I. Escape and play

Words open doors to cultural edifices of thought – German has the term bürger but does not distinguish as French does between bourgeois and citoyen. With these words Rousseau differentiated with linguistic precision between the propertied bourgeois, chiefly concerned with his own prosperity and autonomy, and the citizen (citoyen), who on his own responsibility contributes to advancing the common weal. Perhaps the failure of the German revolutions of the 19th century can be attributed in part to this lexical lacuna.

Exactly in the middle of his life the 35 year old Richard Wagner, at that time court conductor at Dresden, was actively involved in the Revolution of 1848 with speeches and writings. It is from this year that the first draft of his version of the Nibelung saga centring on the hero Siegfried dates. The director of the Dresden Court Theatre, Eduard Devrient, noted in his diary on 21 October 1848: “Kapellmeister Wagner brought me the sketch for an opera, his head still full of big socialist ideas. Now a united Germany is not enough for him. Now the aim is a united Europe, united mankind.” United mankind, a common humanity, the human being that is liberated from, or rather has escaped from, all national and societal structures – lies at the heart of this RING OF THE NIBELUNG.

With arrest warrants issued against him, the revolutionary Wagner fled into exile in Zurich in 1849 where he added a mythical prehistory to his Siegfried project, expanding it into a tetralogy. Since the Nibelung Legend as a medieval epic actually deals with a Christian society, Wagner augmented it with a mythology that combines motifs from the Scandinavian Edda and the Völsunga Saga, so constructing a drama. By the time THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG received its premiere in 1876 at the festival theatre in Bayreuth, the exiled revolutionary Richard Wagner had himself become a propertied bourgeois and honoured master. The long genesis of the RING, lasting over a quarter of a century, left behind ideological and compositional, philosophical and music-dramatic growth marks in the work. The Ride of the Valkyries, for example, was composed as early as the summer of 1850 and must therefore be considered in the context of Wagner’s critique of Meyerbeer, whose LE PROPHETE he had seen in Paris. In a lengthy discussion he had criticised the opera for containing “effects without causes” on account of the sensational use of an electric sun, “purely for its effect on the senses … for the eye”. It may be said that in the Ride of the Valkyries the teichoscopic talk of Sintolt the Hegeling who is slung over Helmwig’s saddle, and Wittig the Irming, being carried by Ortlinde’s mare, is not exactly motivated by any cause as such, yet the passage owes its musical effectiveness to the dramatic pounding rhythm of words. The composer defined his works as “deeds of music become visible”; and in this musical deed made visible, the unified use of ears and eyes is intended to be discernible in the symbol-laden drama.

In Wagner’s biography escape, exile and travel figure extraordinarily prominently: 16 countries and nearly 200 towns. One is reminded of Wotan’s appearance before Mime – an act of desperation – in SIEGFRIED, where he remarks, “The world calls me Wanderer”. Wotan is, as a matter of fact, only one of many culture-fugitives, searchers and travellers we encounter in the tetralogy. In THE VALKYRIE alone we see Siegmund on the run, first by himself and then with Sieglinde, and we witness Brünnhilde’s escape with the Volsung daughter, and Sieglinde continuing her flight alone. Even Wotan, who has run away from his wife and his lover, wants to escape from everything, calling for “the end!” in the middle of the opera.

György Lukács at the beginning of the 20th century spoke of the “transcendental homelessness” of the middle classes. That homelessness has gone on to become, in our day, a metaphysical refugeedom. We carry portions of our collective history and individual life stories around with us, searching for a new, mythical place of refuge. And we do that, again and again, by engaging in art as play, and in play as art. We play this game about a mythical reality, a real myth, in full knowledge of the fact that “Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays,” as Friedrich Schiller phrased it in The Aesthetic Education of Man at the end of the 18th century.

