sieglinde as heroine

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

This is the second of the ‘Wälsung Essays,’ a series I have written about the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. To read the introduction to this series, please click here. For further notes on translations of the text, see this footnote.¹ This work assumes that the reader is already familiar with the subject matter (the first two acts of Die Walküre.) For those who need a little refresher, the plot of the opera can be read in full here.

Note: the following deals heavily with themes of rape and sexual violence.

This essay was revised on 24 December 2024.

Sieglinde among the Valkyries. Illustration by Arthur Rackham (1910)

Who is Sieglinde? She’s a bit of a mystery, in part because she herself rarely gets to tell us who she is. An enigma by omission. We know that, because they are twins, she is like Siegmund, her brother. Hence, we know that she has suffered, that she has achieved the same form of self-consciousness. We know that the world inflicts its cruelty upon her and that she believes this cruelty is fundamentally wrong. In the grand, godly scheme of things, like Siegmund, Sieglinde, too, is property. Indeed, she has been denied so much of her personhood that when Siegmund asks her who she is, she responds, as though it were self-evident: “this house and this woman belong to Hunding.” In these words, ‘Wehwalt’ immediately recognizes that his companion has been reduced to the same abject namelessness as himself. But her dehumanization goes even further: she is no more alive than the four walls that surround her and the land they sit on.

When the gods have their hour long spat about the disputed freedom and fate of Siegmund, Sieglinde is barely mentioned. Why bother including her such a debate in the first place? She is only a woman. The more Wotan goes on about the sword he left in Hunding’s ash tree, the clearer it becomes that the primary purpose of that sword was not to rescue the daughter he left it for but to lure the son into cleaning up his father’s mess. At the end of the day, Sieglinde will either go to the devoutly religious husband who bought his wife from traffickers and held her captive through terror and force, or she will be claimed by the more righteous adulterer. Regardless, she is a possession.

As we saw in the previous essay, Siegmund’s story is told primarily though speech. Sieglinde’s, by contrast, is told through action. Wagner the dramatist is at his best in Act I of Die Walküre. He crafts the character of Sieglinde almost entirely through showing rather than telling. She gazes at Siegmund, inquring about his existence. She shirks away from Hunding, the abusive husband, yet stands tall in the face of his denigration, regal and refined. Everything from Sieglinde’s longing to her apprehension is conveyed corporally and through instrumental scoring, primarily her leitmotif, a beautiful sequence of rising thirds. The obvious reason for this is that her permission to speak has largely been taken from her. Hence, Sieglinde’s actions possess an inherently subversive quality. They are subversive in their own right, too — and brave. From aiding Siegmund in the first place to carrying the fragments of the sword into the forest of her father’s misdeeds, every action Sieglinde takes is so enormously brave.

Because she is a woman, Sieglinde’s bravery is not as readily apparent as her brother’s. Being written by a man, she still falls prey to the age old pitfalls of masculine myth. Ultimately, she will give birth to the Übermensch, the undoing of the world, and this, of course, will kill her. Born from immanence, condemned to enigmatic nothing not once, but twice, immanence will reclaim her. Sieglinde must return to earth, to the soil, and serve her purpose as one of many mother-sacrifices of mankind. But she has always been more than collateral damage, martyr, or the incestuous counterpart to her brother. These roles she plays in the Ring may be spectacular, but more important to what makes the Ring itself meaningful far beyond its time and place, is the essence of her character: above all else, Sieglinde is the Other who reasserts her own humanity. In everything she does, she shows us a woman who refuses to be subjugated.

I won’t make the argument that the Ring is a feminist or even proto-feminist work. That being said, I still believe it contains elements that can be reclaimed for our time or reimagined in service of a set of political beliefs, not unlike how I’ve done with Siegmund, or how the antisemitic caricature of Alberich was repurposed by writers like George Bernard Shaw into a depiction of the rot inherent in the capitalist system. A feminist reorientation of the Ring, however, recognizes as important, if not systemically allegorical, one of its most consistent themes: rape. It is from such a perspective that Sieglinde can be recast as a central heroine. This is not to say that there aren’t other heroines — Brünnhilde is also a heroine, and an important one at that — but only Sieglinde sees her own subjugation clearly for what it is and risks her life putting a stop to it. She does not empathize nor negotiate with her oppressor. Instead, she puts him to sleep. In her pursuit of freedom, Sieglinde will evade even the clutches of the gods, will carry with her into the primordial darkness the fragments of the sword that will shatter the spear of the cruel world’s order. Because she is a woman, it is often said that Sieglinde dies for love. A closer truth is that she meets her end for the same reason as her brother: she would rather die than be a slave.

