reclaiming the wälsungs

part of a body of work on Wagner's Ring cycle

This piece is an introduction to a series of three essays I have written about the twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, henceforth and lovingly referred to as The ‘Wälsung’ Essays. For further notes on my materials and where to watch the opera, see this footnote.¹

Sieglinde, Hunding, and Siegmund in Hunding’s house, by Ferdinand Leeke (1865). Public Domain.

The ending of the Ring cycle is ambiguous, and in that ambiguity some people find optimism. A chorus of men and women stand voiceless and watch as the Valkyrie Brünnhilde climbs onto the funeral pyre where Siegfried, her lover, is already burning. With them, the whole of Walhalla will go up in flames and so, too, the rule of the gods. What happens after is unanswered. Some look into the lacuna Wagner leaves for us and find the liberation of mankind from tyranny. Others see a return to primordial, unfeeling nature — an anti-humanity. One thing, however, is certain: all that is begun with the theft of the Rhinegold will end, and with few exceptions, it must end in death. From the perspectives of its own architects, annihilation is inevitable.

Countless debates are raised, therefore, in retrospect. The endurance of the Ring lies, in part, because, one can talk about it forever. Any stake in the matter is hindered by that which Wagner holds in dialectical tension, namely concepts of freedom and unfreedom, law and lawlessness. It is also made more difficult by the work’s constant contradictions within itself. Examples can be made here of Siegfried’s learning of fear via sexual awakening, which he then swiftly unlearns; or Brünnhilde’s condemnation of Siegfried to death after which she immediately forgives him without further introspection; or Wotan’s extensive, constantly paradoxical schemes and rationalizations in Acts II and III of Die Walküre.

wagner's ring: believing in the stakes

Perhaps, since reading my last essay, you’ve been seduced into watching the Ring, and have begun noticing these things and asking and answering these questions yourself. Why does the end of the world happen? Some will say, because Alberich renounced love in favor of greed. Others will say, because Wotan stole the ring from Alberich. Deep-cut Ring heads will say it begins with Wotan’s mutilation of the World Ash Tree from which he forged his spear of contracts. A similar question is, by what means does it truly happen? Via the ring’s curse and the broader agential hierarchy of objects? The ring, the spear, Nothung the sword, the thread of the Norns? By Wotan’s seemingly willful turn towards suicide after his little cold war doesn’t come to fruition? By the existance of Siegfried? By Siegfried’s usurpation of the great patriarch and his subsequent demise in the lawless post-Wotan anarchy that follows?

Or is the Ring bigger than mere plot points? Is the end baked into an underlying philosophical obeyance of a Schopenhauerean Will, or, as Adorno so forcefully argued, the even broader limitations of Wagner’s own political imagination? “The parable of the man who dominates nature only to relapse into a state of natural bondage gains a historical dimension in the action of the Ring with the victor of the bourgeoisie, the idea that society is like a natural process, something ‘fated’ is reaffirmed, despite the conquest of particular aspects of nature,” he writes in In Search of Wagner. “The catastrophe arises at the moment when this much-vaunted ‘natural process’ is revealed to be the mere product and stigma of an undirected social process and the lackey of an all-knowing authority.”²

Adorno, too, was wise to acknowledge an additional truth that makes staking a claim about the Ring difficult, which is that the world of the Ring is systemic in scope. What happens is not a matter of individual choice, but of material reality in its varying forms. Because the Ring is systemic — both in itself and in terms of its own genesis as a work by a bourgeois for the 19th century bourgeoisie during a moment in which the sociohistorical processes and contradictions of modernity were at their most deeply felt — no one element is extricable from any other. The conditions for the world’s undoing are embedded within the world, at the very beginning. To irreverantly steal from Marx’s thesis on the primitive accumulation of capital, “it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution.”³ But the way in which these conditions play out — in real life, and in the Ring — is a political choice. The existence of one end, by dialectical necessity, implies the alternatives that did not come to pass. This same mercy enables each of us to stake our claims about — and to — the Ring cycle.

Wotan’s ravens, as depicted by Arthur Rackham. Public Domain.

Wagner’s great sleight of hand as a composer and dramatist lies in his ability to make the audience think that annihilation is avoidable while simultaneously insisting that it is not. Wotan condemns the gods to death in Act II of Die Walküre. After this moment, everything will fall in line, even in ways that appear to seek a different outcome. Death lurks in happiness and in triumph. This is best exemplified in the psychosexual conclusion of Siegfried, in which the titular character, about to consummate his love with Brünnhilde, ends on the lines, “one and all / radiant love / laughing death!”

