SOURCE: Tietz, John. “Conclusion: What Does the Ring Mean?” In Redemption or Annihilation? Love versus Power in Wagner's ‘Ring,’ pp. 141-63. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

[In the following excerpt, Tietz sees in Wagner's operatic cycle a thematic “tension between power and love in society,” an emphasis on conflict, and a depiction of the ultimate dissolution of the world.]

1. REDEMPTIVE FIRE

With its great length, The Ring generates such tremendous momentum that it takes quite a while to conclude. There are in fact two long stretches of music in the final version of The Ring, but it could not plausibly have ended with Siegfried's funeral, except anticlimactically. For then Siegfried's death would be, as Mann suggests, a merely sentimental remembrance of heroism destroyed with little connection to the larger dramatic and philosophical context that emerges during the drama.

After her extraordinary adventures, Brünnhilde at last says that she understands what has happened to her in the long journey from her subservient role in her father's kingdom to the side of her lover, a lover she helped to destroy during her long journey towards self-consciousness. What does she comprehend? What we understand emerges in the music at the point of her cryptic realization: “Alles, alles / alles weiss ich.” Has she “studied Schopenhauer,” as Nietzsche says in The Case of Wagner (#4)? She knows, conceivably, what her mother Erda knows—that all things change and that, in particular, power and love cannot be pulled apart. I contend that this sentiment applies in a general way to self and society too, that they are inherently unstable, in constant change, undergoing continual reinvention. This ending, Wagner said, retained by implication the sense of the earlier ending containing the phrase “I saw the world end.” Wotan's denial of his will to power opened the way for radical changes in his society, but those changes did not lead to its replacement by a better one based on love and somehow forestalling the forces of change. Along with Brünnhilde's last words, we also hear the motif of the Power of the Ring followed by Alberich's Curse. The music indicates, I suggest, what Brünnhilde understands through this last constellation of motifs: Alberich's Curse leads into the Rhinemaidens' “Rhinegold” motif (absolved of its Hagenesque distortion), becoming Valhalla at “Ruhe, ruhe du Gott” (but we should also remember that the Rhinegold motif forms the basis for the Power of the Ring and Servitude motifs—recall the transition from the Renunciation, Gold, and Ring motifs to Valhalla between Scenes 1 and 2 of Das Rheingold). Das Rheingold is thereby connected to Götterdämmerung establishing the historical link Wagner intended in his account of the creation of society out of self-consciousness. We then hear the Erda-derived Rise and Fall of the Gods and the Need of the Gods (has this need been satisfied—is it unsatisfiable?). The significance of these references will be completely lost without having seen and heard how they have been built up throughout the rest of the cycle, and the choric function of the orchestra, its ‘comment’ on the general meaning of the drama, is essential to this ending.

Although Brünnhilde has been the focus of the final events of the visible drama, I agree with Tanner (“The Total Work of Art,” p. 172) that neither she nor Siegfried have become the real center of the work. The music increasingly alludes to the larger context of the Will as the opposition of power and love at all levels, the metaphysical, the personal, and the social. As we proceed to the end of Götterdämmerung, we encounter more and more references to the events of the past, reminding us—if not through conscious recollection then indirectly—of the many variations of conflict that have brought the characters to this point. Furthermore, the ending of The Ring in its final version takes us beyond the hope of utopian redemption, in its Feuerbachian sense of social mission of humanity, because the Will, as Wagner came to understand it musically, simply represents the tension between power and love in the self and society. By the middle of Götterdämmerung, Brünnhilde has become a symbol of that tension but not its resolution. Her own, internal discord between love and rage was to be resolved in the death of Siegfried and in the symbolic destruction of Valhalla and Wotan, both by now completely superfluous. I have maintained that the dynamic nature of the Will as Wagner sees it in The Ring engenders both creation and destruction. In this metaphysical environment of continually evolving conflict, there can be no ultimate triumph of love in the form of compassionate humanity over power and evil for there are no universal truths established to underwrite such a victory, to eliminate the possibility of conflict. In this I agree with Adorno. However, the final moments of Götterdämmerung do not envisage a transcendence of conflict and change but a vision of their centrality to civilization.

It should also be observed that placing two powerful and relatively long stretches of music so closely together not only allowed Wagner to highlight the various conceptual elements of the drama but also to bring the orchestral interweaving of these elements to center stage. Again, the role of the orchestra as chorus becomes increasingly prominent as the music-drama becomes symphonic. The significance of The Ring, once again, lies in its music. The Funeral March and the end of Valhalla are in effect two large recapitulations. Siegfried's funeral music brings together the many elements associated with heroism, hope, the sword, the destiny of the Volsungs, Brünnhilde's love, the second part of Freia's motif, the Dawn music, Alberich's Curse and death. Brünnhilde's last scene brings together the motifs associated with Valhalla, with love, the Curse, Fate, the Power of the Ring, and Love's Redemption.

Returning to the characters of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, by the middle of Götterdämmerung, Siegfried has become a mere symbol for the hopes and dreams of both Wotan and Brünnhilde. But he also symbolizes heroic potential, otherwise his funeral music would be grotesquely out of place since—as Tanner asks—after Siegfried leaves his fairy-tale world and climbs Brünnhilde's mountain into the real world of his sexuality and then, in Götterdämmerung, the world of politics, what does he accomplish? What has he done to deserve his funeral music? He sails off to set the world aright at the beginning of Götterdämmerung, but immediately encounters Hagen. With his arrival at the House of Gibichung, Siegfried already has a ‘reputation’ as a great hero, his great life work being to make the world safe for love. Love, however, destroys him.

Let us look specifically at the motif that unifies the Funeral March: the drumbeats symbolizing death. We have seen that this motif has been associated specifically with death since Das Rheingold and brings together the entire cycle in the Funeral March. It accompanies Alberich's renunciation and curse in Das Rheingold, usually appearing whenever twists of fate portending death occur. It points to the motif of Alberich's Curse its role in Wotan's monologue during Die Walküre IIii, foretelling the deaths of Siegmund and Siegfried. Along with the Fate music, the drumbeats accompany Brünnhilde's revelation to Siegmund of his impending doom. The motif thus ultimately establishes a symbolic interconnection between Brünnhilde's destiny and redemption. As the forces of power and love are brought together in Siegfried's funeral music, we see the result of Wotan's dream of heroic redemption. What began as a barely noticeable drumroll in Das Rheingold becomes the basis for the music of Siegfried's death in Götterdämmerung, and for the great Funeral March that follows, where it appears in tremendous and harsh brass chords along with the timpani motif. This music portrays the failure of Wotan's hope; the recurrence of the Volsung motif and the Sword point up the symbolic significance of Siegfried in the drama as the focus of that hope. Its Eroica-like outburst of nobility and sadness brings together all of the events in Siegfried's life, interweaving the many motifs accompanying his progress from individual to symbol. The reference to the love music of his parents, Siegmund and Sieglinde, express the hope for Siegfried while the joys and triumphs of his youth are enshrouded in the mists of death, in the Nothingness opening before Wotan's world at the failure of his redemptive ideal.