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When we see Sieglinde for the first time in Act I of Walküre, she is rushing to the aid of a man who has collapsed on the floor of her house. Despite an evident fear of the repercussions, she does this because the man needs help. It must be a curious sight for her, a weak man, a man who is in pain instead of enforcing it. Through him, she is given the first opportunity to show someone else the kindness she so wishes to see. He bestows upon her the same kindness, for the same reason. When the man tries to leave, citing the vague premise of sparing her from harm (which, to be honest, is something no one has ever done before) Sieglinde, of course, does not want to let him go. Her words, “You cannot bring misfortune into the house where misfortune lives” not only identify her with him and her suffering with his, but invite the possibility that he can help her.

He will try, of course, our Wehwalt. He’s curious, too. But there is a clear subtext to Sieglinde’s invitation. She may be intrigued by him, by his gentleness and aura of mystery, but she also recognizes that the presence of a sympathetic man has the potential to offer her considerable leverage. It may even act as a buffer against what has long been for her an ordinary violence. Indeed, it does. Sieglinde’s hunch plays out because Hunding, chauvinist that he is, behaves in the way society wishes him to. That society is predicated on honor and shame. The rules of honor towards men, Hunding will uphold, and shame he will inflict on his wife in order to keep her in line. Ancient tribal rites of hospitality require that an unarmed man be sheltered, regardless if that man is bad news or not. And so, to Sieglinde’s relief, Wehwalt is allowed to stay.

It doesn’t take long for Siegmund to pick up on Hunding’s cruelty towards his wife. Within a minute of their meeting, Hunding barks at her: “prepare the meal for us men.” As the night progresses, he treats Sieglinde with nothing but disdain, entitlement, and suspicion when that entitlement (especially sexual entitlement) is undermined by the presence of Siegmund. No matter how ugly things get, however, Sieglinde responds with the utmost dignity, dignity that verges on defiance. She tests the boundaries of acceptability by communicating with Siegmund through glances and, when given permission to speak by her husband, uses it to be entreating towards her guest. Most notably, when superstitious Hunding tells Siegmund he’s not exactly pleased to have received such a fraught visitor, Sieglinde outright scolds him: “A lonely defenceless traveler instils dread only in cowards.”

For what it’s worth (and it’s worth nothing to me) Hunding does his best to be hospitable towards Siegmund, though Siegmund doesn’t do himself any favors by telling Hunding about his exploits and constantly making eyes at his host’s wife. Already on thin ice, it gets worse for him when Siegmund regales the pair with stories of his misfortune. He begins, as we already know, with an account of childhood trauma so very similar to that of his hostess who, perhaps in denial or perhaps out of a mistrust of hope, dismisses this similarity because of a mere difference in names.

But more astonishing to Sieglinde must be the story of the girl Siegmund tried to rescue from the bondage of unwanted marriage, discussed in the last essay. I think rather often of Sieglinde in that moment, what it must have been like for her. She herself has been kept in captivity by a man who bought her for money, something that is unjust and has caused her extraordinary sorrow and pain. Despite the one glimmer of hope she’s been given, the years pass, people come and go, and nothing changes. That sword in the tree, that vision of the man at her sham wedding who may or may not have been her father, they lash out at her, seem to only confirm the reality of her abandonment.

Yet still embedded in the sword is the promise of the one who can retrieve it — after all, no one can go about ending oppression alone — and with it, the possibility of freedom. And now, here Sieglinde stands, listening to this strange man tell the tale of how he’s just risked his own life to help a woman trapped in the same bondage — a woman not as brave or enlightened as Sieglinde. Finally, here is someone who can see clearly how wrong all this is, how disgusting its true nature, and not only that, he is here in this terrible house with her, looking at her, seeing how she is treated. For the first time, she is not alone. Someone stands alongside her in solidarity.