We are led to believe, through ceaseless praise and the previous acts of the opera, through the slaying of the dragon and the shattering of Wotan’s spear, that Siegfried will be the superior hero who is supposed to deliver the world from destruction, or at least put an end to the tyranny of the gods in a very different way than he eventually does, perhaps a way more redolent of the one intuited by his father. Might we say an active, revolutionary way? But by the end of the cycle, Siegfried is revealed as an inhuman empty vessel, the Freudian subject par excellence, crying for his mother, yanked around by his drives, easily beguiled because he believes in nothing. Selfish, yet without much of a self.

The heroine Brünnhilde herself, once a great rebel to (and yet in service of!) her father, is a constant vacillation of resistance and acquiescence, often in rapid succession, to the Will, which for her may as well be paternal. Her death, the world’s death, after all, is still Wotan’s wish. It still brings that Walküre death-desire to fruition, regardless of whether it opens up the possibility of humanity’s alleged liberation alongside it. Despite it all, our Brünnhilde still fights, still loves, still suffers, still gets revenge. It all appears as though it’s going somewhere and is very beautiful along the way. The innocent spectator, the one who has gone into the Ring with nothing more than their own ears and eyes, will be strung along, enchanted until the very end, which will appear both stark and powerful. After the final curtain falls, our spectator’s first question will inevitably be: Where did it all go wrong?

But even before we know what will happen in the plot of the opera, Wagner’s little device will tell us. We are dumb, ignorant Siegfried and the leitmotif is the birdsong leading us to the mountain encircled by magic fire. As much as it is used as a memory aid and a way of signaling pre-conscious or subconscious affect, the leitmotif is also a key tool for irony, for expressing things that go beyond the characters’ own self-knowledge. This also complicates any analysis of the Ring as text because any given character’s own words cannot be entirely their own. To paraphrase Adorno, the leitmotif enmeshes them in the totality, identifies as well as robs them of identity. It is the musical system itself that reinforces best that everything is moving towards one thing and one thing only: the end.

Sieglinde amid the Valkyries by Arthur Rackham (1910.) Public Domain.

There is, however, one exception within this bleak totality. This exception has always been acknowledged with a certain degree of puzzlement and admiration, especially by radical thinkers like Shaw, Jameson, or Adorno. The one moment in the Ring in which the end is not inevitable — and in which the irony of the leitmotif is simple dramatic irony⁴ — is, of course, Act I of Die Walküre. It is here where we meet Wotan’s illegitimate and incestuous mortal twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, two human beings abandoned by the gods whose freedom has come at the cost of profound suffering. In their solidarity and love for one another, in their principled rejection of the world as it is, they offer a small glimpse into a future that cannot come to pass within the ideological and philosophical boundaries of the Ring. In doing so, the twins open the question about what this world-which-must-end really is. It is no wonder, then, that their existence becomes a point of contention for the rest of the opera, constantly relitigated in rhetoric so contradictory it works to obscure the despotism of the gods — a despotism so clearly expressed in the twins’ experiences and the deliberately violent end they face.

All of the work’s points of friction and political limitations are laid bare in the case of the Wälsungs. Elements of their goodness come almost in spite of their creator, whether one is speaking about Wotan or Wagner. Not only are the twins the Ring’s best heroes, they are its only heroes. Not only are they the work’s first pair of lovers, so tenderly and lushly scored by their creator, they are its only pair, because their love is philosophically grounded in something beyond blind fate. Siegmund and Sieglinde are the only two protagonists in the Ring’s pantheon who die for themselves and for their own aims. In practical reality, both of them do not only die, but are killed.

In this series of three essays, the twins will be examined from a variety of political, sociological, philosophical, and aesthetic perspectives, with a special focus on Beauvoirian feminism. My goal in creating this small body of work is to reclaim for myself a part of the Wagnerian oeuvre and, in part, to be blasphemous and stake a claim that is both original and syncretic. I wish to reorient all of the Ring around an unorthodox interpretation in which the twins are as Wotan originally claimed them to be, and arguably, as he made them: free, with all the resulting implications. Instead of accepting the weepy canards of fallibility Wagner and Wagnerites so love to bestow upon Wotan, his patriarchal authoritarianism and violence are taken seriously and, following Adorno, are seen as being reflective of the bourgeois perspective under which Wagner labors.

By rescuing Siegmund and Sieglinde from the Ring’s garbage bin of inevitable tragedy, we can reconsider not only Walhalla from the perspective of humanity, but, as is the case with all great artistic creations, our own world and human relationships. The twins further enable us to take up the task of making visible not only Wagner’s political and philosophical boundaries — boundaries deceptively concealed by the mythical nature of the work — but also the same frictions still at play in today’s similarly nihilistic moment. This is especially true in matters of freedom, womanhood, and love, each of which will receive its own treatment.

Nothung, as depicted by Arthur Rackham. Public Domain.

