The Nibelung’s Ring: The Valkyrie 2

Let’s take a moment to review our story so far.  In mythic terms, it’s a straightforward fairy tale: the gold from the bottom of the Rhine, stolen by the dwarf Alberich and turned into a magic ring, was then stolen from him in turn by the god Wotan, who then had to hand it over to the giants Fasolt and Fafner under threat of imminent doom. Fafner killed Fasolt on the spot, made off with the ring and the rest of the dwarf’s treasure, and turned himself into a dragon, the better to guard the treasure.  Wotan, armed with all the grubby tricks available to him as king of the gods and supreme sleazeball of the Wagnerian universe, wants the ring back, but he can’t break the agreements he’s made without losing his power; Alberich wants the ring back, too, but he doesn’t have the guts or the physical strength to face a dragon; and the Rhinemaidens, the spirits of nature who originally had the gold, also want it back but are powerless to get it.

It all seems very cute and harmless until you realize what Richard Wagner was actually saying with all this symbolism, using the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach as a mask.  The gold from the Rhine is the wealth of nature—all of it, of every kind, defining “wealth” here as anything that human beings value.  The making of the Ring is the process of commodification through which, all of human life got flattened out to fit a one-dimensional scale denominated in money.  Alberich here represents the productive classes, those who actually convert labor and raw materials into tangible wealth; Wotan represents the intelligentsia, which craves control over the commodification process as part of the lust for unearned power that pervades Western intellectual life; the giants represent the political and economic ruling classes, which the intelligentsia have to placate in order to keep their ample salaries and their status in society.

That is to say, the world of The Nibelung’s Ring is the world we live in today. Not much has changed in our basic situation, all things considered, since Wagner’s time. The plot of The Valkyrie, the second opera in the cycle, is another matter. Let’s go through the symbolic narrative first, and then talk about what it all means. Here as before, if you haven’t downloaded and read the libretto for The Valkyrie, do that now before going on; you can find it here.

We begin with Siegmund fleeing through the storm. As usual, he’s in danger of his life, and as usual, the reason is a disastrous mismatch between the abstract ideals he believes in and the realities that surround him. The mismatch isn’t accidental; his father, though Siegmund doesn’t know this, is Wotan, and the king of the gods has set the whole situation up as part of his plot to get the ring back.  There’s a whole cascade of ironies here; Siegmund thinks he’s a free man trying to do what’s right in a world out of joint, but he’s actually just a tool in a disreputable scheme to extract stolen goods from one thief for the benefit of another.

So he comes stumbling into the hall of Hunding, exhausted and weaponless, and the first person he meets is Hunding’s wife Sieglinde—“wife” here being a euphemism for marital slave, since she was kidnapped and sold to Hunding by raiders. Siegmund and Sieglinde are brother and sister, though they’ve been separated long enough that they don’t realize that until later on. The hall in which they meet just happens to be the one where a mysterious figure showed up at Hunding’s marriage feast and thrust a sword into the giant ash tree that just happens to grow up through the middle of the hall. Once again, we see Wotan’s meddling fingers at work.

The rest of Act I plays out like clockwork. Hunding arrives; it turns out that he was among those hunting for Siegmund, but the old Germanic tribal laws of hospitality forbid him from slaughtering Siegmund there and then. He grants the young man shelter for the night but warns him that they will fight to the death the next morning. He then goes off to bed with Sieglinde. She appears a little later, having put a drug into Hunding’s nightcap that has him out cold, and the inevitable romance occurs. Strengthened by love and renewed hope, Siegmund draws the great sword from the tree, so he’s prepared to fight Hunding; the two of them recognize each other as brother and sister, and off they go to a night of love.

That probably deserves a comment of its own. Brother-sister incest was a pervasive theme in 19th century European literature, more often hinted at than introduced as literally as Wagner did, but much less shocking in his time than it is in ours. The reason is quite simple: the social rules of the 19th century only permitted young men and women to have unsupervised access to each other if they were closely related.  That meant that even when actual incest didn’t take place, young people routinely felt their first sexual reactions toward siblings—and the resulting guilt, amplified by endless sermons, played a massive role in the psychology of the age.

What made Freud shocking, in other words, wasn’t that he talked about incest. It’s that he introduced Mom into the picture, and didn’t stash it safely away in a work of art, as something that could be held at a safe distance behind the proscenium of an opera house. He pointed to the role of incest fantasies in the individual psychology of respectable people, as part of his general demolition of Victorian sexual hypocrisy. We still haven’t finished processing that very sudden shift, and the vagaries of our collective attitudes toward sex are driven in large part by the shockwaves—but that’s a discussion for another time.

As Act II begins, we’ll leave Siegmund and Sieglinde as much privacy as an opera allows, and we’re back with Wotan, who’s plotting with his favorite daughter, Brunnhilde the Valkyrie. This is where the audience (if they haven’t read the libretto in advance, that is) find out all about his scheming. It’s a fine bit of dramatic contrast—we’ve just seen the whole thing from Siegmund’s viewpoint as sympathetic hero, and then Wagner shows you the seamy side of the same fabric. Wotan’s in trouble, though, because the audience isn’t the only one who sees through him.  So does his wife Fricka, the goddess of social custom and collective consciousness.