Then, the stakes are raised even further. At the end of the second scene, Siegmund watches helplessly as Hunding makes a demonstration of total ownership over his wife. Violently, he tells her to get out of the room, demands that she prepare his nightly drink. Then, punctuated by a seething cadential fifth, he orders that she wait for him to “come to bed.” Wagner is not ambiguous about what is happening, and I don’t feel the need to be either. Hunding, angry at having been usurped and emasculated, is going to rape his wife. She knows this, and so does Siegmund. Over sixty bars or so of music, they all look at each other. Hunding languishes menacing glances on his woman and his guest. Sieglinde gestures repeatedly towards the hilt of the sword embedded in the tree in the center of the hall. Siegmund is too busy looking at her with concern to notice. Despite Hunding’s threat, Sieglinde remains calm. She does what she’s told. She walks to the cupboard. She fixes her husband’s nightcap. Except this time, she fixes it differently.²

Sieglinde tampering Hunding’s drink, as depicted by Arthur Rackham (1910)

Many years ago, a professor of mine in music school loved to go on about how Sieglinde was a misogynistic caricature, a typical damsel in distress waiting around for a man to save her. (And, when he does, she rewards him with sex.) Meanwhile, on the other side of the ideological spectrum, when Sieglinde reveals to Siegmund that she’s drugged Hunding into a deep sleep, Schopenhauer annotated “This is infamous!” in the margins of his libretto. Rudy Sabor in the Phaidon libretti also makes a similar point, writing: “Is Sieglinde’s drugging of Hunding morally defensible?” It seems that, no matter how Sieglinde resolves this predicament of hers, she’s inherently problematic. That’s being a woman for you.

Still, both characterizations — Sieglinde as damsel or Sieglinde as immoral adulteress — have never sat right with me. To speak of the former: What, right now, is our alleged white knight doing anyway? So far, Siegmund has only been able to serve as a witness to Sieglinde’s torment. The moment Hunding locks the door behind him, our hero will be on his knees in despair begging for his father’s sword, desperate for any chance to intervene on this kind woman’s behalf, not to mention his own. What he believes to be happening is deeply painful to him, yet he can do nothing to stop it. His impotence only exacerbates that pain. This is only one example, however, of a broader truth: it has never been Siegmund who saves Sieglinde from her dreadful fate. Rather than being her rescuer, Siegmund is what enables Sieglinde herself to take the necessary steps in securing the barest conditions for freedom. When the time comes to face their enemy, albeit through no fault of his own, Siegmund will fail. When Sieglinde’s life is at its greatest peril, it is not Siegmund who protects her, but the Valkyrie, Brünnhilde — a woman.

As for all the male hand-wringing about whether Sieglinde’s drugging of her husband is morally justified, no one bothers to ask the more pressing question: why does Hunding have such a sleeping drug to begin with? We know why, and so does Sieglinde. It’s never surprising to me when men denounce women who protect themselves from violence. Paeans of moral ambiguity seek only to weaken the statement of empowerment embodied in a woman who uses the means of her own violation to stop herself from being violated further. In drugging her husband, much like her later carrying until the bitter end the fragments of Nothung, Sieglinde knows that only the master’s tools will dismantle the master’s house, whether that master is a coward like Hunding or the father of battles himself. Is she morally justified in this? To me it is indisputable. As for other opinions, I don’t really care. After all, she doesn’t kill Hunding. She merely renders him the same kind of powerless he has long rendered her. For Sieglinde, the stakes are very clear. So is her response to them: You will not rape me. I will not be raped ever again.

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Rape is everywhere in the Ring cycle. It is not just a recurring theme within the work, it is its arch-crime, the crime underlying all others. Rape lurks in every opera. It begins in Das Rheingold with Alberich’s harassment of the Rhinemaidens and his theft of their gold — the rape of the earth — and is further implied by the fate awaiting a terrified Freia should she be given as payment to the giants. Later, in the second act of Walküre, Wotan admits to having used ‘coercive erotic magic’ in order to subdue Erda, the wise Earth Mother, into giving him the knowledge he craves.³ Hence, Brünnhilde, the other result of that encounter, is herself a product of rape. As a woman gifted the power of physical strength, being forced to submit to a man is the Valkyrie’s greatest fear. When her father condemns her to sleep, she demands of him the magic fire so that, on the other side of it, she will wake up to the man she chooses, for the alternative — being a plaything to any old stranger — is the most humiliating fate imaginable.