Hence, a brief summary of the task at hand:

I. The Exception of Siegmund

The first essay will consist of a politicized answer to “the Siegmund question.” Even that great anti-Wagnerite Adorno was willing to concede this curious aberration within Wagner’s fatalistic pessimism, having called Siegmund the hero who “rejects the heroic ideal that he embodies more truly than those well-established heroes who will win the battle even before they start to fight.”⁵ This essay will work primarily with the Ring as a text, cross examining Siegmund’s own testimony and perspective with those of the gods, arguing that even accounting for the totalitarian philosophical and agential systems of the Ring, it is more likely than not that Siegmund is truly free. Regardless of his own subjectivity or lack thereof, the gods ultimately see his fate as their own to decide because within the existing social order Siegmund is above all their property. Indeed, it could be said Siegmund’s very existence is evidentiary of the fact that the world the gods have made is ugly, cruel, and must be destroyed.

II. Sieglinde as Heroine

In the second essay, Sieglinde — who, if she is not ignored entirely, is oft maligned as either a damsel in distress or an amoral seductress — will be re-examined as a heroine in her own right, one who uses the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. In her, one can also find fascinating musical and narratological traces of what will happen throughout the rest of the cycle, especially between Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Unlike her brother, Sieglinde is defined by negative space, by not being talked about. She is an enigma by exclusion. Even when the gods sit around and debate the consciousness of Siegmund, his sister is a misogynistic omission, a silent corollary, collateral damage, and ultimately, the bounty of men. Crucial to any project regarding Sieglinde is an understanding of the key role rape plays in the Ring. This is because before Wagner, man that he is, reduces Sieglinde to the mother of the Übermensch and condemns her to immanence, fundamentally she is the woman who refuses to be raped. Her despair in Act II is not the despair of a helpless woman, but the realization of what rape does to one’s personhood. Her death, too, is a form of violence, disguised, as violence so often is, by inevitability and neglect.

III. The Love of the Wälsungs

Finally, an attempt will be made to examine the ever-problematic, consanguineous love of the Wälsungs. Rather than absolve the twins of their transgressions by appeals to myth or even to psychoanalysis, I accept the condition that their love is willful and rooted in a specific and utopian philosophical condition, at the heart of which lies mutual recognition of the other’s suffering and personhood. For Siegmund and Sieglinde, love is a literal matter of identification. It is also liberation, forgiveness, and a refuge from despair. Like the ending of the Ring itself, it opens up the possibility (but does not answer the question) of another world. To me, the twins’ incest does not primarily owe itself to psychoanalytical stuntedness, ideals of free love, or even the original Volsunga saga. Incest is in fact imperative — due to reasons of structural misogyny underlying the work — to making whole this philosophy of love. Moreover, drawing on historian Brian Connolly’s research on incest in the popular imaginary of the 19th century United States, Wagner’s use of the theme also unintentionally reveals, much like the rest of the Ring, anxieties of the day regarding the changing landscape of industrial modernity.

As much as these essays are highly critical of Wagner the patriarchal bourgeois pessimist, they still owe their origins to the power of the composer’s spell. At the end of the day, I have decided to write them because Die Walküre obsesses me, ensnares me, frustrates me to no end. It is, in my opinion, the best opera in the entire tetralogy. Of all of Wagner’s repertoire, I find the music he wrote for Siegmund and Sieglinde to be among the most transcendental; of all his characters, these two have moved me the deepest. So very much can be said of the hero who insists, no matter how terrible the circumstances, upon his own freedom and dies without hope; of the dignified woman who uses the leverage provided her to put an end to her own subjugation and in whose pain lies the comprehension of her own alterity. Extant still in our own patriarchal society is the dream of a love between men and women that does away with objectification, a love predicated on the truth that men cannot be free unless women are too.

“Shame was your lot, and sorrow was mine,” Siegmund sings to Sieglinde in Act I. “I was the outlaw, and you were the slave.”*

1. This series is working from the Pierre Boulez / Patrice Chéreau edition of Wagner’s Ring, produced for Bayreuth in 1980. It can be viewed in full with English subtitles via this link. (Click the closed-captioning button at the bottom of the screen.) The translations of the text are from the Penguin Classics edition of The Ring of the Nibelung by John Deathridge unless otherwise noted. (I have been going between three different libretto texts — this, the Rudolph Sabor anthology for Phaidon (indicated with a *), and the subtitles of the Chéreau production, indicated with a **.)

2. In Search of Wagner, p. 126

3. From Chapter 32 of Capital: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm

4. For example, we know when the twins do not that their father is Wotan because of the Walhall motif. The most notable exception to this, when Siegmund pulls the sword Nothung from the tree to the tune of the Liebe-tragik motif will be discussed extensively.

5. In Search of Wagner, p. 142.