The Nibelung’s Ring: The Twilight of the Gods 2

Siegfried’s betrayal of his ideals and his love for Brunnhilde, the central theme of our discussion three weeks ago, is also the hinge upon which the entire story of The Ring turns toward its end. Our blond and brawny hero was doomed the moment he took the Ring from Fafner’s hoard, Alberich’s curse guarantees that, but it was not yet certain how the curse would destroy him. Once Siegfried put his fearlessness and his magic cap in the service of Gunther’s sleazy plan, that was settled, and the rest of the story proceeds with terrible inevitability from that point on.

Of course, outside the world of the story, that outcome was determined before Richard Wagner was born.  The Twilight of the Gods depends more than the cycle’s other operas on the raw material Wagner inherited from medieval legends. It’s hardwired into the tale that Siegfried would fall in love with Gutrune, that he would pay her bride-price by using the magic cap to obtain Brunnhilde for Gunther under false pretenses, that Brunnhilde would discover the ruse and repay one betrayal with another by letting Hagen know about Siegfried’s only vulnerable spot, that Hagen will follow through by thrusting a spear through Siegfried’s back when the hero expected no danger, and that the consequences of that treacherous deed would include the deaths of Brunnhilde, Gunther, and Hagen, and the fall of the Gibichung kingdom.

All those details of the plot came to Wagner down through the centuries, all the way from whichever forgotten storyteller in the Dark Ages first wove together the story of fall of Gundacar the Gibichung, the last king of the Burgundians, with the tale of the vengeful Frankish queen Brunechildis and the archaic myth of the sun-hero who slew the dragon of winter and freed the golden sun. It’s what Wagner did with those elements, and how he used them as a basis for talking about the political, economic, and philosophical themes that structure the entire story of The Ring, that shows Wagner’s genius.

I don’t simply mean that last word only in an artistic sense, though of course Wagner was a brilliant creator.  He wrote at a time when the literary genre of allegory hadn’t quite become moribund yet, and it was still just possible to express profound thought in the form of symbolic narrative.  Here as in so many other ways, he stood at the hinge of ages, when one era was ending and another about to begin; it’s no surprise that so many people nowadays have trouble grasping the idea that a great work of art can also deal with the gritty realities of politics and economics. Friedrich Nietzsche, by turns Wagner’s best friend and bitterest enemy, attempted the same thing with philosophy a few decades later in the mythic narrative of Thus Spake Zarathustra, but by then it was already too late.  Next to nobody understood what Nietzsche was saying, and his own plunge into insanity and death followed not long thereafter.

Wagner avoided that fate, barely.  Schopenhauer’s philosophy gave him a way to make sense of the tragic conclusion of his story, and thus also of the equally tragic conclusion he foresaw for the entire historical arc of European society.  On a more pragmatic level, the ample financial support he received from King Ludwig II of Bavaria spared him a great deal of stress, and the emotional support he received from his second wife Cosima—not to mention her patient and competent management of his affairs, in several senses of that word—took care of much of the rest.  Where Nietzche ended his life as a burnt-out psychotic in a mental ward, Wagner ended his as the Western world’s most adored living composer, living in luxury and basking in the applause of legions of crazed fans in every country of Europe and the European diaspora. How many of those fans understood what he was trying to say is a good question, and one that haunted him in his last years, if Cosima’s recollections are anything to go by.

We can try to make sense of the implications of his ideas by paying attention to some of the core themes of The Twilight of the Gods, and relating them to the subtext we’ve been following all through this series of posts.

Let’s start with one detail that often gets missed:  the way that some of the most important symbols and dramatic actions in the earlier operas in the cycle get reprised in this one. The most striking of these, appropriately enough, center on the Ring itself.  Just as Wotan takes the Ring by force from Alberich, setting the entire tragedy of the later operas in motion, the old god’s grandson Siegfried takes the Ring from Brunnhilde by force, setting his own personal tragedy in motion.  Just as Wotan, motivated by greed, refuses to give the Ring back to the Rhinemaidens when he has the chance, his grandson, motivated by pride, refuses to give the Ring back to the Rhinemaidens when he has the chance—and doom clamps down hard on both characters once that final chance has slipped away.

Notice also how Wotan in the aftermath of The Rhinegold redirects his affections from Fricka to Erda, furthermore, and thus guarantees that Fricka will turn on him with icy fury in The Valkyrie and destroy his plan to regain the ring.  In much the same way, Siegfried in the first act of The Twilight of the Gods redirects his affections from Brunnhilde to Gutrune, and thus guarantees that Brunnhilde will turn on him with equally icy fury, and even more devastating effect, in the second act.  In all these ways and others, Siegfried shows himself to be Wotan’s rightful heir, as selfish and self-defeating as the king of the gods himself.

Siegfried isn’t the only character to reprise an earlier role in the present opera, of course. Just as Sieglinde was kidnapped and forced into marriage with Hunding in the backstory of The Valkyrie, Brunnhilde is kidnapped and forced into marriage with Gunther in The Twilight of the Gods. It’s a bitterly edged irony that Sieglinde’s own son is the one who does the kidnapping in this latter case, just as it was Sieglinde’s own father Wotan who arranged for the kidnapping in the earlier case. Yet there’s an important difference here, as in the other parallels just mentioned. Wotan knew exactly what he was doing when he treated his mortal children as pawns in his plot to recapture the Ring. Siegfried, by contrast, has no clue what’s going on. He stumbles blindly along a track laid down before he was born by the events of the first two operas.  It’s for this reason that Brunnhilde can rise above her own bitterness and forgive him in the tremendous final scene of the opera, just before she sacrifices herself and her world to the consuming flames.

In a very real sense, then, the action of The Twilight of the Gods recapitulates the action of the whole cycle of operas. What was enacted then in a world of gods, giants, and magic dwarfs is reenacted in the human world.  The great difference between this last opera and the three that come before it, after all, is that now the world of gods and mythic beings has receded almost beyond the range of vision.  The Norns appear in the first part of the Prelude, but the cord of destiny snaps in their hands and they vanish from the scene; one of the Valkyries puts in an appearance, pleading with Brunnhilde to return the Ring to the Rhinemaidens, but without effect; Alberich comes to his son Hagen in the depths of the night, but as an insubstantial presence, almost a ghost; and Wotan and his castle in the clouds hover like a phantom in the distance, visible only in the final scene when the flames take them.

There’s an ancient vision of history underlying all this, and it’s one that Wagner—like every other person who received a middle or upper class education in nineteenth-century Europe—learned about in childhood. The Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro, whom other scholars of his time considered the most learned of all Rome’s antiquarians, divided history into three ages: the age of gods, which is chronicled only in myth; the age of heroes, which is chronicled in legend; and the age of men, which is chronicled in history.  That’s the scheme that structures the temporal vision of The Ring.  The Rhinegold is set in the age of gods, and human beings play no role in it at all. The Valkyrie and Siegfried are set in the age of heroes, and in it human beings mingle with gods, dragons, and other legendary beings. The Twilight of the Gods is set in the age of men, when the gods are fading shadows that perish in the final scene.

It’s an indication of the importance of that scheme that JRR Tolkien, whose Ring trilogy so often provides an edgy counterpoint to Wagner’s tetralogy, also used a variant of Varro’s system. No, these aren’t the three ages of Middle-earth. If you happen to read The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s account of the myths and legends of the elves, you’ll find that there were ages before the beginning of the notional First Age.  For example, Morgoth was bound for three ages of the world in the prison of Mandos after his defeat at the siege of Utumno.

These three ages were the Noontide of Valinor, Tolkien tells us, and correspond to the age of gods in Varro’s system. There followed the three ages of Middle-earth, during which Elves and Men contended with Morgoth and his servant Sauron; these correspond to Varro’s age of heroes. Finally, Tolkien speaks of the Fourth Age, which he and Varro both term the age of men.  The idea that the world would last for seven ages was a staple of medieval Christian legend, and Tolkien blended it with Varro’s scheme with his usual panache. But then Tolkien was a Christian, of course, and Wagner was not—a point which will become even more edged when we reach Wagner’s final opera Parsifal.

The same system of three ages also has a distinctive meaning in the light of Wagner’s great metaphor, shaped as it was by Feuerbach’s interpretation of myth and legend. To Wagner, who didn’t believe in the real existence of gods, myth was necessarily what Feuerbach said it was, a way of talking about the highest ideals and basic understandings of a particular human society. That was why The Rhinegold, set in the age of gods, laid out what Wagner identified as the fundamental problem of European society: the commodification of nature (very much including human nature), the process by which all values were reduced to monetary value and thus controlled by those who had money.

The age of heroes is transitional, representing the way this fundamental problem worked out in history.  At this stage of the metaphor, gods and humans, ideal principles and actual historical phenomena, mingle and interbreed with very mixed results.  In The Valkyrie and Siegfried, Wotan—in the earlier opera, the ideal principle of rule by an intellectual elite, the grand and disastrously misguided dream of Pythagoras, Plato, and their myriad followers down through the ages—became the intelligentsia as a historical class, the people who embraced the ideal principle and tried to make it real in the world of history.

We watched them place all their hopes on the idea of liberty, and manipulate that idea in the hope that they could use it to seize power.  We also saw them lose control of it, as the ideal was taken from them by the revolutionary Siegfrieds of radical movements in Europe and around the world, who overthrew the authotiry of the intellectuals as their first act, replacing it with the rule of raw force in the normal revolutionary manner. Opera being opera, and myth being myth, that took place one time only. In history, of course, it repeats over and over again.  So far, at least, each new generation of would-be Wotans has to learn the same lesson the hard way.

That’s the basic theme of The Twilight of the Gods. Having taken the concept of liberty far more literally than the intelligentsia intended, each generation of revolutionary Siegfrieds liberate themselves from the ideologies and belief systems that were intended to make them hand over power to the intelligentsia, and proceed to bargain with the old elite classes for whatever Gutrune-shaped goodies they think they can get.  The Gunthers and Hagens of each generation, in turn, are generally more than ready to cut a deal with the Siegfrieds, partly because most of them were Siegfrieds in an earlier decade before they sold out, and partly because Hagen’s spear is always handy if the Siegfrieds step out of line. Those of my readers who have watched the history of the last half century or so know this song well enough to sing it in the shower.