Even in love, Brünnhilde fears sexual coercion. In the conclusion of Siegfried, the now ex-Valkyrie, nervous and imbued with a deep sense of shame, tries to dissuade Siegfried from his wild passion for her. Interestingly, for both of them, intercourse is linked with feelings of fear. But Siegfried’s fear caves to his physical desire — the fear he learns, he just as quickly forgets — and even though Brünnhilde ultimately makes the decision to put her trust and vulnerability in her lover, Siegfried’s impatience proves an ominous harbinger of what’s to come. However, not even men escape the shadow of rape. In Götterdämmerung, Siegfried himself is ensnared in it when he is persuaded to drink the potion that will rob him of his memory and agency, forcing him to succumb to the amorous advances of Gutrune. Most infamously, of course, is the rape of Brünnhilde by the weak coward Gunther — a rape facilitated by Siegfried, who in doing so betrays both his lover and the legacy of his parents in the worst possible way. This crime is so heinous, it serves as the tinder with which the whole world is set on fire.

If we look at the role rape plays in the Ring, we can clearly see a concurrent pessimism lurking even deeper than the alleged pessimism of the Will. This is a feminine pessimism. In the cycle, women are inescapably failed by men. Fricka, Erda, Freia, Sieglinde, and Brünnhilde are all failed by Wotan. Siegmund fails Sieglinde; Gutrune is failed by her brothers; Siegfried fails Brünnhilde. All of these failures are something women must then transcend, usually through death. There is very little justice to be found in the truth that, in the Ring, women’s deaths are more important because they serve a distinct role: each brings the world closer and closer toward a better or at least different state. In other words, it could be said that in the Ring, men may die for women, but women die for Love. Regardless, they die all the same.

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However, at this point in the opera, Sieglinde is not quite in love. When she returns to Siegmund, her primary goal is escape. There isn’t much time, she thinks. You have to understand. And so, for the first time, she presents her story from her perspective. She tells Siegmund about her wretched wedding, about the mysterious one-eyed man and the sword he plunged for her in the tree, about her hopes that the freeing of the sword will bring, at long last, her own liberation. Yet at this juncture, she still speaks to Siegmund in the language of friendship: “If only I could find that cherished friend / I’d take that hero in my arms.” There remains a subtle boundary between them.⁴

Sieglinde has every reason for this trepidation. She stands before Siegmund a woman from whom everything has been taken — her freedom, her bodily autonomy, her self-worth — all at the hands of men. Of course, the heroism of Siegmund lies in that he is different from the others. After all, he’s been taken from, too. He sees in her the pain he feels in himself. This is why, when presented for the first time with the possibility of love, he gives. He has nothing at all to his name — not even his name itself — and yet, he still gives. He gives her his attention, his gentleness. He gives her a beautiful song. Even the sword is a gift for her, and with it, the promise of another world. By the time the first act is over, all that is left for him to give is himself. It is this particular kind of giving that the woman who has been taken from finds so very moving.

Love, however, is not the instant salvation all so desperately want. Instead it presents a fraught dialectical reality: the wonder of its generosity also opens up a maw of pain. This is the substance of Act II, Scene 3.

The Revelation by Gaston Bussier (1893)

Love’s pain comes from the alternative it presents to suffering. Being given to enables Sieglinde to recognize how deep the wounds of her theft really go. This is, to borrow from Siegmund, the “fear that does not speak.” For so long, Sieglinde has suppressed the full brunt of her violation in order to maintain her dignity, to further endure. Now uncovered, the bruises bleed. This terrifies her. She can’t stand the thought of them bleeding or the thought of him seeing them bleed. And so, when presented with love, she is unable to accept it. She runs from it, and from the man who loves her. It does not matter that Siegmund loves her, or that he is holding her, or that the words she will speak to him, per Wagner’s own instructions, are “so terrible that Siegmund then fixes his eyes to the ground for a long time in deep shock.” She is reaching into a part of herself that only she can see.

