An Introduction to Wagner and “The Ring of the Nibelung”

It’s hard to believe, but the end of the Jacksonville Symphony season is nearly upon us. We’re closing it next weekend with concerts of Debussy and Wagner, which include ninety minutes of one of Wagner’s greatest operas, Götterdämmerung, or The Twilight of the Gods.

Of all classical composers, it’s fair to say that none creates in the listener such strong feelings of either passion or revulsion as Richard Wagner. As someone who loves his music, I’m always a little suspicious of people who don’t; in my experience the dismissal is usually a convenient front for not knowing the music especially well, or an attempt to dodge a political bullet rather than taking the time to navigate the treacherous waters of Wagner’s music and writings. So this article is an unabashed attempt to whet your appetite for some glorious music, and to encourage you to make up your own mind about this megalomaniacal genius who changed the course of musical history.

Wagner was born in 1813 (the same year as Verdi, his Italian rival) and spent much of his youth and early adulthood in a rather uninspiring succession of minor conducting positions. His early operas are in the line of German Romanticism established by Carl Maria von Weber. But by 1850 and the composition of his opera Lohengrin, Wagner’s own voice was clear.Lohengrinis through-composed, meaning it doesn’t break down into separate musical “numbers”, like, say, a Mozart opera. The usual succession of aria, chorus, duet and recitative is all subsumed into a single unbroken musical thread. Wagner gives the music structure by a device called the leitmotif, whereby every musical character, every idea, every emotion, is given a short musical motto (almost like a miniature theme tune). This simple idea has enormous repercussions as it allows the orchestra to “comment” on what’s happening. We can tell what a character is thinking about depending on what the orchestra plays. Instrumental music, which doesn’t usually express anything specific, is imbued with concrete semantic meaning.

Wagner believed that opera was the greatest of the human arts, and he wanted it to contain all the arts: literature in the form of the text (which, unlike other composers, he always wrote himself), visual arts in the set and costume design, and music. He wanted his theatre pieces to be “complete art works”, and in order to distinguish them from the operas of the past, he called them “music dramas”.

In 1848, Wagner began to compose a new work, Siegfried’s Death. In it, a human hero, Siegfried, dies because of others’ lust for power. As Wagner worked on the poem, he realized that he needed to provide more context so that the audience could appreciate the full meaning of Siegfried’s death. This led him into one of the most ambitious creative undertakings in Western art, without parallel in music. Over the course of 26 years, Wagner wrote the poems and music for four music dramas that would tell the story of an entire world order ultimately destroyed by greed and lust for power. First, Das Rheingold, which tells of a hoard of gold that has lain at the bottom of the river Rhine since time began. The hoard is controlled by a ring, which can bring its master untold power, but only if he renounces love. In Das Rheingold, we meet Alberich, a greedy dwarf (and one of Wagner’s several ugly anti-Semitic portraits) who does indeed renounce love in order to control the gold.

Next comes Die Walküre, or The Valkyrie. The Valkyries are daughters of Wotan, the chief god, who fly around the earth taking worthy battle heroes to Valhalla, the home of the gods, for eternal rest. I’m sure you know the music that accompanies them as they ride through the air. Wotan’s favourite Valkyrie is Brünnhilde. She disobeys him, and Wotan punishes her by sending her to a rock surrounded by a ring of fire, to be claimed by the first man who can reach her. Only he who knows no fear can penetrate the fire.

The third music drama is named Siegfried, after our hero. Siegfried represents all that is good in humanity. We see him being raised by another dwarf, Mime. Mime despises Siegfried for this strength and courage, and only raises him so that he will win back the gold, which has been stolen from Alberich. Siegfried grows up, kills a dragon, gets the gold, but is told by a bird that Mime wants to kill him to keep the gold for himself. Siegfried kills Mime, and is now master of the gold.

By 1874 we reach the final music drama, Siegfried’s Death, where Wagner started back in 1848, now renamed Götterdämmerung. Siegfried knows no fear; he is the perfect man. The birds have told him that Brünnhilde lies on a rock and that if he reaches her, he can marry her. He jumps through the flames, and the two fall madly in love. This is where we join the action. The sun rises after what has effectively been their wedding night. They exult in their love for each other with a passion and ecstasy that had never before been captured in music, and Siegfried, in the manner of all epic heroes, goes off in search of adventure. Siegfried gives Brünnhilde the ring as a token of his love.