This human being is viewed in a twofold way as man and woman, especially in THE VALKYRIE. The abduction and forcible marriage of Sieglinde to Hunding, the free, incestuous love of the Volsung siblings, Wotan and Fricka’s deeply manipulative marital row, the intended punishment of Brünnhilde as female prey to male lust, the divine father’s farewell to his own will in the form of his beloved daughter… there is a lot about the relationship between the sexes and gender. And what’s more, renunciation of love or out of love is the main root of the work, although that conceptualisation returns us to the problem we began with: words open doors to cultural edifices of thought, and just by naming musical motifs we pin them down and inhibit their associative free flight.

The RING tetralogy concludes after Hagen cries out “Get back from the ring!” at the end of TWILIGHT OF THE GODS with a wordless orchestral finale 50 bars long, in which the Valhalla motif, the Rhinemaidens’ motif and one other motif are woven together. This third motif is often labelled the Redemption motif, yet in fact it points far beyond that semantic cage and back into the heart of THE VALKYRIE. While it makes an appearance in TWILIGHT OF THE GODS already conjoined with the Siegfried motif in Brünnhilde’s closing monologue, this particular “melodic moment”, as leitmotifs were termed by Wagner himself, has its origin in Act Three of THE VALKYRIE, where Brünnhilde tells the fugitive Sieglinde, who has lost her will to live, that she is pregnant by her brother Siegmund and carrying “the noblest hero in the world” who shall bear the name Siegfried. These tidings of new life are “holy comfort” for Sieglinde. If it is a question of redemption at all, then only in the sense of an all-sacrificing love for the sake of new life; the redemption here is from hopelessness. To put it differently, the motif could be understood as “hope for love and life”. And it is used in this sense in Brünnhilde’s closing monologue, when she looks forward to union with her beloved Siegfried:

Feel how in my breast, too,
the flames burn;
bright fire
engulfs my heart;
to clasp him fast,
to be embraced by him,
wedded to him
in mightiest love!

Hope-filled love, the yearning for union in love, the act of sacrifice by a woman – these words verbally frame the motif. When in the orchestral finale of TWILIGHT OF THE GODS the grand Valhalla motif is linked with the gushing motif of the Rhinemaidens and this third motif rises up over them, then aurally we, like Sieglinde in THE VALKYRIE, become pregnant with new hope. The hope for love and life is the “mightiest of miracles”, the “holy comfort” in a world that is out of joint and ruined, a comfort that perhaps only art can give us an inkling of now. As early as 1851, in A Communication to my Friends, Wagner wrote: “It is the necessity of love – and the essence of this love is, in its most genuine expression, the desire for full sensual reality, for the enjoyment of an object that is perceived with all the senses, and clasped firmly and intimately with all the power of real existence. In this finite, sensually certain embrace, must God not perish and vanish? Is the person that yearned for God not negated, annihilated? Has love in its truest and highest essence not thereby become manifest?”

In Act One of THE VALKYRIE Siegmund confesses: “yearning love’s misery / burns bright in my breast, / urges me on to deeds and death”. This hymn to “holiest love’s deepest distress” is sung above the “renunciation of love” motif, which is familiar from THE RHINEGOLD; Siegmund is thus heralding an act of love and a death. In the ecstasy of renunciation something new arises – a violent leave-taking. For Alberich in THE RHINEGOLD it was the cursing of love in exchange for all the power in the world; for the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde it is the repudiation of all social and moral norms for the sake of love. The resolution ends in death a number of times in the course of the drama. So is the Renunciation motif placed here as a warning? Is something dreadful unfolding in this moment? When the fearsome blade Nothung shows its “sharpness and cutting edge”, the outcome is not only metaphorically human sacrifice – the urge to deeds and death will be obeyed as it is in Greek tragedy.