In the final sequence of The Ring (also discussed in Chapter 2, Section 3) we hear the deceptively hopeful motifs of Valhalla (deceptive because of its close resemblance to that of the Ring and hence with the desire for power), Death, and Alberich's Curse, the Twilight of the Gods, and finally Love's Redemption. Immediately following the moment of Brünnhilde's “Alles, Alles, / Alles weiss ich, / Alles ward mir non frei!” we again hear the solo timpani and its death motif followed shortly by Alberich's Curse, cut off as Hagen and the ring are submerged. We then hear the Rhinegold motif, Valhalla, the Rise and Fall of the Gods, and then the motif of sleep originally associated with Brünnhilde at “Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott!” Finally, just before Brünnhilde calls on Loge to light the fire, the Ring motif along with the Curse and a reference to Renunciation reappear, followed by Wotan's Spear motif—the outcome of his authority in the conflagration initiated long before by his daughter. The motif of the Rise and Fall of the Gods (reminiscent of the rising and falling piano theme in the second movement of Beethoven's “Kreutzer” violin sonata (op. 47)) provides the backdrop for much of the final scene. This motif combines a version of the rising nature motif with the falling motif of the Twilight of the Gods.

In the end, the ruins of Valhalla remain to be contemplated by the survivors of the House of Gibichung who have witnessed these catastrophic events. What do these events symbolize? I have argued that from Wagner's point of view, the essence of the world manifests conflict through the Power/Love dichotomy. Society and selfhood are essentially impermanent because they are changing, as we have seen in the characters of Brünnhilde and Siegfried. Yet persons can, through their creations, control the forces of power and love at least to the extent that we can see the dialectics of opposition and resolution as the root of our impermanence, and through that understanding perhaps we can establish some relative stability within such a world. The self does not achieve independence from politics at the end of Götterdämmerung by at last establishing utopia. Nor, contrary to Peckham (Appendix, Section 4; Chapter 3, Section 9), should we think of the Will as an “absolute self,” as transcendent individuality (for Wagner, this must be an oxymoron). At the end, the dynamic forces of the universe remain, but they contain no absolutes except change through conflict. The power of both love and politics lies in their ability to effect change. The concluding moments of the cycle, I have argued, do not portray the triumph of love but the interdependence of power and love. Valhalla was deceptive in its illusion of permanence, its motif indeed the “lullaby of the bourgeoisie” (as Adorno described it). Furthermore, we have seen the deceptiveness of love in its transcendent power through its connection with fate.¹

I suggest that these two extended recapitulations show, firstly, the connection between hope, redemption, and change. Society and the self in nineteenth-century German philosophy and art are not only conceived as fundamentally changing but, when understood as the underlying source of the desire for permanence and stability, change and contingency has the character of irony. What happens through our hope for permanence will not always be what we expect, and sometimes it will be the opposite. For example, Wotan's search for social stability only ensures its change and Brünnhilde's desire to live for love as the only real value has direct political and social consequences. Secondly, the last recapitulation joins together power and love as two sides to the same force of change forming the images of self and society in The Ring—and for us as well. In the last moments of Götterdämmerung, Redemption Through Love does not, I have argued, signal the victory of love over power; it shows the power of change in our conceptions of self and society. When the Dawn music occurs for the final time at the moment of Siegfried's death, it portends the dawn of the gods' final day but it also constitutes a moment of comprehension. Brünnhilde begins to see the interconnectedness of power and love, the essential orientation of life: she has become like her mother, Erda.² The two great orchestral montages immediately following this final occurrence of the Dawn music at Siegfried's death take us to this more general level of understanding. What, exactly, is the victory of love in this context?

By bringing together the contrary symbols of nature and society—the World Ash Tree and Valhalla—and then unifying them in the fire that consumes both, Wagner retains something of Schopenhauer's scepticism about the ideals of the Enlightenment and romanticism. Nature and spirit cannot be brought to unity in human civilization, or through art or emotion, or transcendent selfhood, because they embody principles of change inconsistent with the illusions of permanence that have sustained Western civilization, at least until the nineteenth century. When we see and hear the collapse of Valhalla at the end of Götterdämmerung, we witness the destruction of our own symbols of permanence. To use Nietzsche's terminology, love and redemption are reduced to the primal force of the will to power (exemplified in both Brünnhilde and Wotan), their illusoriness, the desire for permanence, thus made evident to us. If the essence of self and society lies in change rather than permanence, how can we achieve order and value if the hope for redemption rests on the will to power rather than permanent values and truths? Is this not, after all, exactly Adorno's complaint about “permanent catastrophe”?

I have tried to show that understanding the self as an illusion does not necessarily lead to the abandonment of the concept of morally active, creative personhood. Just because the self is a kind of action does not mean that we should eliminate the concept and speak only of economic forces, social institutions, atoms in the void, or whatever we might think of as the originating conditions of selfhood. Understanding the forces that constitute our Western images of selfhood does not necessarily make them superfluous. Kant was the first to say that the constituted nature of the self does not eliminate the concept of Responsibility from our self-image. Similarly, for Nietzsche, if self-images are results rather than discovered essences (however much they may so appear), the question of the importance or value of the self cannot be settled by realizing it to be a construct rather than an irreducible substance. Either way, life goes on.

Turning to the motif of Redemption Through Love, we should again ask not only what Siegfried redeemed but what Brünnhilde accomplished at the end of Götterdämmerung. (I noted in Chapter 3, Section 2 that Wagner did not associate the defeat of power with redemptive love.) I also pointed out that this motif, although added to Die Walküre later by Wagner, should not be considered in isolated from others in The Ring because of the late date of its actual composition since it and the several forms of love music share elements derived from Freia I and II. It also contains the Fate motif in its first measure. Redemption Through Love does not symbolize the overcoming of power and the victorious assertion of love over, but the destructiveness of love itself, its power as a force of change. Love, as much as hate, initiates the great conflicts in The Ring. Wotan's world is destroyed as much by love as by the machinations of Alberich and Hagen.

