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 Valkyrie 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”?

>> I. Escape and play  >> III. Bayreuth and Berlin