II. Power and nothing

Wotan, “a dauntless god”, wants to rule through laws and contracts, but breaks them himself on several occasions and gets ever more hopelessly entangled in crime and debt, because love and power are incompatible. In THE RHINEGOLD he tries to cheat the giants out of their fee for building the fortress of the gods. The fee agreed – the goddess Freia – was at the cost of the gods collectively, since Freia’s apples are what guarantees them eternal life. This is followed by a further injustice, the theft of Alberich’s ring, which the Nibelung was able to forge from the Rhinegold after forswearing love in order to secure global domination. The breaching of contracts is in evidence also in THE VALKYRIE: Wotan entered the bonds of matrimony with Fricka, a contract that he has broken repeatedly. His affairs have begotten nine Valkyries – Brünnhilde with Erda – as well as Siegmund and Sieglinde, born to a human mother. Instead of preserving the divine order as he actually ought to do, he defends the adulterous and incestuous relationship of the Volsung twins even towards his wife, who denounces it as an outrage: “When was it ever witnessed / that brother and sister were lovers?” Wotan responds in an unperturbed, almost jovial manner: “Today you have witnessed it happen!” and his lack of concern is accompanied by the caressing tones of the Winter Storms motif on the cellos; he smilingly gives his blessing to this love for its own sake. This quarrel with Fricka is not only about the “impious twin-born pair” and the divine order, however. It is also about the relationship between the two recriminatory and self-justifying spouses.

Fricka had hoped to keep her divine spouse tied to the home by “domestic bliss”, but what he wants is to increase his power and “win the world beyond” for himself. He puts his attitude in a nutshell as early as Scene Two of THE RHINEGOLD: “All that lives loves change and transformation. That play I cannot forgo!” In THE RHINEGOLD Wotan tells Fricka plainly to her face: “Unholy I consider a vow that unites those who do not love one another”. Having in the meantime digested his comment about changeability, the divine consort now reproaches him for indulging his “fondness for change«. Wagner takes the god’s side in this dispute with Fricka: in his view Wotan’s breach of the marriage contract does not in itself constitute oath breaking and need to be atoned for. In a letter to August Röckel from 1854, Wagner wrote of “love’s involuntary error of prolonging itself beyond the needed variety [...] as far as the mutual torment of lovelessness. The remainder of the poem therefore shows the necessity of acknowledging the changeability, the variety, the multiplicity, the perpetual newness of reality and of life.” Aesthetically that is an exciting concept: the need to accept the self-renewing diversity of reality and life. The divine spouses’ argument is thus played out in front of a changing, varied, multiplex, perpetually new audience. What matters is gaining the upper hand in the game of life, a game about realities, by rules and rule breaking. But the question is: who has the power to control the game?

Even the father of the gods himself has not acquired his power by rightful means in terms of dramatic action. We discover in the Prologue to TWILIGHT OF THE GODS that Wotan once broke a bough off the world ash tree and fashioned it into a spear as an insignia of his authority, which ensures order as a symbolic guarantee of contract law, as the Second Norn recalls:

The runes of truly
counselled contracts
Wotan carved
on the spear’s shaft:
he gripped it as his hold on the world.

Wotan paid a high price for that branch: “one of his eyes he paid as an eternal toll”. And yet the bodily sacrifice does not make up for the violent injury done to nature. The well-spring of wisdom at the roots of the world ash tree sadly runs dry; the tree itself withers, is felled and hacked up to build a stockade round Valhalla. Even this sacrificial act, the most primordial barter agreement – Wotan’s eye for a bough of the world ash tree – is a failure, never legitimised by nature myth. The act of violence opens up a rift between newly imposed law and the law of nature, throughout all existence: an original sin that is to be hushed up, glossed over, suppressed by contracts, though it holds up a disturbingly topical reflection of the world he live in. When the father of the gods loses the argument with Fricka and his argument-based position of power is obviously compromised, it becomes evident that he was never the all-powerful controller of the game, and he becomes resigned:

Away, then, with lordly splendour,
divine pomp and shameful boasting!
Let fall to pieces what I have built!
I give up all claims. Only one thing I still want:
the end,
the end!