It would be easy enough to portray this as a straightforward repeating cycle.  There’s a broader pattern at work in it, however, and it’s one that many people are beginning to notice around them at this phase of our own historical process. Each repetition of the cycle, after all, whittles away at the legitimacy of the system and also of the ideals that it supposedly embodies. Each generation of revolutionaries, as it abandons the rhetoric of liberty in order to secure its own privilege, makes it harder for anyone to take seriously the claims of the new leadership regarding liberty—or anything else, for that matter.

It’s hard to tell, either from the operas or from Wagner’s letters and essays, whether he expected the loss of faith in the Valhalla of Western ideals to be gradual, or whether he foresaw a collapse as sudden as the one that happens in the last scene of The Twilight of the Gods.  It’s clear, though, that he recognized that an ideal betrayed often enough loses any power to move people to action. Thus it’s not just the kingdom of the Gibichungs that goes up in flames, it’s Valhalla itself, and also Brunnhilde, the ideal of liberty, who kindles the fire in which she herself will perish.

That, in turn, is when the Rhine comes rushing in to finish the process.

All through the cycle of operas, from the opening chord of The Rhinegold, the waters of the Rhine have symbolized nature. In that first opera, nature had a wholly passive role to play:  the Rhinemaidens’ guardianship of the magic gold didn’t give Alberich the least trouble once he decided to take it. When Erda the earth goddess put in her appearance toward the end of The Rhinegold, all she could do was offer good advice, and she was receptive enough to Wotan’s response that nine Valkyries promptly resulted. In the next two plays, the role of nature was nearly as passive: in The Valkyrie, the ash tree growing in the middle of Hunding’s hall didn’t offer the least resistance when Siegmund extracted the sword from it, and while the forest bird in Siegfried had a slightly more active part to play, her role was simply to give the clueless hero some idea of what was going on.

Yet that passivity comes to a decisive end in The Twilight of the Gods. The Rhimemaidens fail to convince Siegfried to hand over the Ring, true, but they make the attempt; they have much more success explaining to Brunnhilde everything she doesn’t know about the situation; and when flames rise from Siegfried’s funeral pyre and Brunnhilde flings herself into the fire to join him in death, the waters of the Rhine come sweeping in to take the Ring from Siegfried’s ashes and return it to where it belongs. When Hagen tries to intervene and get the Ring for himself, the Rhinemaidens show that they’ve learned from their experiences. They don’t tease and taunt him as they did his father; they drag him under the waters and hold him there until he drowns.

So the story ends.  In terms of Wagner’s great metaphor, what has happened?  Simply this:  in the final crisis of society, the system of commodification itself breaks down. Money, that complex system of tokens that the elites of industrial society use to control and exploit the exchange of goods and services, turns out to be too brittle a thing to survive the final crisis of the society that created it. As the system burns down, all the tokens of notional wealth—including, by the way, gold, the keystone of the financial system in Wagner’s time—lose their ability to exert power on people and extract real, nonfinancial wealth from them.  Those glittering objects, once rings of genuine power, become nothing more than pretty toys for Rhinemaidens to play with.

That, at least, was Wagner’s vision.  One of the fascinating things about it is that history appears to agree with him. It’s one of curious details of economic history that as the Roman empire fell and the Dark Ages closed in, money dropped almost entirely out of use in economies across the Western world. In 300 AD, nearly every imaginable transaction in what was then the western half of a huge empire involved the exchange of gold, silver, or copper coins; five hundred years later, the great majority of people in the same region could easily go through their entire lives without ever handling a coin. Market economies went away almost completely, and were replaced by customary systems of exchange in which a man might pay rent on a piece of land by handing over a tenth of the grain he grew on it each year, plus two piglets suitable for roasting each Christmas.  Commodification collapsed, giving way to the same patterns of personal relationship that the young Wagner and his fellow romantic revolutionaries had glorified so enthusiastically.

Yet The Twilight of the Gods has very little else in common with the fond fantasies of redemption through revolution that Feuerbach and the left-Hegelians had put into circulation. Just to start with, Wotan and Valhalla are gone; the intelligentsia and its castle in the clouds are among the casualties of the process. The Gibichung kingdom is right next to them on the obituary page, and so are death notices for nearly all the characters. (Not, however, Gutrune. Keep her in mind; we won’t see her again, but she’s a bridge to the final stage of our discussion.) To get out from under the curse of commodification, Wagner seems to be saying, the only option is to burn everything down to the ground

It’s a bleak prospect. Wagner being Wagner, he couldn’t leave it at that. He had only one more opera to write after The Twilight of the Gods, and he considered it his most important work—so important, in fact, that while he lived it could only be performed at his own specially constructed opera house at Bayreuth. This was Parsifal, the opera in which he tried to come to a final synthesis and resolution of the themes he’d introduced in The Nibelung’s Ring. In order to make sense of that, we’re going to have to take another deep dive into the world of myth and legend…and when we do, starting two weeks from now, we’ll find that Wagner has gotten there before us and is waiting to show us around.