Renunciation stands with redemption as the other main theme of The Ring. Neither the renunciation of love nor the renunciation of power accomplishes what it is supposed to. Siegfried's loss of identity in Götterdämmerung Iii exposes the delusory romantic ideal of das Ewigweibliche (the Goethean ideal of eternal passive feminine as the goal of masculine active striving), as Peckham suggests (see Chapter 2, Section 4). It shows that love as the pure desire to control its object destroys its freedom. Indeed as a response to Siegfried's ‘deception’, Brünnhilde becomes the active agent. But Siegfried's anonymous sexuality also destroys the autonomous existence he and Brünnhilde thought they had achieved. In one of Wagner's many anticipations of Freud, Siegfried not only opposes (his grandfather) Wotan's world but, subconsciously, the exclusive bond between two individuals as well. Siegfried's sexuality is easily manipulated by Hagen, Gutrune easily substituted for Brünnhilde (as Peckham says of Siegfried, sexually any woman will do), and Siegfried can even dominate Brünnhilde through the persona of Gunther.³ Not until he regains his memory, just before his death, does his identity through his relation to Brünnhilde return.⁴

In the Appendix, Section 4 I point out the similarities and differences between the hope of transcendent love in The Ring and Tristan. Although I do not know how degrees could be measured very finely here, The Ring ended up less Schopenhauerian than Tristan because the lovers in The Ring do not believe they will achieve the union of their identities in death. Their love, they believe, will take them beyond the world of Wotan's struggle for control; but while they are deceived in believing that they are no longer involved in that struggle, that they have transcended it, they perish as direct a result of their renunciation of that world. Alberich's renunciation of love destroys him, Wotan's renunciation of power, as well as Brünnhilde's and Siegfried's “laughing death” in the face of Wotan's world, proves only, in Götterdämmerung II, that renouncing politics for love leads only to more politics.

At the end of Götterdämmerung the violins play the motif of Love's Redemption and the personal, human level of compassionate love becomes the impersonal Will. As Tanner describes it, the instrument nearest to the human voice shows us how the personal is also the universal, how “unconscious Nature rolls peacefully forward, and human creativity, wonderful but containing the seeds of dissolution (how Lawrentian Wagner was!) is celebrated without irony even as it is incinerated, and the misnamed Redemption theme promises that there will be new conscious life” (“The Total Work of Art,” p. 173). Is that “promise of new conscious life” utopian—Feuerbachian—as Dahlhaus argues? Does The Ring tell a story about how we leave behind earlier stages of conflict for unity and resolution, or does it tell a Schopenhauerian, anti-utopian story about how new life will repeat the same cycle of destruction? My point has been that The Ring does not advance our capacity for transcending conflict except in our understanding of its formative power. But this is an advance: we are not caught up in Schopenhauer's bad infinity of the Wheel of Ixion (explained in the Appendix, Section 3) and the denial of human significance. Redemption simply amounts to the management of our tendencies towards conflict rather than their elimination (the point of Die Meistersinger). It comes down to the realization that we cannot get beyond change, that we can only manage its forces in accordance with the values we have established for our survival and for the survival of what we hold dear. To understand ourselves in this way, to have reached the stage of aufheben that allows us to see ourselves as both constituted and constituting, amounts to no more than our grasp of the role of conflict and change in our self-imagery.

In its final appearance, the motif of Redemption Through Love should include an experience of loss. Brünnhilde's reunion with Siegfried would not have the powerful effect it does without the defeat of that hope in her actual death. Her Aufhebung, her understanding, takes place in life as constituted by conflict. Heard in this light, her final moments are not an anticipation of utopia but a reminiscence of the hope that drove her (and others) to terrible depths as well as to great heights. With Tanner I suggest that any promise of new life contained in the final moments of The Ring also holds out the essence of the world as change—life as Becoming rather than Being, process rather than stasis. But, reminiscent of Greek tragedy, it also tell us that everything can come to an end because of our lack of understanding, as it did in Wotan's case and, of course, we never understand everything. It may well be that, like Wotan and Brünnhilde, we simply bring about our own destruction through our best intentions, and in the twentieth century we have certainly been able to envisage that possibility. In an image I used earlier (Chapter 3, Section 2), the campfire of our civilization may be the only light of any value in the entire universe, but it may be a light that eventually burns out. Our only hope lies in maintaining that fire, not it transcending it for something better; we must have faith in our own redemptive powers.

Tanner also, appropriately, quotes from Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium.⁵ To this one should add, from Second Coming, the now often-quoted lines:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats invokes a mood reminiscent of the end of Götterdämmerung, the somberness of its visage, and even its circumspectiveness about redemption. We should also remember the passage from Conrad I quoted at the end of the Appendix: only by understanding the destructive and creative elements of life enables us to understand it—a sentiment Nietzsche wholeheartedly supported in the passage about the joys of creation and destruction from Twilight of the Idols also quoted in the Appendix. If we are beings who become, who establish values and truths rather than discover them, we must see ourselves as both creative and destructive.

I have tried to show how every major character in The Ring embodies an illusion that has both positive (creative) and negative (destructive) potential. … In Chapter 2 I showed how the two pairs of endings to the four parts of The Ring bring together two principle groups of illusions. The first pair: Das Rheingold ends with the myth of social redemption and Enlightenment order established by Wotan having taken up the sword (in his imagination), thereby embarking on the path of intervention that eventually destroys his hope as he presciently envisages the very thing that will shatter the spear, the symbol of his power. Siegfried ends in the mythology of romantic love. The second pair: Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung end in the destructive fire of truth, the Heraclitean symbol of change. The implicit power of change contained in love (in the form of the sleeping Brünnhilde) ironically arising out of the clash between love and power at the end of Die Walküre. The interdependence of power and love, as the mechanism of that change, connects directly to the image of Brünnhilde's achievement of self-understanding implicit in the illusion sustaining her as she escapes from Wotan's world to create another with Siegfried. She does not escape the destructiveness of her illusion of redemption, however, and lives it to its conclusion. In understanding that change and illusion are the fabric of life, she nevertheless does not abandon all myth. That would be to abandon her identity altogether and this she does not do. She encounters death as “Siegfried's bride,” united with him in death and the destruction of her illusion by the very powers she believed she had transcended. We soon hear the music of Brünnhilde's Magic Sleep from Die Walküre—when it occurred there, it's falling movement paralleled the motif of the Twilight or Decline of the Gods thereby symbolizing Brünnhilde's destructive potential.

In discussing the theme of understanding in The Ring, I pointed out the symbolic phototropism implicit in its dramatic and musical movement. We continually move towards or away from understanding, towards light or towards darkness (in this Wagner retained a fundamental Hegelian metaphor that derives from the Enlightenment); but sometimes the light proves to be a false dawn—for example, the endings of Das Rheingold and Siegfried. What appears to be the light of day or the triumph of noble intentions—the dream of redemptive resolution—takes us instead further into the larger drama of conflict. As we see at the beginning of Götterdämmerung, the Dawn music of Siegfried III, the music of Brünnhilde's awakening, reappears but in a disheartening reversal of that earlier hope and optimism in its transposition from dawn to dusk. The fire at the end of Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung, through its power of transformation, takes us closer to an overview of the elements of conflict in the work as a whole. But we nevertheless can experience the hope of redemptive transcendence in Siegfried's arrival at Brünnhilde's mountain fortress: his ascent into the sky, his movement upwards towards Brünnhilde's light in the sky so marvelously depicted by the orchestra in the Prelude to Siegfried IIIiii, again based on Freia's motif. Cooke points out that Siegfried's search for Brünnhilde dwells on the first part of that motif, the part associated with sexuality (I Saw the World End, p. 49). Here, to take the psychological approach, Siegfried's assent symbolizes his libidinal search for love. We hear musical references to Wotan and Brünnhilde's reconciliation at the end of Die Walküre, but finally the opening of Brünnhilde's eyes—her “Heil dir Sonne” referring ambiguously to the sun and to Siegfried—directly quotes the motif of Fate. Our understanding through this reference to light is that we see the reactivating of Erda's prophecy. The Renunciation music also reappears when Siegfried sings: “Since you have bound me in powerful fetters, give me my freedom again!”:“in mächtigen Banden, / birg meinen Muth mir nicht mehr!” The sentiment could also be Wotan's: at that moment showing how this love—seemingly so completely removed from Wotan's world—mirrors his struggle. Brünnhilde's passion determines the future for Siegfried in ways he will never know.