We move from there to the prelude to the second act, a depiction of the brooding Hagen (Alberich’s son), very much the villain of the piece, a portrait of evil, manipulativeness and self-loathing that probably has no equal anywhere in music. Hagen has contrived, through spells and deceit, to have his half-brother Gunther abduct Brünnhilde with the intention of marrying her, and also to force Siegfried, forgetting everything about Brünnhilde, to fall in love with Gutrune, Hagen’s half-sister.

Our third act excerpts revolve around Hagen’s murder of Siegfried and Brünnhilde’s ultimate realization of everything that has happened, her ecstatic self-sacrifice, and the return of the cursed ring to the river Rhine. Siegfried meets up with Hagen and Gunther while on a hunt in the woods. Hagen offers him a drink to quench his thirst in the summer’s heat, adding a potion that causes him to remember everything that previously Hagen had caused him to forget. His memory restored, Siegfried begins to recount his wooing of Brünnhilde. Hagen feigns horror at what he designates a betrayal, and thrusts a spear into Siegfried’s back. Siegfried’s dying words are a moving recollection of his first moments with Brünnhilde. There follows the mighty Funeral March, in which Siegfried’s body is borne away, and then the tremendous last tableau of the opera, the Immolation Scene. Brünnhilde has learned the truth about everything, and in these final moments she ruminates on all the evil that has led to this point, essentially forgiving everyone for their human or godly failings. She leaps onto her horse and mounts the burning funeral pyre of Siegfried’s body. The Rhine overflows its banks and takes back the ring while flames in the sky seize on Valhalla, where all the gods are assembled, and consume it. The entire world order has been brought down by greed, and now man must start again, renouncing power, and seeking only love.

It’s a complicated plot, and one that is very easy to ridicule given the unprecedented seriousness with which Wagner presents it. But it’s complicated and involved on purpose. Wagner wanted to create something that takes years to understand, rich in philosophical meaning. What makes it palatable, and incomparably powerful, is the music.

Eduard Hanslick, the music critic who so loved Brahms and hated Wagner, once commented that music “works more rapidly and intensely upon the mind than any other art: while the other arts persuade, music invades us.” I agree. We all know the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by music, or of having our mood changed by it in a few minutes. In common with the music of other great composers, Wagner’s can make us feel many things: triumph, despair, desire, terror, ecstasy. Usually when we listen to music and experience these emotions, they aren’t particularly specific, because music alone doesn’t have semantic meaning. But Wagner’s use of leitmotifs (the theme tunes for people and ideas) adds that meaning, and we find ourselves under a spell. I can attest to this personally: I only engage with Wagner when I have a lot of time off, because once I start to listening to the operas and thinking about them, weeks go by without much else happening. The music has a power that is absolutely unique. Whether you love or despise it, every musician, and I would argue every thinking person, has to engage with it to decide what he thinks for himself, just as with Dante, Shakespeare, Proust or Goethe. As the musicologist Richard Taruskin commented, “Succumbing to Wagner’s hypnosis is valued as religious experience, as erotic experience, as narcotic experience, in any combination or all at once.”

Wagner’s reputation today is often of a vainglorious German nationalist: chauvinistic, anti-Semitic and tainted by the Third Reich’s championing of his music decades after his death. He was certainly anti-Semitic, writing many hateful things about Mendelssohn, from whom he actually learned a great deal. It is still forbidden to perform Wagner’s music in Israel. But to dismiss him because of this is to deprive oneself of the fruits of one of Western civilization’s most imaginative and blindingly original minds. Götterdämmerung contains some of the greatest music ever written, and its message is one for all time: only by renouncing lust, power and greed can we find redemption in love.

For these performances we welcome a terrific duo of singers: Christine Brewer will sing Brünnhilde, and Jay Hunter Morris, Siegfried. Both perform these roles in the world’s great opera houses, and it’s a real treat to have them visit Jacksonville. So I urge you, not so gently: come and hear this intoxicating music, and make up your own mind about Richard Wagner.

Posted with the permission of the Florida Times-Union. Originally published at:

http://www.jacksonville.com/entertainmentlife/20180523/wagners-ring-comes-to-jacksonville