When Sieglinde names the fear that does not speak, it is not only one of the most emotionally powerful moments in the Ring — it is also a startlingly frank and thorough depiction of what rape does to the human psyche:

Go, go! Flee this sullied woman! Wickedly her arm embraces you; defiled, demeaned, this body is gone: flee the corpse! Let it go! Let the wind blow it away, it’s surrendered to the hero in shame. When he embraced her lovingly, when she found supreme bliss, the man gave her all his passion, all her passion was awoken by him: but beside sweetest love’s sacred blessing…the horror and dread of the most monstrous disgrace could not but take shocking hold of the shamed woman, ever obedient to that husband who had possessed her without love! Abandon the damned, let her desert you! For I am an outcast, deprived of dignity. — (emphases mine.)

Rape is the thief that never stops stealing. From one’s moment of total joy with another, it steals. From love, it steals. From oneself, one’s self-worth, it steals. From trust and security — from the future — it steals. It’s stolen so much from Sieglinde that she can’t even inhabit her own testimony. Rape has evicted her from her very body, has forced her into the role of an observer. Indeed, there is no her left to speak of. There is only that same body, described in the visceral language of filth, absence, and death. It is defiled. It is gone. It is a corpse. But most importantly, it is an object — an object that can be taken and owned, an object upon which things — mostly pain —are inflicted.

Because Sieglinde did not answer her husband’s violence with violence in kind, even though this would only put her at further risk of harm, she feels complicit in her suffering and guilty in her love for another. Hence’s she’s been robbed, too, of the ability to see how brave she is, and how worthy of love. Subjugation so often works like a curse, occludes all possibilities of freedom and happiness. Even though the man she loves is holding her in his arms, Sieglinde can only imagine — and believes she deserves — more suffering. But more than anything, she speaks to Siegmund using the prevailing social order’s rhetoric of shame. It is no surprise that Siegmund feels the need to answer her with shame’s stalwart feudal counterpart: honor. To avenge his sister’s honor, Siegmund will kill Hunding for what he’s done. It cannot be otherwise. But this is a terrible moment. In it, the cruel and violent world the Wälsung twins have so rejected, the world they’ve so boldly rebelled against, now claims them, too.

The die has thus been cast. For Sieglinde, one trauma gives way to another. In a haunting vision, she sees her childhood home on fire, the dead body of her mother. In the dream and in reality, she calls out for her brother — Siegmund, where are you — even though he is embracing her, silently begging her to realize that he is right there. But Sieglinde cannot see anything beyond this dissonant vision of further terror. Hunding is coming, his dogs are tearing Siegmund limb from limb. The ash tree splinters. This is one of two moments in which Sieglinde foresees the end of the cycle. The ash tree will splinter — not the tree in Hunding’s hall, but the World Ash Tree, and with it, everything existing.

In this, the emotional zenith of the scene, what does Wagner do? It’s rather infuriating. After giving his heroine such dignity and strength, including in this extraordinary depiction of her pain, Wagner puts her to sleep. Deep, ironic, operatic sleep. His name on her lips, Sieglinde collapses in Siegmund’s arms. We are fortunate that this melodrama is somewhat softened by its tenderness. The last words she hears Siegmund speak to her simply reflect the fraught but sincere reality of what she is to him: “My sister, my beloved one.”

What makes this sudden loss of Sieglinde’s agency more troublesome is that there’s no discernable reason for why she has to be asleep during the conversation between Siegmund and the Valkyrie in the first place. The alternative staging of this scene in the Copenhagen Ring, demonstrates that the pathos and substance of Siegmund’s negotiation with Brünnhilde works better if Sieglinde remains awake. Then, not only can she be made aware of the extraordinary sacrifice Siegmund is willing to make on her behalf, Sieglinde can also consent to what is happening. A traditionalist may argue that Wagner puts Sieglinde to sleep as a matter of mercy. After all, his heroine has suffered enough already. In giving her a moment of peace, she is spared from the most painful news of all: that Siegmund will die. However, one cannot doubt that this magic slumber is misogynistic in nature, that it is based on the idea that Sieglinde cannot withstand what is to follow or should play no part in it even though it very much concerns her. She becomes, once more, a thing to be negotiated over.