When the Dawn music occurs for the third and last time (at Siegfried's death), we have seen its evolution through degrees of realization and comprehension that make up the epistemological subplot of the entire work. Just before the beginning of the Funeral March, Siegfried relives the scene of Brünnhilde's awakening. This music also portrayed her awakening to her human identity and to the love that became its basis. Just before Siegfried dies he remembers her eyes: “Ah! See those eyes, / open forever! / Ah! Feel her breathing, / loving and tender! / Joyful surrender! / Sweet are these terrors! / Brünnhilde waits for me here!”: “Ach, dieses Auge / ewig non offen! / Ach, dieses Atems / wonniges Wehen! / Süsses Vergehen, / seliges Grauen— / Brünnhild bietet mir—Gruss!” In his remembrance of that first moment, Siegfried also points ahead to Brünnhilde's moment of understanding at the end of Götterdämmerung. His reference to her eyes, “open forever,” retains its Buddhist connotation of the all-seeing eye of the enlightened, but (I have argued) we do not get the existentialist metaphysics of absolute selfhood that Peckham finds so tempting.

The imagery of vision should include the closing of Brünnhilde's eyes at the end of Die Walküre. There, love first opened her eyes and gave her wisdom, but through an extremely destructive route. It may be possible here to see ‘understanding’ in its Hegelian form, as the placing the microcosm within the macrocosm. As power was transformed into love at the end of Die Walküre associated with Brünnhilde's potential as her eyes close, so love is transformed into power in Götterdämmerung, partly because of Hagen's passionate intensity, but ultimately through Brünnhilde's illusion of transcending her society. So important was the idea of love for Brünnhilde that (what she saw as) betrayal by her lover was the deepest possible threat to her human identity, newly created and entirely defined by her relation to Siegfried. This idea of love became a motive for Brünnhilde's exercise of power and it's resulting annihilation of the object of her love, Siegfried the individual. Ironically, Brünnhilde denies his importance to her as an individual because of the symbolic role he came to play in her emotions. When she earlier refuses to return the ring to the Rhinemaidens she has, in effect, adopted its power for her own idealization of love.

For Peckham, Wagner's goal was “to free people from … illusions” such as the asocial value of romantic love, the belief in transcendent and permanent values, and in a conclusive representation of the nature of the self as Will (Beyond the Tragic Vision, p. 260). This is, I contend, overstated: The Ring certainly shows us how the illusion of redemptive love works and how it forms the specific images of self and society that make us what we are. But can we ever be completely freed from all illusions, from all myth, from all perspective? As long as change is part of our nature, as The Ring suggests, I do not think so. I have taken this Wagnerian-Nietzschean theme of the constitutive power of illusion to show how there can be no perception without selection, without potentially destructive (as well as potentially constructive) interpretation. The essence of human life centers on the activity of Bildung for Wagner, the creation of understanding and character, and while its goal should be, as Nietzsche suggests in the epigraph at the beginning of Chapter 1, to understand itself as an illusion, in the sense of a creation, it should also be to understand itself as self-creative and responsible. How this view of personhood could work obviously takes us beyond the scope of this book, but it has been one of the central questions in twentieth-century philosophy, one that has its origins in the nineteenth century.

2. THE METAPHYSICS OF THE RING: OPTIMISM OR PESSIMISM?

The early, Feuerbachian ending of The Ring, discussed in Chapter 2, saw the dawn of a new age of humanity in the clear, objective light of day, eros evolving into socially responsible compassion. Dahlhaus' reading of the ending to the cycle, which I have used as my primary example of this optimistic reading, was that Wagner returned to this original ending in the final version, thus contradicting some of his own statements about the radical changes The Ring had undergone. I have argued that this view does not hold up in the face of internal evidence. In my interpretation of the final version of The Ring, we do not see the historical transition from a world in the grips of divine, autocratic power to a new order of freedom and renewed social value (anticipated in Brünnhilde and Siegfried's love). We see the very essence of the world as change resting on conflict represented by the music. In The Ring, I have suggested, Wagner conceives of the Will as eternal conflict (that Schopenhauerian principle remains strong in all versions); I have suggested that the ending of Götterdämmerung tells us that creation and destruction are counterparts with no ultimate supremacy of freedom or love. Freedom and love are achievements that have to be reinvented virtually every day because they do not remain static, they cannot be taken for granted.

Through its emphasis on conflict, The Ring retains some elements of Hegel's theory of self-consciousness, insofar as Wagner understood it. Hegel would claim that the interdependencies of selfhood, society, and reality consist of change, that change driven by conflict has a structure that can eventually be explicated in the historical comprehension of higher levels of civilization, although he also believed that, for individuals, history is a “slaughter bench.” What appears in the short run to be irrational or destructive, however, will in the long run be seen to fit into a rational scheme of development—this he called “the cunning of reason.” Wagner clearly rejected the rationalism and determinism implicit in that view, the unity of reason with civilization in spirit. What we understand and feel at the end of The Ring does not resemble the higher rational order of the universe contained in Hegel's concept of Spirit, one civilization succeeding another through the process of growth and decay leading inexorably to higher forms of culture. In The Ring we encounter the possibility of destruction instead of progress, no new values established, no final vision put into practice. The point that stuck with Wagner after Schopenhauer was that while humanity can never eliminate conflict and change from its constitutive processes, it can never achieve the kind of rational/emotional integration envisaged by Hegel.