This spells instant disaster to Wotan’s plans. The whole point of all the gimmickry he’s set in motion is to give him plausible deniability in his attempt to regain the ring: if it’s clear to everyone that the whole thing is a stage play Wotan set in motion, he loses that, and with it the contracts that give him his power. Faced with Fricka’s furious condemnation, all Wotan can do is crumple and leave his puppet Siegmund to his fate. Since self-sacrifice is the one thing he can’t imagine doing, he has no other choice.

This is where things get complicated, though, because he’s not the only player in the game. Brunnhilde is also involved.  Unlike her father, she’s honest and, as we’ll see, wholly capable of self-sacrifice. Wotan orders her to go tell Siegmund that he’s got to suck it up and die heroically. That’s her job, because the Valkyries are the ideals manufactured by the intellectual class in pursuit of its goals, and Brunnhilde is the ideal of liberty. It’s an authentic ideal, but it’s also a tool that intellectuals in the Western world have used ruthlessly in pursuit of power.

It’s when Brunnhilde confronts Siegmund that Wotan’s plan really runs off the rails, because Siegmund isn’t willing to follow blindly the role that Wotan has sketched out for him. Unlike Wotan, he cares for something other than his own ego: he cares for Sieglinde. For her sake, he proposes to ignore Wotan’s interests, kill Hunding, and go off with his sister-bride to whatever future awaits them. What’s more, he succeeds in getting Brunnhilde on his side. Translated from the Feuerbachian, he wrenches the ideal of liberty out of the hands of the intellectual class that promoted it and applies it in his own way, to his own very human interests.

As Wagner realized, but a great many intellectuals still haven’t figured out most of two centuries after his time, that’s the risk you run if you promote a high-sounding ideal but then insist that it can only mean what you want it to mean. It’s always possible that the people you’re trying to motivate through those slogans might apply them in ways you don’t intend. As I write this, our intellectual classes here in the United States are melting down for exactly this reason:  having insisted that the ideal of equality can only be applied to races, genders, and sexual orientations, they were blindsided when millions of working class voters applied the same ideal to social classes, and insisted on treating their own interests as equal to those of their supposed betters. So far, at least, the response of the intellectual classes to this Siegmundian disobedience on the part of working class voters seems mostly to consist of blind rage.

Chalk up another one for Wagner, because that’s exactly how he has Wotan respond. The king of the gods explodes in a blind rage that could come straight off today’s corporate media, intervenes directly in the fight between Siegmund and Hunding, and shatters the sword he himself had given Siegmund so that Hunding can kill him.  Brunnhilde flees with Sieglinde, who is carrying Siegmund’s child, and helps her get to safety in one of those deep forests that always feature in Germanic legends. (We’ll hear more about that forest as the story proceeds.)  Then she confronts her enraged father.  He rants and raves, but as his fury cools he starts to show one of the few glimpses of genuine sympathy he shows in the story. It doesn’t keep him from behaving like a jerk, but at least he has the good grace to feel bad about it.

So after the yelling and negotiating are over, he puts Brunnhilde into a magic sleep and, with the help of the fire god Loki, surrounds her with a wall of magic flame that only a fearless hero can pass through. Again, this is cute and harmless until you see through the Feuerbachian mask. What Wotan has done is to take the ideal of liberty and make it as unapproachable as possible. Sure, the intellectual classes say, liberty is a great ideal and a wonderful goal, let’s all praise it to the skies, but don’t any of you underlings dare try to do anything about enacting it in your own lives. At the same time—and this is one of the places where Wagner’s creative genius really shows—they know perfectly well that someday somebody will go straight through that wall of flame and awaken that ideal. They are terrified of that event, and they long for it.

In Wagner’s time, and in ours, they are and they do. Yet there’s something much more specific going on in this opera than the kind of general overview just laid out might suggest. It’s important to remember two crucial points here. The first is that in the grand scheme of Wagner’s opera cycle, The Valkyrie is set in the past—and that’s the past from Wagner’s  perspective, not ours. The second is that the past as seen from mid-nineteenth century Europe was dominated to an astonishing degree by one event:  the French Revolution.

I’m far from sure anyone nowadays can even begin to understand just how vast a shadow the French Revolution cast over the century that followed it. Certainly those of us born and raised in America have less than no clue, unless we saturate ourselves in European history and then make a significant effort of the imagination.  The impact of German National Socialism on the modern Western imagination is comparable in some ways—we still have people shrieking about Nazis almost eighty years after the inglorious collapse of the Twelve-Year Reich, after all—but that impact is mostly limited to the political sphere and a few areas of culture.  The French Revolution left nothing untouched.

