Richard Wagner His Life and His Dramas

Part 3 — DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN (continued 2)

Reading edition

"Siegfried charges her with shamelessness: faithful had he been to this blood brothership,—his sword he laid between Brünnhilde and himself:—he calls on her to bear him witness. Purposely, and thinking only of his ruin, she will not understand him."

In a speech of double meaning, she declares that the sword hung in its scabbard on the wall on the night when its master gained him a true love. Siegfried swears to his truth on the point of Hagen's spear, calling upon it to pierce him if he is false. This is a purely theatric touch. This spear does pierce him, yet was he not false. Brünnhilde swears upon the same spear that Siegfried has committed perjury. Thereupon Siegfried lightly says that she is daft, and bids the guests to let the festivities proceed. Brünnhilde now suspects some deviltry, but her runic wisdom is gone and she cannot fathom it. But she can and does confide to Hagen that she had made her hero invulnerable, except in the back. Gunther discerns that he has been dishonoured, yet he is loath, for his sister's sake, to be revenged upon Siegfried. This makes Brünnhilde all the more furious, and she readily assents to Hagen's proposition that Siegfried must die. The vacillating Gunther is overcome. Hagen shouts in triumph; the ring and the power will soon be his.

The last act shows the Rhine maidens sporting on the surface of the water in a little cove of the river. Siegfried, hunting and strayed from his party, appears on the rocks above them. They beg him to return the ring, and he is almost on the point of doing so when they warn him of its curse. He refuses to be scared into parting with it. This meeting with the Rhine maidens is not found in any of the old stories, because the ring which causes the trouble in "Götterdämmerung" is not in any way associated in the legends with the end of the gods. In both the Thidrek Saga and the "Nibelungen Lied," Hagen is warned of an evil by mermaids, and this may barely have suggested this scene, which so accentuates the immediately succeeding tragedy of Siegfried's death.

The hunting party arrives, and to cheer the gloomy Gunther Siegfried volunteers to tell the story of his youth. All this is original with Wagner. The hero narrates the incidents of the drama "Siegfried" to a wonderful epitome of its music, up to the slaying of Mime. Then Hagen administers an antidote to the drink of forgetfulness, and the hero reveals his discovery of Brünnhilde. Gunther is shocked as he realises Hagen's perfidy. Wotan's ravens fly past, and Hagen calls on Siegfried to interpret their tones. As the hero turns his back, Hagen drives the spear into it. Siegfried dies apostrophising his Valkyr love. To the strains of the great funeral march, the body is borne back to the home of the Gibichs, and laid at the feet of Gutrune, who is told, as in the Thidrek Saga, that a wild boar slew her lord. She accuses Gunther, who promptly denounces Hagen. The Nibelung demands the ring; Gunther opposes him; they fight, and Gunther is slain. Hagen reaches for the ring, but the dead hand of Siegfried rises in solemn warning, and sends him staggering back in terror. At this juncture Brünnhilde, who, as we vaguely learn from the text, has heard the truth from the Rhine maidens, enters the hall, a picture of outraged majesty.

After informing Gutrune that she was never the real wife of Siegfried, Brünnhilde sums up the dénouement of the entire tragedy in a speech which must be carefully read by anyone desiring thoroughly to understand Wagner's design. She perceives the whole of Wotan's plan, and upbraids him for throwing on a guiltless man the curse of his own crime. Let the ravens tell Wotan that his plan is accomplished. And let the weary god have rest. She takes the ring from Siegfried's finger, and places it upon her own. When she is burned with him on the funeral pyre, the Rhine maidens may get the ring again. And now fly home, ravens. Pass by the Valkyr's rock and bid the flickering Loge once more visit Walhalla, for the dusk of the gods is at hand, and with this torch will the bride of Siegfried fire the towers of Asgard. Then she addresses the wondering retainers and bids them, when she is gone, to put aside treaties and treacherous bonds as laws of life, and in their place to let Love rule alone. With her steed, Grani, she mounts Siegfried's funeral pyre. The flames rise to heaven. Upon the Rhine are seen the three maidens, one of them holding aloft the ring. Hagen madly springs into the water after the accursed bauble, and is drawn under by the maidens and drowned. The sky blazes and we see the assembled gods, as described by Waltraute, sitting in the burning Walhalla. It is the "Götterdämmerung."