By placing his earlier, optimistic Feuerbachian (and Hegelian) conception of The Ring, with its emphasis on progress and development, within a larger anti-Hegelian context denying a final resolution of conflict, an ‘ultimate’ last word, Wagner nevertheless accepted only part of Schopenhauer's thesis of the destructiveness of the Will. If he did not see his characters as expressions of a rational Hegelian Spirit, neither did Wagner disparage the world of phenomenal individuals when he moved to the subrational level of Will (Adorno's characterization of the sensual transcendence of reason). Schopenhauer appealed to the contrast between the reality of the Will and the illusions of selfhood as a justification for his cynicism about the value of civilization. Where is this dualism in The Ring? Wagner allows the spectators of the fall of the gods to occupy the center of the visible drama. The phenomenal world remains at the center of our understanding at the end of Götterdämmerung when the orchestral Will, summarizing the essence of both politics and love as creation and destruction. ‘World as Will’ just is that world described as the dialectic of conflict. The illusions that make up selfhood and value simply reflect the relative stability of historical moments—including the belief in an absolute foundation for truth and value. Although Schopenhauer believed there were absolutes here, which he characterized as the Platonic forms, they performed the role of abstract standards by which to measure changes in phenomena (see Appendix, Section 3), I have suggested that both Nietzsche and Wagner reacted to Schopenhauer by thinking of the Will naturalistically rather than transcendently (for Schopenhauer, nature was a representation of the Will). They also see the desire to transcend the impermanent as a natural rather than a supernatural desire. Real effects on real people (however grandly conceived).

I have also maintained that love does not defeat power in the resolution of conflict because they are both features of the ‘essence of the world’ in The Ring. Consequently, we see how love itself can be a form of power, a source of change as well as stability. The ambiguity of love lies in its hope of transcendence and redemption on the one hand, and its controlling domination of the self on the other. For Schopenhauer, love destroys individuals in the conflict between the desires for unity and for self-assertion, but its universal potential rests on the perpetuation of the species, of willing in general, rather than on individual identity. Wagner's “slight modification” of Schopenhauer's Will, ironically, was to completely interpret it as sexuality, and specifically the sexuality of individuals rather than sex as the secret of metaphysical unity. Even at our most spiritual, as searchers of unity, we are still sexual individuals. This seems to be one of the lasting influences of Feuerbach on Wagner and one of the reasons neither he nor Nietzsche could follow Schopenhauer in his irony about apparent individuality. One way or another, sex is everything for us, not merely a symbol for the Will, for something abstract and general. Wagner also modified Schopenhauer's view of the denial of the Will to show how resignation fits into the illusion of transcendence—as we see in Wotan's case and, I have argued, in Brünnhilde's as well. He inverts Schopenhauer's claim that our highest goal in life is the denial of the Will in ourselves, that is, that we should somehow escape the illusory principle of individuation in life. If personhood depends on myths, it is also real in the sense that myth can only be replaced by myth: we can give up one conception of selfhood only by inventing another and the real choice lies between myths that are creative and myths that are self-destructive (and, again, which is which is not something that can be known a priori). In so doing, by concentrating on individuals and their illusions, Wagner thus put love and conflict together in a way that the optimistic interpretations of The Ring simply cannot explain.

As we saw in Chapter 3, for example, Dahlhaus argued that Siegfried and Brünnhilde's love was destroyed by “an outside agency and falls victim to a world in opposition to it” (Wagner's Music-Dramas, p. 104). They were deceived, and their love was a promise of redemption at the end of Siegfried. But is that promise fulfilled? Is not Brünnhilde herself responsible for her own refusal to return the ring even before her deception by Hagen and Siegfried/Gunther? Is not her love destroyed from within because of its transcendent mythology, its self-deceptive dream of romantic detachment from Wotan's world in her idealization of Siegfried? That world may be in opposition to Brünnhilde, but she also opposes it by her refusal to help Wotan or even to try to understand why Siegfried acts so strangely. The world has become alien to her. Later, in Götterdämmerung II and III, she has become so dominated by her image of love that she denies the importance of Siegfried, the mere object of that love because of its apparent inadequacy. Her own actions then help to unleash the destructive power of Hagen's revenge for Wotan's original injustice to Alberich. But renunciation as much as deception catalyzes the action of The Ring: Brünnhilde and Wotan renounce power, Alberich renounces love, and Hagen renounces the good. They are destroyed by what they desire in their renunciation: Alberich by the power he desires, Brünnhilde and Wotan by the love they hope will redeem them from the horrors of uncontrolled power.

I have occasionally used Nietzsche to help me understand the nature of illusion as a constitutive force in human life, and then to apply it in my view of The Ring. But in what I take to be their common refusal to transcend by seeing contingency rather than permanence in the concepts of Truth and Value, have Nietzsche and Wagner eliminated the whole point of civilized existence and morality, namely the importance of social stability that stems from a shared understanding of our self-imagery and its world? Perhaps Adorno was right after all. Indeed, in showing us that power and love are interconnected, that destructiveness cannot be eliminated from our images of humanity, no matter how strongly we desire peace and harmony, are not pessimistic resignation, or sensualistic escapism, the only courses open to us? Why take them seriously if our most important values are simply illusions, if whatever we accomplish will pass away? If we have moved beyond good and evil, how can there be any purpose to life? My reply has been that if Wagner and Nietzsche are ironic they are not cynical. But, even so, do not Wagner and Nietzsche give us only a theory of disillusionment? If irony leads to inaction, why bother? Where is their positive contribution? These are indeed questions raised by and in their works and they have not been fully answered even though we have been trying hard to do so for over a century. These two still have much to say to us, with Wagner emphasizing the problematic relation between personhood and society, and Nietzsche the problematic nature of creation and value as constitutive of personal identity.

Nietzsche's view of creative individuality rests on his point that creativity does not just come down to the invention of something new but of something different relative to what we have got, what we are bored with, what restricts or constrains or offends us. ‘Creativity’ comes down to the invention of something valuable in relation to negative values, something that helps us see differently, act differently, and feel differently, something that enhances life by extending our comprehension of its processes. Creativity thus usually rests on responses to perceived needs in one's environment or society, or in oneself. But, if we are lucky enough or smart enough, something quite new sometimes occurs, something that changes our perspective. For Nietzsche, creativity turns its culture in a new, unpredictable direction by giving it new myths and therefore new energy. But every myth will find its demythologizing nemisis, laying open the way for new ones. We can never transcend myth and so, Nietzsche argues, let us learn to control it as best we can where “control” means to create myths that enhance our understanding of contingency—and that encourage us to create more myths, new ways of seeing ourselves and the world.

In one of his letters to Röckel, Wagner wrote: “to be at one with truth is to give oneself up as a sentient human being wholly and entirely to reality—to encounter birth, growth, bloom, blight and decay frankly, with joy and with sorrow, and to live to the full this life made up of happiness and suffering—so to live and so to die.” Later in the same paragraph he reiterates his view that “love in its most perfect reality is only possible between the sexes; only as man and woman can we human beings truly love. Every other love is merely derived from this.”⁶ But in this context love cannot be the transcendence of life; and here, clearly, the world should be not left to Alberich (as he said to Liszt): we should live to the fullest the life we have because that is all that we have. How to live it depends on exactly the kind encounters between individuals that Nietzsche depicts in his account of truth and morality and Wagner in his cautionary and inspiring tales.