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It is a mistake to believe that Siegmund fails the woman he loves by dying in battle. Rather, it is in this moment of so-called peace with his sister in his lap that Siegmund is unable to live up to his prior heroism. After he renounces heaven, believing that there remains a slim chance he can still win in the match with Hunding — in part because he is unwilling to accept the premise of determinism — Brünnhilde informs Siegmund once more that he has no choice, that his fate is decided for him whether he likes it or not. However, seeing his desperation, she offers to protect her charge’s slumbering bride (and unborn child!), something she can do because her arrangement with Wotan only concerns Siegmund himself.

But Siegmund distrusts the Valkyrie. After all, she’s just condemned him to death. He finds himself in a moment of utter, abject despair. In it, he threatens to kill himself and his lover, would rather make the choice of death for both of them than perish at the hand of his enemy. This would have tremendous power as a gesture if Sieglinde were still awake, if she could agree to such an outcome. Frankly, she probably would. But because she is asleep, it is an awful proposition. And the words Siegmund uses to make it are even more awful:

No one but me
is to touch this pure woman alive;
if I’m to die,
I’ll kill her first where she sleeps!⁵

This, to put it bluntly, is the language of patriarchal ownership. Indeed, this language and behavior are so very out of character for Siegmund, one is tempted to rationalize it away. We can say: of course Siegmund feels like this. His twin has just regaled to him in excruciating detail how distinctly impure she feels after having been physically violated. Touched by another. She’s reminded Siegmund of the terrifying circumstances that separated them in the first place — and now, he would do anything to keep from being separated again. The idea of letting Sieglinde go, of failing to protect her from further harm — especially since Hunding is supposed to be the victor of this fight — is intolerable. Faced with certain defeat, why not take matters into his own hands? Is there not something admirable in Siegmund’s desire to die on his own terms? And, after all, why should he trust this cold, strange woman who speaks for the gods who have abandoned him? Maybe this is all in bad faith, this threat of Siegmund’s. Maybe he thinks that claims of ownership are the only logic someone cruel like the Valkyrie — herself an avatar of the ruling class — can understand.

However, these, to me, are all excuses. At the end of the day, this is Siegmund we are talking about. Siegmund, who is free. Siegmund, for whom good is not determined by what one is, but what one does. And here, he has committed an awful wrong. The brutal feudal culture that’s left nothing but scars on this man’s body has now cut into his very soul. It is with this transgression that the feminine pessimism of the Ring claims its strongest male protagonist. Because Brünnhilde has a change of heart, because Siegmund is given the chance to fight on his own terms, yes, it is true, Siegmund dies free. In many respects, as I wrote before, he dies a hero.

No one can deny that Siegmund’s end is met trying to protect the one he loves, and that his death remains a final act of utmost defiance against a world which cannot stand. But another side of me has always believed that Siegmund dies partly as a result of this gross error of judgement made in the eleventh hour. And as much as she deserves to be awake, perhaps it really is for the best that Sieglinde lies like that in her brother’s lap. In her oblivious slumber, she is at least spared from having to hear the man she loves speak of her in the language of her oppressor.

Mime discovering Sieglinde in the woods. Illustration by Arthur Rackham (1911)

I said in my introductory essay that the Ring works upon its viewers in a way that uncovers something between allegory and identification. These twins, let’s call them, of allegory and identification have already come to fruition in a few ways in this body of work. If the Ring is seen as an allegory for capitalism and greed, then one’s identification is usually with Brünnhilde, the utopian spirit who will bring about the end of this development and return the world to — and by way of — Love. If the Ring is an allegory for a failed revolution, then one’s identification is with Siegmund, the failed revolutionary. But to me, the Ring has always been a work about the unmaking of many different worlds, human and in totality, and this is done consistently through one mechanism, which is rape in its various forms. Hence, my identification is with Sieglinde, the first woman to throw off the yoke of violence. Her function within this allegory, and within the structure of the Ring itself, is existential. Sieglinde is not just a heroine. She is a fundamental condition necessary for the annihilation of the world.

Much like with Siegmund, it is an error to write off Sieglinde as mere collateral damage for the gods, or as a simple vessel for the coming of Siegfried. Sieglinde’s life contains so much from which the rest of the Ring’s contents will combine, diverge, rearrange, distort, and finally, immolate. Hers is the rape, the passion, the fear, the resilience, the violence, the desire for vengeance, the disappointment men bring women and the sacrifices women make in pursuit of that which is greater than themselves. And so, Sieglinde is everything and she is the beginning of the end of everything. This is evident in her very music. At the conclusion of Act III, Scene 1, when Brünnhilde tells her that she is carrying Siegmund’s child, Sieglinde, shaken from her extraordinary grief, sings the words ‘O mightiest wonder!’ to a very special lietmotif. It is commonly called ‘Libeserlösung’ aka ‘Redemption Through Love,’ but Sabor calls it the ‘Assurance’ motif, which I like better. The passage is triumphant, ending in a leap of faith, a falling 7^th. The next time we hear it, nearly two operas later, everything will burn.

What we are supposed to gleam from this music is, per Sabor, that “the end of the gods is not the end of life; that Love, renounced in one period of existence, may yet rule supreme.” Already the woman who sings these notes has been erased from what their purpose serves, becomes, like the music itself, a mere passage, a container for time. It is, however, very important that Sieglinde sings them. After the gods are destroyed, life will go on, sure; but before they meet their end, so will this life, in defiance of the heavens, shielded from their sight. Perhaps there is a premonition there, in her singing. Perhaps there is a reason why, laughingly, Sieglinde meets her fate, meanders down into the forest of immanence in a major key. She will die, yes. Like many, she never gets to see the dawn of freedom, merely trusts that the future will bring it into being, as it has brought into being all other things. But the “bad infinity” of this world, as Adorno called both the Ring’s and our own, will perish because of what this woman does. And this end will be justice for her. Sieglinde knows this. Of course, she knows. She promised it first to Siegmund:

“I’d go after all I ever lost, all I ever mourned I’ll win again.”

1. These essays originally worked from the Boulez/Chéreau 1979 production of Der Ring Das Nibelungen, which can be found on YouTube. Videos linked in-line have German subtitles that can be auto-translated to English. The translation of the text is from the Penguin Classics edition of The Ring of the Nibelung by John Deathridge unless otherwise indicated. I fully acknowledge that translations of poetic texts are fraught endeavors. In the pursuit of accuracy, I have sought help from German-speaking colleagues and have been going between three different libretto texts — this, the Rudolph Sabor anthology for Phaidon (indicated with a *), and the original subtitles of the Chéreau production (indicated with a **).

2. Chéreau elects not to show this in his staging. He doesn’t really need to because Sieglinde will tell Siegmund later about doctoring the drink. Instead, Chéreau focuses on the sexual tension between the three characters, a choice I prefer. Additionally, he does not draw special attention to the sword during this moment. After all, it will take another two times for Siegmund to see it because, being a male Wagner protagonist, he is kind of stupid.

3. “I coerced the Wala / with erotic magic, / rattled her arrogant pride / to make her justify what she’d said.”

4. In many stagings of the Ring this is omitted or made ambiguous. Chéreau, however, has Sieglinde (Jeannette Altmeyer) show lots of apprehension. Until the love song, she keeps Siegmund (Peter Hoffman) very much at arms length. Most notably, in the more feminist 2008 Copenhagen production, Siegmund (Stig Fogh Andersen) is terribly afraid to touch Sieglinde (Gitta-Maria Sjöberg) until right before the curtain falls. In that same staging, Sieglinde herself pulls the sword from the tree.

5. Fellow writer and opera lover Leigh Walton pointed out to me on social media after I posted this piece a second time that there’s an interesting role sleep plays in the Ring: as part punishment and part relief from punishment. To further reflect on this thought, this synthesis is best achieved when Sieglinde drugs Hunding — it is a punishment for harm and a way of sparing further harm. Brünnhilde watches Sieglinde sleep unaware that she, too, will soon sleep as well. The negotiation with Wotan over Brünnhilde’s sleep also forms an interesting intersection between punishment and relief — she is being punished, yes. But she will also be spared, via the magic fire, the punishment of being disturbed by a coward. Within this dichotomy, Sieglinde’s sleep is somewhat an anomaly because no one puts her to sleep. In pure Sieglinde fashion, perhaps she puts herself to sleep.