But the end of divine rule, the end of the world, the end of the game is still a long way off... Is Wotan’s desired flight towards that end therefore not in fact a deliberate move to manipulate Brünnhilde, his will? What is the mythical game now, this drama acted out between the beginning and the end, between a place to call home and the condition of the refugee, between life and death? Who moves freely in it? Do we really become free by playing a game, or does a game only exist in the first place by virtue of rules that are created? And do such rules not make us unfree, as Wotan comes to realise: “I, ruler by treaties, am now a slave to those treaties”?

III. Bayreuth and Berlin

For his drama, Wagner not only created contracts and rules that were new to music theatre; he also built the house where his big “stage festival play” was be mounted: the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth. He referred to its orchestra pit poetically as the “mystic abyss” and somewhat more prosaically as the “technical hearth of the music”: a wave of heat and glowing light issue from it. For the composer and for the singers, the technical hearth of the music gets downsized to the piano, out of which everything comes into existence. We may recall that the only partial performance that satisfied Wagner before the Ring cycle received its world premiere in 1876 was given on this instrument, at Zurich’s Hotel Baur au Lac on 22 October in 1856. It was Act One of THE VALKYRIE, performed unstaged with Franz Liszt on the piano on what was his 45th birthday, with Wagner singing the roles of Siegmund and Hunding, and Emilie Heim singing Sieglinde. The concert brought the composition to public notice. The piano – which conjures up worlds through sound, and is the medium that delivers art to an audience…

What was to be presented to the spectators of the stage festival play was “the total reality of the most meaningful illusion by a noble art” – in Wagner’s words. This aspiration for the total reality of the most meaningful illusion that a noble art can accomplish is the aesthetic manifesto that is viewed from all sides in the preliminary and three subsequent three evenings of the tetralogy and made to resonate again and again; reality, illusion and art are woven together in performance.

Never have all artistic ideals and technical matters been so concentrated in the hands of one artist as they were in the case of the premiere of Richard Wagner’s RING OF THE NIBELUNG in Bayreuth in 1876. Wagner had not only written the libretto and the music himself, he had built a theatre specifically for the work; he selected the designer and stage manager, cast the singers and took charge of stage direction himself. The collective event, opera, was to an unprecedented extent his own production, both in conception and realisation. He sought to stage “model performances” in Bayreuth, by dint of superhuman effort, but in the end he admitted to his Bayreuth patrons a year after the cycle’s world premiere: “My ideal was not attained with last year’s performances.” Wagner’s artistically conceived experience of the saga was not possible to realise technically. Why was that?

If we ask Wagner, we will discover that in his view myth originates in the contemplation of nature – sunlight and darkness being the elemental experiences. Myth, he says, is a condensing “of the contemplation of nature into the human and moral”. The natural environment is the habitat of natural males and females in myth, while architectural space surrounds historical men and women. This distinguishes Wagner’s drama fundamentally from grand historical opera and so it is that the action in the RING takes place more or less exclusively in the natural landscape: water, cliffs, rocky mountains, river valleys, caves, forests. Wagner talks of this natural environment as a “living organism”, “full of life, organically interrelated”.

In translating his gesamtkunstwerk to the stage, however, Wagner, as the director in 1876, was labouring under a misapprehension. His categorical stage realism only imitates nature. He does not approach nature’s essence where its meaning resides; he does not explore its dramaturgical function; nor does he address the idea of it as a “living organism”. He believed that with the best stage technology on an illusionist stage, he was capable of the perfect presentation of his saga. But the problem is not technical but artistic. Let us remember the passage quoted above from his letter to Röckel, where he speaks of “the necessity of acknowledging the changeability, the variety, the multiplicity, the perpetual newness of reality and of life”. Wagner intended his mythical drama to be an alternative to the historicism of his day, but in fact it was nothing more than the dim reflection of a once great revolutionary vision.

Myth is essentially a collective narrative. Goethe saw myth as “the reflected truth of an ancient present”; Nietzsche recognised “eternal recurrence” in it, and Thomas Mann defined myth as “the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious”. All three have in common the fact that they conceive of myth as repetitive in structure and hence figuratively partaking of the nature of the circular ring.