In retrospect, Europe should have seen it coming. England had a revolution of its own in 1641-1645, and finished it up by chopping off the head of King Charles I in 1649, but hushed it up afterwards in a very British sort of way and went around pretending that nothing much had happened. The American Revolution of 1775-1782 was more of a shock, since everyone knew that we’d cheerfully have chopped off the head of George III if he’d given us half a chance, but the aftermath turned out to be a great reassurance to conservatives everywhere:  the new federal government left the elite classes of the colonies-turned-states in charge of their own backyards, and simply gave them a new arena for their interminable bickering. (That changed, granted but it took a long time and went through a whole series of intermediate stages, from the Jacksonian era of the 1820s to the Obama era that ended so abruptly last month.)

The French Revolution started out in this same moderate fashion. After decades of spectacular mismanagement, the French monarchy and aristocracy between them had driven the nation into effective bankruptcy through uncontrolled deficit spending.  The aristocrats used this to back King Louis XVI into a corner and forced him to call elections for the États-Généraux, the rarely convened national legislature of France, which alone could enact new taxes.  Their goal was to get him to restore some of the privileges his grandfather Louis XIV had taken from them in exchange for support on his tax proposals.

What neither they nor he realized was that the French electorate, like ours last month, had its own agenda in mind. The États-Généraux had three houses—the first for the aristocracy, the second for the Catholic clergy, and the third for ordinary French voters—and the latter took the elections as a referendum on the entire French system of government. By big majorities, they packed the third house with advocates of radical change. Once the États-Généraux convened, the third house simply voted to proclaim itself the National Assembly, invited sympathetic members of the aristocracy and clergy to leave the two higher houses and join them, and declared itself the legitimate government of France. The national bureaucracies and the military, sick of the inept and dysfunctional royal government, sided with them, and the transfer of power happened very nearly before anyone quite realized it.

None of that happened by accident. French intellectuals had been laboring to bring it about for most of a century. The philosophes of the Siècle des Lumières (“Age of Lights”), to use the self-glorifying label of theirs adopted by later historians, were motivated by the craving for unearned power that so often corrupts Western intelligentsias.  They had devoted all their considerable talents to stripping the French monarchy—one of the oldest continuously functioning political institutions in all of Europe—of the traditional legitimacy it had long held in the eyes of the people it ruled.  Their motivation was straightforward:  they convinced themselves that if only the monarchy could be overthrown, power would fall into their hands, since they believed as a matter of course that they were the smartest people in the room.

History shows how wrong they were.  In times of crisis, power flows to men of action, not to intellectuals who only know how to deal in abstractions, and that’s what happened in France after 1789. Power passed from the National Assembly to ever more extreme and murderous factions, then to a series of fragile juntas, and finally to Napoleon Bonaparte, an ambitious army officer with a genius for tactics who seized power, proclaimed himself emperor, and plunged all of Europe into twenty years of war. By the time he was finally defeated once and for all and packed off to a barren island in the South Atlantic to live out a few dreary years of exile, France and Europe were changed forever, but not in the way that the philosophes had dreamed.

The behavior of the European intelligentsia during all these events bears close study.  During the opening days of the French Revolution, the events in Paris were greeted by ecstatic cries in intellectual circles across Europe. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” the English poet William Wordsworth wrote in 1809, looking back on the enthusiasm of his younger days. Once the ruling classes of the rest of Europe realized the scale of the threat, though, that enthusiasm got muzzled in a hurry. The intellectual classes depended, as of course they still depend, on the support of the ruling classes for their wealth and influence. That was a leash that could be, and was, yanked good and hard if they got too far out of line.

Thus the intellectual classes found themselves in the same situation as Wotan, with their own machinations all too visibly on display and their plausible deniability in shreds. By and large—there were of course exceptions—they did the same thing that Wotan did:  they turned on a dime, helped prop up the existing order of European society against the revolutionary impulses they had just been praising so exuberantly, and redefined the ideal of liberty into a distant abstraction. It was acceptable to exalt Napoleon himself into the pantheon of heroes, especially once he was safely out of the way, but the intelligentsia had to watch themselves very carefully for a while, as conservative forces across Europe did their level best to turn back the clock and reimpose the monarchical system the events of 1789 had fatally wounded.

Mind you, the intellectuals didn’t leave radical politics for long. By the 1830s they were back at it again, laying the foundations for the failed Europe-wide uprisings of 1848 and 1849; when those failed—well, the easiest way to describe it is to borrow JRR Tolkien’s phrase and note that always, after a defeat and a respite, the shadow of revolution took another shape and rose again. It’s interesting to note, too, that it didn’t matter in the least how many abuses were abolished and how many liberties granted, because the actual condition of the working classes or what have you was never much more than a excuse. Wotan’s craving for unearned power was the real force that set all the Siegmunds of Europe’s radical history on their foredoomed quests.

All these repetitions, though, have no place in The Ring. The nature of opera requires grand narratives to be compressed into a few vivid scenes, and so all those cycles of unrest stirred up by the intelligentsia appear in the opera once, in the form of Siegmund’s brief and tragic career. What interested Wagner was what would come next, now that the ideals launched into motion by the European intelligentsia had slipped decisively out of their grasp.  That provided the central theme of the third opera in the sequence, where Siegfried—the child of Siegmund and Sieglinde—rises to his own brief, triumphant, and disastrous destiny.