3. THE SURVIVORS

Deryck Cooke suggests that “the story told in The Ring, undeniably, is the history of a whole world, from its origins to its dissolution, since nothing is imagined as having happened before its first event, or as capable of happening after its last event.”⁷ Well, perhaps not quite: at the end of The Ring, the House of Gibichung silently remains. In the Chereau Bayreuth production of 1976, the survivors, a mute, questioning, proletarian chorus, turn to face the audience indicating that we too are among the survivors symbolically present at the ending of the world and the creation of a new one.⁸ Our understanding has been increased; we too have moved towards the light. So The Ring cannot be the bad infinity Adorno claimed it to be. The cycle of creativity and destruction will continue—that is the nature of both Spirit and the Will—but we might better control it through our experience of works like The Ring. We cannot halt the process of change and conflict, but we can try to establish and protect what we cherish through our responses to its inevitability. We have recognized something about the character of our world and of ourselves: in essence, the new world will be like the old one. The universe has not been returned to a state of nature in the sense of an ideal condition of pacified purity, the ultimate Goethean fantasy (and one he knew could never be achieved so long as human redemption lies in its striving, in its quest for truth, in journey rather than arrival). Nature, for Wagner, has no intrinsic value beyond its portentous symbolism of potential conflict, as frightening as it is attractive, existing simply as the raw material of change.

Wagner's view seems to be that individual autonomy has significance only within social contexts, only through the interaction between individuals and the moral forces that envelop them. The tension between individual autonomy and social cohesiveness defines the structures of his music-dramas. The Ring focuses on death but celebrates life as the process of renewal and decay, of our own individual selfhood and civilization. The music of The Ring goes beyond its physical referents (such as the sword, the gold, the ring and so on) to portray the dynamic flow and collision of forces underlying the conceptual level of action and belief in the visible drama. The objective referents of the music are taken into a larger developmental, philosophical realm of increasing complexity. In my appeals to musical examples, I tried to show how the leitmotifs are totally misconstrued when thought of as isolated Pavlovian cues to recall specific images. The specific referents of motifs such as the Sword, Valhalla, the Gold, and so on, are swept along in constantly varying contexts which change their meaning and significance. Contrast, for example, the first occurrences of the Valhalla theme in Das Rheingold with its distorted corruption in Götterdämmerung, and its final, nostalgic reminiscence at the end. Is this not foretold in that brief and condensed interlude in Das Rheingold (between Scenes 1 and 2) where the Ring/Power motif changes into Valhalla? What has happened to the idea of Wotan's noble society in the course of The Ring? What has happened to Wotan's nobility, to Siegfried's heroism, to Brünnhilde's love? As Cooke says, Wagner intended the music behind these events “to express the profound emotional and psychological realities behind the concepts.”⁹

By connecting motifs to events, and to the hopes, fears of the characters, the orchestra shows us how the characters hope that they can overcome their limitations and the contradictions implicit in their moral values. If fear, hope, aggression and the death wish are let loose in The Ring (along with the desires for pleasure and sex, to finish Cooke's list¹⁰), our comprehension proceeds through the musical connection of their world to the desire for understanding on the part of the characters. Both Wotan and Brünnhilde are driven by the need to understand and, although Siegfried's motivation remains primarily sexual, he too achieves a larger, if still only partial, perspective on his life. Brünnhilde's love was destructively transformed by her participation in Siegfried's death. Her realization of what happened to her love released the compassion and desire for reconciliation that ends both Valhalla and her own life. Just before Siegfried's death—after the last recurrence of the Dawn music and directly parallel to the awakening scene in Siegfried III where Siegfried awakens Brünnhilde from her renunciation-induced sleep—he again exhorts Brünnhilde to open her eyes and to see him for what he is. When he asks: “Who has forced you / back to your sleep?”:“Wer verschloss dich / wieder in Schlaf?” he refers to the moment when he found her (and indirectly to Wotan who put her to sleep the first time), but the reference attaches to her delusion about his betrayal of her love. At that moment we hear the Fate motif in the violins followed by a reference to the second part of Freia's motif in the basses and cellos—the problematic role of love in a world of change and power.

Brünnhilde's problematic vision—distorted by a love that expresses her own fears and desires—comes to its musical climax just after Hagen runs Siegfried through with his spear. When the vassals ask: “Hagen, what have you done?”:“Hagen, was tatest du?” we hear twice in the horns the Sleep music from the last scene in Die Walküre. Brünnhilde's potential destructiveness has been actualized by her love, Siegfried's death the result of awakening Brünnhilde. When Siegfried woke the sleeping Brünnhilde, he reactivated that potential. Her own desire for revenge also became a kind of sleep and her lack of understanding the cause of Siegfried's death. Immediately after, we hear the demonically slithering motif in the basses and cellos associated with Siegfried's death (and reminding us of Alberich's original motif in Das Rheingold), the first part of which includes the death motif from the timpani that becomes the ostinato of the funeral music to follow. This early motif in Das Rheingold leads to Siegfried's death as the outcome of Alberich's renunciation. The Dawn music of Siegfried IIIiii then appears for the third and final time as a preface to Siegfried's final moments and the return of his identity. The Magic Sleep music clearly refers to the last act of Die Walküre when Wotan and Brünnhilde experience reconciliation. But that reconciliation will not be possible for Siegfried and Brünnhilde.

Brünnhilde's ultimate state of comprehension would not have been possible had her love not been transformed into her desire for domination and revenge. Her reconciliation with Wotan required transgression; but her understanding now seems possible only through the kind of development we have witnessed. So the wonderful cello theme in their final scene together, recapitulating Wotan's “Der Augen leuchtendes Paar,” takes on an even deeper significance when we realize the symbolic role that Brünnhilde's sight plays in the larger drama. The closing of her eyes in Die Walküre should be understood in connection with their reopening at the end of Götterdämmerung. That higher state of comprehension was possible only through the loss of what was dearest to her. Is the same not also true of Wotan and his desire for redemption through Brünnhilde at the end of Die Walküre? This moment means so much more when one looks back on it from that later vantage point.