In the speech he gave on the laying of the foundation stone of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre, Wagner made a clear distinction between the structurally provisional theatre building and what was to be presented inside it, in terms of technique and technology. On the stage there would be “nothing provisional, merely hinted at”. The audience should be “presented with perfection in staging and acting, to the extent artistically achievable in the present day”. Wagner believed that by harnessing the maximum then artistically achievable he could put perfect stage technology at the service of naturalism. In so doing he committed a system error, because the “most meaningful illusion”, as he put it, only forms itself in the mind of the spectator – on stage nothing is real; rather, things are indicated, betokened. At the premiere Eduard Hanslick was amazed by “the huge machinery, the gas-apparatus, the steam-engines on and under the stage”. In his opinion Wagner “would not have been able to compose the Ring before the invention of electric light”. Wilhelm Mohr, in his discussion of the premiere performance, described the panoply of stage technology as “the new marvels of decor”, but at the same time felt they were “incompatible with what mechanics or indeed the machinists of today can manage, and, which is even worse, they are in conflict with the nature of art”. He thus clearly separated the epic drama of ideas from the entertaining mechanised farce.

Wagner brings together the genres of literature and music, pantomime and costume design, painting and stage design, not in a living synthesis, metaphorically speaking, but rather gives the gesamtkunstwerk of opera the task of “consuming, destroying each one of these genres as resources for the sake of […] the unconditional, direct representation of perfect human nature”. Consuming and destroying for the sake of perfecting sounds like sinister language, but what he was in fact striving for was the reconciling of aesthetics with ethics in opera, and he considered the art form to be “the necessary collective work of the people of the future”. People who flee the present in search of a future. A mission that goes far beyond the stage and the drama.

Wagner himself, in a letter from 1851, said the following about the storyline of third part of the cycle, SIEGFRIED: “…it uses play to teach the audience the crucial myth, as a child is taught a fairy tale. Everything sinks in, as a result of vivid sensory impressions; everything is grasped”. Let the public be taught by means of intelligible play, he says, and he also gives the compelling reason for it: only when the last part comes, TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, does the audience “understand everything that had to be simply accepted as given or could only be hinted at there, and – I’ve won”.

Wagner therefore himself uses the double notion of play – including the game he is playing as author – in his aesthetic conception. And making a staging of this conception possible is precisely what we are aiming at with a suitcase-built isle of the dead, drawn from contemporary history. The narration of myth necessitates compression, Wagner writes, the representation of all “conceivable realities…in compact, clear and plastic form”. Just as though every individual of a collective had packed a suitcase with memories and aspirations, to take up an image from a satirically apposite poem written at the beginning of the 1850s by the exiled Heinrich Heine, whom Wagner met after his flight to Paris:

In my brain there’s rumbling and cracking,
I think a suitcase is a-packing,
And my mind is leaving – oh no!–
Much sooner than I will go.

Amidst verbally packed suitcases a piece of theatre comes into being out of nothing, the nothing that is everything: a collective piece of theatre that brings forth material worlds by which the individual is taken in, a mythical drama about love, one which seeks to free art from the lie that it has to be true, and which by doing so may offer “holy comfort”.

The RING OF THE NIBELUNG is – in the words of Thomas Mann – “directed and composed against bourgeois culture and education as a whole”. Which leads us back to the opening speculations on the nature of the bürger in Germany. In Cosima Wagner’s diary there is an entry in spring 1874 which records Richard reiterating the importance of the revolutionary impulse of 1848 for his stage festival play: “Only the Springtime of the Nations brought continuous fine weather from March onwards, and despite all the nonsense the foundation was laid then for Germany’s unification. I believe I wouldn’t have conceived the Ring without that movement.” The active impulse of the radical citoyen is the destructive and as it were consoling artistic germ cell of the sated bourgeois.