[In the following excerpt, Lee probes the mythic, musical, and psychological elements of Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried.]

DIE WALKüRE

act i: In a forest storm, Wotan's mortal son, Siegmund, finds shelter, not knowing that he has come to the house of the very enemy he has been fleeing from, Hunding. He is befriended by Hunding's wife, the gentle Sieglinde, but he keeps his name from her. Hunding, according to primitive rites of hospitality, will shelter the fugitive for the night, then fight him in the morning. Siegmund is weaponless, and calls on his father, whom he knew only as a mortal named Wälse, for the sword he once promised to send in an hour of need. While Hunding sleeps, Sieglinde comes to Siegmund and points out a sword that a mysterious stranger had once thrust into a great ash tree. As Siegmund and Sieglinde fall in love, they realize, from twinship of face and voice, and from common parenthood under Wälse, that they are long-lost brother and sister. Sieglinde confers on Siegmund his rightful name. He pulls the foredestined sword from the ash tree, names it Nothung (need), claims his sister as his bride, and escapes with her.

act ii: Wotan, who began his plan for the future by assuming human guise as Wälse and siring the mortal twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, has also sired in his own name nine immortal angel-warrioresses, the Valkyries. Their role is to defend heroes in battle, to greet them before their deaths, and to gather them after death from the battlefields and bear them through the air on horseback to Valhalla. There, in an afterlife, the heroes will defend the sky god from attack.

In a mountain gorge, Wotan tells his favorite Valkyrie daughter, Brünnhilde, whose mother is the intuitive Erda, that she must defend Siegmund in the coming encounter with Hunding. Fricka storms in to remind Wotan that his power rests on the contracts he has made with nature: if he defies his own laws and defends an incestuous hero, he will lose everything.

Wotan, alone with Brünnhilde, explains to her that she must disregard his former command. She must now see to it that Siegmund, his own son, dies at the hands of Hunding. And, he confides, when his own son is gone, a son of Alberich, just sired, will take possession of the Ring and the world.

Brünnhilde grieves that her father's mortal son must die, but she nonetheless obeys his command, and appears in epiphany to Siegmund to announce his impending death. Then Siegmund's brave devotion to Sieglinde so touches her that she disobeys her father and attempts to defend Siegmund in the duel with Hunding. Wotan furiously intervenes with his spear, smashes the sword he had left for his son, allows Hunding to kill Siegmund, then fells Hunding himself with a single word. Brünnhilde meanwhile has gathered up the pieces of the sword and rescued Sieglinde, who is to have Siegmund's child.

act iii: The Valkyries, en route to Valhalla with the bodies of slain heroes, land their horses on a mountaintop. Brünnhilde comes last to land, bringing Sieglinde, who hastens safely into the forest with the fragments of Siegmund's sword. Wotan appears in thunder, dismisses the other eight Valkyries, and sentences Brünnhilde, for her disobedience, to be reduced to mortal state and take as husband the first man who wakens her from sleep. She pleads that she has only done what she knew he wanted inwardly. He is moved, for what she says is true. He promises that her slumber will be surrounded by flames, so that only a great hero will waken her. They both know that that hero will be Siegmund's child. With great tenderness the father god kisses his daughter to sleep and summons Loge to encircle her with a wall of magic fire.

Late in the year 1853, when he had finished what he called “the great scene in the Rheingold,” Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt, “My friend! I am in a state of wonderment! A new world stands revealed before me … everything within me seethes and makes music. Oh, I am in love!”

We hear something of that exaltation in Act I of Die Walküre. It's clearly the music of a man who felt the joy of creation as he wrote. Listening to it, you would hardly suppose that it was music adhering strictly to severe, solidly reasoned principles. But it is. No other act in Wagner observes so closely the principles Wagner had laid down, in his book Opera and Drama, as essential to true musical theater. There he ruled that the words had to share equally with the music in realizing the drama; that the words should sound in alliterative clusters; that the vocal line should spring directly out of the rise and fall of the words; that the singers should never blend their voices but give the impression, while singing, of heightened speech; that what the sung words could not say the orchestra should say—in those ever-recurring musical themes Wagner called “motifs of memory.”

None of that sounds too promising, certainly not to an opera-lover nursed on an Italian tradition of arias and duets. But how wonderfully it all works out in the first act of Die Walküre! What impassioned music springs out of the archaic-sounding words! How melodious the vocal line becomes, and how suspenseful the action! And all the while the vast orchestra is commenting on what we see, using musical motifs to tell us what the characters do not say—and sometimes do not even know.

Some of the recurring musical themes in this second opera we have not heard before—the tender motifs associated with Siegmund and Sieglinde and their common parentage, and the menacing theme of Hunding. But it is the music we already know from Rheingold that comments most tellingly on the action here. At the very start, the Rheingold motif of Wotan's spear is figured in the cellos and double basses during the storm, changed but still recognizable. It now sounds like the precipitous flight of a man through the forest. To that man in flight the storm is only a storm. But we who have heard Das Rheingold can hear, in the man's desperate footsteps, the foredestining spear of his father, Wotan. We know that there is a power and a plan at work as Siegmund flees through the wind and rain. Wotan is with him.