The ending of the world is the subject of The Ring. The world of Wotan and Alberich ends. Power and love destroy each other but they also sustain each other. God is dead; there are no absolute foundations for our values or our particular perspectives of understanding and knowledge—no ‘perspectiveless’ perspective beyond the pervasiveness of change. The survivors on stage have witnessed the end of a life, the end of a civilization, the end of a world. We contemplate the Heraclitean fire of change, with its potential for success and for failure, standing as the great truth at the end of Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung. The Rhinemaidens survive and there are human witnesses to the end of Wotan and Brünnhilde's world. But for these survivors (including ourselves, symbolized by those left on stage) the question should be whether we are about to embark on a repetition of the cycle we have just witnessed, for no absolute values, no universal social principles, have been established to prevent it—beyond love, which we have seen to be a cause of change. Wagner's answer seems to me to be: ‘Yes, this will happen to you too because life is change, so be careful how you manage it’. As Boulez puts it: “without going so far as Joyce's literal solution in Finnegan's Wake, the impression remains at the end of The Ring that Wagner has set the scene for a future beginning; without wishing to implicate Nietzsche in the matter, one cannot help thinking of the ewige Wiederkehr [Nietzsche's “eternal return”].”¹¹ Still, because we have been witnesses to this cycle, it should be (contrary to Adorno) a repetition with understanding—what Nietzsche himself hoped to achieve in his fantasy of the eternal return—nature always contains the potential for conflict. In Wagner's world, the universe cannot redeem us, as it did Faust. What disturbed Adorno about this view of truth was that it seemed to imply no socially redemptive value for love, nothing we can count on. But something has to hold society together. I have argued that Wagner agrees: if anything stands as the essence of society it is, as Feuerbach suggested, love. However, love is also a power, also potentially destructive. Adorno's non-materialist socialism cannot easily accept that view because it remains millennial in its conception of human nature. We did not know that before. Wagner envisaged humanity without that kind of hope but still capable of generating others in response. I think that Nietzsche's view of truth as an illusion helps us to understand Wagner's imagery better.

In my appeal to the ancient Greek metaphors of fire and water, one other allusion suggests itself: Heraclitus' pun that life is a bow (bíos, biós). In The Will to Power (#967) Nietzsche refers to this very metaphor: “the greatest human beings perhaps also possess great virtues, but in that case also their opposites. I believe that it is precisely in the presence of opposites and the feelings that they occasion that the great person, the bow with the great tension, develops.”¹² The string that keeps the bow tense is our understanding of the world. The bow itself comprises our life, our civilization. It seems at rest but contains forces of great power. If the string loses tension, the bow will not work. Pericles, the greatest of the Greek soldier-rulers, held that everything declines (like Yeats, “Things fall apart,” like Erda, “All things perish”); the bowstring will loosen, every society will lose its creative edge even if their heroes accomplish their goals.

In their rejection of the metaphysics of tragedy, Plato and Aristotle took the ancient distinction between physis and nomos, between the impersonal workings of nature and the gods on the one hand and human convention and society on the other, and brought them together in their antitragic view that human reason is the crown of nature, thereby establishing one of the major dreams of Western civilization. For Plato, nature itself provides us with standards and, if we understand them, we can flourish. Understanding the natural order, rather than on faith in tradition or luck, thus became central to virtue; knowledge unifies the virtues and reason closes the gap between our desires and the Good. This antitragic metaphysics became the basis for Christianity and for the rise of science in the Enlightenment. For Christians, humans cannot fully understand because they are imperfect. But perfection must exist, even though it “passeth the understanding.” Divine perfection exists as a principle fundamentally opposed to the possibility of tragedy. Damnation is not tragic if salvation, however unlikely, remains possible. Removing theological blinders in the form of the limits of human reason, as the Enlightenment did, simply enabled human beings to understand what before only God could comprehend.

Since the nineteenth century, we have seen many challenges to this optimistic relation between mankind and nature in the criticism of the tradition of metaphysical realism that has held Western civilization together from Thales to Kant. The Ring shows us how profound this challenge has become. It also shows us that the inventiveness of human practices, the core of Plato and Aristotle's view of virtue, has been the real source of value even if it does not reflect a redemptive relationship between truth, nature, and the Good. Plato, at least the younger Plato, held that we cannot be good without knowing what is true. Aristotle's conception of virtue was designed to work without an absolute value, but not without a conception of happiness as an objective biological feature of human nature. But if, as I have suggested, social inventions are contingent, not based on universal truths, it remains for us to show that liberal democracy can sustain a conception of value rich enough to preserve its resilient and continued reinvention.¹³ Heraclitus' bow depends on tension, on the conflict implicit in human practices and, again, The Ring shows us how powerful that tension remains. The pessimism that often arises out of contingency, however, can also drive us back into life, as it did for Hans Sachs and for Parsifal, by showing us the real conditions of creativity—an insight that must be optimistic, even against the recognition that all things change. Tanner describes this attitude as “moral vitalism”¹⁴ and I suggest that Nietzsche exemplifies it in his later works. His view about creativity in The Genealogy of Morals is that value arises as a responsiveness to threats. For Wagner, Siegmund's sword becomes valuable to him as a symbol of his love for Sieglinde. She satisfies in him a deep need—hence the name of the sword: “Notung” (expressing also Wotan's need for a redeemer). But creation must have a goal, for Nietzsche, an end, and this points to the problem with love—love can also destroy.

Our experience at the end of Götterdämmerung thus centers not on victory but on downfall—the downfall of our noblest ideals of redemption, love, freedom, law, and heroism. These are all symbolized by the sword, indeed, all of those ideals, so important to our civilization, were created in our attempts to minimize the flux of life and the world, to eliminate tragedy, the condition of their creation. In The Ring, Wagner emphasizes process through the motion of the music: we have experienced the upward movement of Wotan's optimism (positive needs), the rising motion of the Nature motif and of its permutations in Siegfried's sexuality and Brünnhilde's love set against the downward plunge of Wotan's spear, Hagen's downward-moving destructiveness, disguised in the falling motif of Gutrune's innocence, and the permutation of this at the end of Götterdämmerung IIv when Brünnhilde's revenge is combined with the Renunciation and the Power of the Ring motifs—the denial of the will to life. But these are needs too—negative needs possible only as destructive reactions to other hopes. This is Wagner's bow.

For the most part, so far at least, the defeat of these hopes has also been part of the movement towards the light, towards new hopes, and in this way The Ring preserves an element of Greek tragedy. Tragedy finds its expression in the final scene through the metaphysical dimension not present at the end of Siegfried's Funeral Music: despite the pyrotechnics of Valhalla's destruction, the climax suggests an open-ended, forever incomplete understanding of ourselves and the universe. The Funeral Music, the Death motif of the timpani (connecting with such poignancy the lives of Siegfried and his father Siegmund, and his father Wotan, all touched by Brünnhilde's love), the memories of the love music in the final concatenation: the upward movement of heroism, hope and love contrasting with the downward motion of the decline of the world, the twilight of the gods and their dream of permanence, Brünnhilde's final encounter with the fire of truth told to us in the music. In that complex image, we are still caught within the brooding presence of its vision.

Notes

1. In “Richard Wagner and The Ring,” Mann describes Siegfried's Funeral Music as an “overwhelming celebration of memory and mind” because it brings together the motifs of hope and heroism that have appeared throughout the drama: “all these splendid, reminiscent phrases, weighted with fate and feeling, should pass by amid earth-shakings and thunderings, with the body borne high on its bier—and that was only one instance of all the significant solemnity and mythical exaltation promised by this drama turned scenic epic. Back to the beginning, the beginning of all things, and its music! For the Rhine depths with the glittering hoard, round which the Rhine daughters sported and played—all that was the innocent, primitive state, still untouched by greed and curse; and one with it was the beginning of music.” When Siegfried ascends Brünnhilde's rock in the Prelude to Siegfried IIIiii, every musical event implies something about Siegfried. We hear the Sleep music from Die Walküre, indicating Brünnhilde and her potential for love, Siegfried's Horn Call, the Bird motif, symbolizing the quest for knowledge in preparation for his discovery of Brünnhilde, and the Bondage or Servitude motif indicating not only the problems of Wotan's world but the power that the ring will have over Siegfried too.