So ends the tragedy. Nothing in the final scenes closely resembles the original legends except the burning of Walhalla. In the legends the gods are destroyed in battle with the powers of evil. Here they die in solemn atonement for sin. And their punishment, which is their release, is accomplished by the voluntary sacrifice of a woman through love. Brünnhilde, wiser in the end than Wotan himself, perfects and completes his plan. The death of the hero, innocent and unoffending, was not enough. The intentional sacrifice, hallowed by love, accomplishes what all Wotan's schemes failed to achieve. The ethical plot of the drama is finished. "The eternal feminine leadeth us upward and on."

This glorious Brünnhilde of Wagner is a grander figure than any conceived by the sagamen. Dimly, indeed, may her sacrifice be connected with the death of Nanna, the wife of Baldur, the bright one, who could not outlive her husband. But that death was merely from a broken heart. This one is a magnificent atonement.

Baldur's horse, fully caparisoned, was led to his master's pyre. Wotan placed on the pile his ring, Draupner, which every ninth night produced eight other rings. But none of these incidents have the enormous significance of Wagner's final scene. His reconstruction of the story of the end of the gods, of their release from the burden of sin by a voluntary, vicarious sacrifice, raises the poetic issue of his drama to a plane far above the conceptions of the old Norse and Teutonic skalds. With "Der Ring des Nibelungen," in spite of its defects, Wagner set himself beside the Greek dramatists.

III.—The Music of the Trilogy

In "Der Ring des Nibelungen" the leitmotiv system is found at its best. In this gigantic and complex drama it provides a musical aid to an understanding of the intent of the dramatist. It is a running commentary on the action, a ceaseless revealer of inner thoughts and motives. And, owing to the development of plot and character, the musical device of thematic development is employed with admirable effect in this work. Unfortunately for the credit of Wagner, the typical handbook of these dramas, and the fashionable "Wagner Lecture," which consists of telling the story and playing the principal motives on a piano, have gone far to convey wholly erroneous ideas of this unique musical system. The hearer of the lecture and the reader of the handbook are led to suppose that the score consists of a string of disconnected phrases, arbitrarily formed and capriciously titled, and that this is the whole result of the system.

The truth is that the score becomes symphonic in scope. The various motives are invented with a profound insight into the philosophy of musical expression and are repeated or developed according to the principles of musico-dramatic art formulated in the mind of Wagner when he had fully elaborated his theory of the organic union of the text and the music. Reading the handbooks or hearing the lectures and afterward recognising the motives as they appear in the dramas, even when their significance is known, is not all that Wagner asks of one who attempts to understand his system. It is necessary to study the scores very thoroughly, to note the intimate union of text and music, to observe the changes which motives undergo when new shades of meaning are to be expressed, to grasp the treatment of rhythm and tonality and the formation and expansion of themes, and generally to follow the composer through the various ramifications of the most elaborate plan for dramatic expression in music ever invented.

On the other hand, none of this study is essential to a mere enjoyment of these dramas. For that, only a perfect comprehension of the text is necessary; if you know what the characters are saying and doing, the music will do its own work. It will create the right mood for you, though you do not know the name of a single leading theme. But the thematic system is there, and to understand it will add enormously to your intellectual and artistic pleasure and give Wagner a far higher position in your estimation than he would otherwise occupy. Only, if you intend to study it, do not treat it as if it were nothing more than a thematic catalogue. What I am about to put before the reader cannot claim to be more than some pertinent hints. An exhaustive study of these scores would fill a volume.

Let the reader refer to the classification of motives given in Chapter III. of "The Artistic Aims of Wagner" (page 193), and apply it to the themes now to be considered. He will find in these scores all the classes there enumerated and will note that they are used and developed with extraordinary skill.

After the preliminary measures of the introduction to "Das Rheingold," we hear the first guiding theme of the drama, the motive of the Primeval Elements: