course he falls for it. He’s a teenage boy motivated purely by passion, after all, utterly fearless and, as previously noted, nearly brainless as well. The stage machinery of the magic potion is hardly necessary to the plot; he sees Gutrune, he wants her, and he’s perfectly willing to do whatever Gunther asks in order to get her. In fact, he adds a detail to Hagen’s frankly sleazy arrangement;  he will use the magic cap he got from Fafner to make himself look like Gunther, so Brunnhilde will never know that it wasn’t Gunther who went through the flames and fetched her out as a bride.

Let’s step outside the narrative here, because this is one of the places where Wagner’s insights into the radical politics of his time and ours become uncomfortably edged. Leaving aside the mythic elements, and returning to the underlying themes of politics, economics, and society, what has just happened?  Siegfried, the revolutionary vanguard onto which the young Wagner once heaped so many hopes, has just sold out to the establishment. Brunnhilde, as we’ve seen, is the ideal of liberty; Gutrune can be identified easily enough as privilege—and all of Siegfried’s heartfelt pledges of loyalty to the one went whistling down the wind as soon as he had his first serious chance at the other.

This, in turn, is why George Bernard Shaw insisted so heatedly that Wagner had lost the plot and couldn’t possibly have meant The Twilight of the Gods as the final stage of the process of social transformation traced out in the first three operas. Shaw, in the final analysis, was just one more sell-out, no different from Siegfried; he’d given up his revolutionary ambitions and settled for flattering his capitalist masters, having convinced himself that he could change the system from within. His was an unusually bleak example of selling out; by the time he wrote The Perfect Wagnerite he had convinced himself that ordinary people couldn’t possibly govern themselves, that democracy was therefore a sham, and that humanity ought to be governed by a superior class produced by eugenic policies. It’s frankly not that easy to distinguish Shaw’s ideas in later life from those of German National Socialism.

I suspect, for what it’s worth, that Wagner also recognized his own compromises with the ruling classes of his time for what they were. As noted earlier, there are kinds of art you can do successfully out on the fringes as an exile from polite society, but writing grand operas isn’t one of them—not if you want those operas to be produced, and especially not if you write them on the grandiose scale Wagner had in mind, with huge orchestras and unusually elaborate sets. In order to fulfill his creative vision, he had to compromise with a system he despised.  Some of the tremendous harshness of the music that frames Siegfried’s betrayal is thus likely to come out of Wagner’s own reflections on his life and his choices.

But of course Shaw and Wagner aren’t unique in any way. Show me a radical movement among young idealists and I’ll show you, after the lapse of a very few years, a crop of former radicals who have sold out to the system they claimed they were going to oppose forever. Those of my readers who were around in the last decades of the twentieth century will recall how quickly the environmental activist groups of the 1970s turned into the slick corporate enablers of the 1980s. More recently, those who were paying attention watched core leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement use millions of dollars in donations to that movement to buy themselves big houses and lavish lifestyles, while BLM collapsed behind them. It’s an old, old story.

The rhetoric used to justify it is just as old.  The George Bernard Shaws among us like to insist, when they cuddle up to the first available Gutrune, that they’ve decided that their best option was to change the system from within. A great many former hippies at the end of the 1960s, as they threw away their headbands and love beads and bought business attire, said the same thing. Even at the time, it was widely recognized as a cop-out, but in such times cop-outs are in vogue.

The Shaws among us also like to insist that time, or social evolution, or the dialectical process of history, or some other abstraction of the same kind will eventually bring about the goals they’ve stopped fighting for. That’s one of the things that Wagner meant to counter with that harrowing opening scene, where the Norns can no longer foresee the future and the cord of destiny snaps in their hands. In his mature view, drawing on Schopenhauer’s insights, the sense of historical entitlement that leads radicals to insist that history on their side is a delusion. The historical process set in motion symbolically by Alberich’s theft of the Rhinegold, and historically by the rise of abstract commodification as the central principle of society, does have a natural endpoint, but that endpoint isn’t the Utopia he once hoped for. In his view, as we’ll see, the arc of history bends inexorably toward fire, flood, and nightfall.