   The Prelude to Siegfried III comprises one of three encapsulizations of Siegfried's significance for the drama. Two others occur in Götterdämmerung: first, the Rhine Journey interlude at the end of the Prolog, which (despite its projection of heroism) takes Siegfried directly into the clutches of Hagen, and second, Siegfried's funeral music. These three interludes sum up Siegfried's search for love, his heroic potential, and the failure of heroic redemption and Wotan's hope. (Interestingly and significantly, the introduction to the Rhine Journey begins with Brünnhilde waving good-bye to Siegfried—the motif of that waving motion is based on the augmented Freia II motif and becomes the basis for the Rhine river as Siegfried sails off to his doom.) Once again, it is impossible to make all of these associations as one hears this music for the first time (or even several times). This is just one of many such instances where Wagner abandons the doctrines of Opera and Drama. The music does not support the drama here, it becomes the drama. By the time Siegfried's Destiny occurs in the final kaleidoscopic moments of The Ring, it has returned to its original status as a pure ideal. But we have seen what has happened to that hope in the course of the attempt to achieve it in a world constituted by the process of conflict.

2. After Erda's warning in Das Rheingold, Wotan followed her to the underworld and fathered Brünnhilde. She therefore has a direct connection to Wotan's desire for domination.

3. For the psychological interpreter, it is irrelevant that all of this is done by magic potions and trickery: these are merely symbols of a deeper libidinal motivation. His initial fear of Brünnhilde (quite justified) matches Brünnhilde's fear of her sexual power over Siegfried. For psychological interpreters, their “death to the world” symbolizes the libidinal power of sex.

4. The relation between conscious knowledge and unconscious instinct in the character of Siegfried requires more attention than I can give it here. S. K. Land, in “The Rise of Intellect in Wagner's Ring,” Comparative Drama, V, 1, Spring, 1971, for example, identifies three stages of Siegfried's learning: first, the biological facts of life (symbolized by the bear in Siegfried's first entrance); second, learning language (Fafner's blood and the woodbird); and third, love (with his discovery of Brünnhilde) (pp. 38-9). But equally important to Siegfried's character are the cases of personality transformation, forgetting, and then the regaining of his identity in Götterdämmerung. Land's point that the movement of intellect in The Ring points toward reflective consciousness, if taken in the way suggested by Land, seems clearly not to fit the understanding of either Siegfried and Brünnhilde at the point of their deaths. We have not reached the point of “conscious intellectual processes.” They do not conceptualize their understanding; the music conveys a significance only dimly grasped by Siegfried, and Brünnhilde's “Alles, alles weis ich” must be conveyed by music; prose will not do at this point. Furthermore, his claim about Siegfried's “impregnable strength” resting on the sensible and the emotional nature of his being (and its Feuerbachian naturalness) (p. 39) clearly stands at odds with the events of Götterdämmerung depicting Siegfried's vulnerability. Like many other commentators, Land fails to see the irony of Siegfried's characterization.

5. See The Total Work of Art, p. 173: “so, in The Ring, Wagner has sung of ‘what is past and passing, [or] to come’, and he came very close to answering to Yeats's more detailed specifications:

                                                                         … The young
   In one another's arms, birds in the trees
   —Those dying generations—at their song,
   The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
   Fish, Flesh, or Fowl, commend all summer long
   Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
   Caught in that sensual music all neglect
   Monuments of unageing intellect.”

6. See Cooke, I Saw the World End, pp. 17-18. Wagner also says: “I had (unfortunately!) never really sorted out in my own mind what I meant by this ‘love’ which, in the course of the myth, we saw as something utterly and completely destructive,” quoted in Tanner, Wagner, p. 177.

7. I Saw the World End, p. 248. Also quoted in Darcy, “The Pessimism of The Ring,” p. 41.

8. See Tanner's discussion of the Boulez/Chereau productions in Chapter 4 of Wagner.

9. “Wagner's Musical Language,” p. 227.

10. Ibid., p. 243.

11. “Time Re-Explored,” p. 30.

12. See also Twilight of the Idols, #38. This passage is quoted and discussed by Nehamas, p. 221 (see Appendix, Section 6).

13. The work of Richard Rorty stands as one of the most important contemporary discussions of this point and an exemplar of what I have referred to as moral vitalism. I include references in the Bibliography. Although I will not to discuss this connection here, I look forward to an opportunity to do so elsewhere. Two provocative quotations must suffice for now. Rorty, like Nietzsche, holds to the contingency of selfhood and, in his demythologization of romantic metaphysics, says: “To say that we become different people, that we “remake” ourselves as we read more, talk more, and write more, is simply a dramatic way of saying that the sentences which become true of us by virtue of such activities are often more important to us than the sentences which become true of us when we drink more, earn more, and so on,” Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 359. Concerning the ideology of conclusive philosophical refutation (bearing MacIntyre in mind (see the Appendix, Section 6)): “any attempt to drive one's opponent up against a wall … fails when the wall against which he is driven comes to be seen as one more vocabulary, one more way of describing things. The wall then turns out to be a painted backdrop, one more work of man, one more bit of cultural stage setting. A poeticized culture would be one which would not insist we find the real wall behind the painted ones, the real touchstones of truth as opposed to touchstones which are merely cultural artifacts. It would be a culture which, precisely by appreciating that all touchstones are such artifacts, would take as its goal the creation of ever more various and multi-colored artifacts” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 53-54).

14. I discuss this concept in the Appendix, Section 6. See Tanner's “The Total Work of Art,” p. 175.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodore. In Search of Wagner. Rodney Livingstone, trans. Manchester: NLB and Schocken, 1981.

Boulez, Pierre. “Time Re-Explored,” in the book accompanying the 1981 release of the 1976 Bayreuth Ring by Philips records, reprinted from the 1976 concert program published by the Verlag der Festspeilleitung Bayreuth.

Cooke, Deryck. I Saw the World End. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Dahlhaus, Carl. “Soziologishe Dechiffrierung von Music: Zu Theodor W. Adornos Wagnerkritik,” International Review of Music, Aesthetics, and Sociology, I, 2 (1970).

———. “Über den Schluss der Götterdämmerung” Richard Wagner: Werk und Wirkung. Ed. Carl Dahlhaus. Regensburg, 1971.

———. Richard Wagner's Music-Dramas. Mary Whittall, trans. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Peckham, Morse. Beyond the Tragic Vision. New York: George Braziller, 1962.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

———. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Tanner, Michael. “The Total Work of Art,” in Burbidge and Sutton, The Wagner Companion.