The Rheingold motif of Wotan's sky castle, Valhalla, returns in Walküre when Sieglinde tells Siegmund how a mysterious stranger came to her unhappy wedding celebration, and thrust a sword into an old ash tree. No one knew then who the unknown figure was. But we can hear the Valhalla motif in the horns as Sieglinde sings, and we know, though she does not, that that awesome apparition was her father, Wotan, and that his presence at the wedding was, like his sending Siegmund through the storm, another part of his providential plan.

And when in Rheingold Wotan first conceived that plan, the orchestra sounded a motif for which there was not yet an association or a meaning. In Walküre, when Siegmund is called to play his part in Wotan's evolving plan, and Sieglinde directs his eyes to the ash tree, the meaning of that motif is revealed. It signifies the sword that Wotan planted there, for the future.

And when in Rheingold Alberich was told he had to renounce love in order to possess the gold and win power over the world, a solemn theme sounded, for Alberich was about to determine momentously the future of the world. In Walküre, when Siegmund pulls the sword from the tree, he intones that same motif, for he too has reached the critical moment in his life: he is beginning the plan of Wotan that will eventually restore the gold to its natural state and transform the world. Siegmund knows nothing of this. But we do, from the motif that recurs at that moment.

Then, about a half hour into the second act of Walküre, there is a change in the Ring music. The various motifs continue unabated as a comment on the words, but Wotan's music becomes quite palpably more introspective and pessimistic. At one point it almost comes to a halt. That is when the father god, alone with yet another of his children, the Valkyrie daughter Brünnhilde, looks into himself and realizes, in a long but fast-moving, half-whispered monologue, that his plan to dominate the world is doomed to failure.

By the time Wagner came to set that passage to music, his view of the world had changed, even as his idealistic hopes for a new Europe had changed. Never again was he to be the wide-eyed revolutionary he had been in Dresden. He now saw that not only Germany, from which he was exiled, and not only Europe, of which he despaired, but the world itself was laboring under a curse from which there was no release.

What had happened? Wagner had read, for the first time, that philosophical tome of Arthur Schopenhauer called The World as Will and Representation. In fact, he read it through four whole times the year he was working on Act II of Die Walküre, and he returned to it often for the rest of his life.

What he read in Schopenhauer was profoundly pessimistic: the world we see is not reality but only our representation of reality. The ultimately real is a force we cannot see. Schopenhauer called it “will,” Wille. This inscrutable power works in the cosmos far beyond us and also in the soul deep within each of us. The world, and we who are in the world, are driven towards goals which, once achieved, prove to be illusory and meaningless. Schopenhauer urged his readers to look steadily at this force that is the cause of all our suffering, to see it for what it is, to withdraw from it, and renounce it.

Suddenly, as he wrote the music for Act II of Die Walküre, Wagner thought he saw what his Ring really meant. His Europe, symbolized in the drama by Wotan's world, will never find release from its struggles, for endless, meaningless struggling is inherent in the very nature of that world. Wagner wrote to Liszt, “I looked at my poem and saw to my astonishment that what convinced me in Schopenhauer was already there, in my poetic concept. Only then did I really understand my Wotan. I was deeply moved. For years after that, Schopenhauer's book was never far from me. Its ever-growing influence on me and my life was extraordinary and decisive.”

Wagner explained this further to his fellow revolutionary Röckel, still languishing in a Saxon prison: “I started my poem with an optimistic view of the world … and I hardly noticed, when I was outlining it, that I was unconsciously following a quite different and much more profound intuition. I was seeing, not a single moment in the world's evolution, but the essence of the world, the world in all of its moments.” That is to say, the Ring was coming to represent not one nineteenth-century moment—industrialized Europe on the brink of political revolution—but the whole history of the world, from beginning to end, a world spun on endlessly and meaninglessly. Wagner henceforth all but dismissed the political element in his Ring (“a single moment in the world's evolution”) in favor of a metaphysical meaning (“the essence of the world in all of its moments”). “And,” Wagner continued, “I saw that the world was Nichtigkeit”—nothingness. An illusion.

He made this even more emphatic when he wrote to Liszt, “The world is evil, fundamentally evil!”

To make his Ring an illustration of Schopenhauer, Wagner hardly had to change his text. His poem was already shot through with references to Wotan's lost eye, Wotan's imperfect view of the world, and especially to Wotan's Wille. Writing the text, Wagner had intuitively anticipated Schopenhauer just as, commentators today are saying, he intuited in advance the discoveries of Freud and Jung. Let's try now to understand further the lonely god whom Wagner, after reading Schopenhauer, began himself to understand: Wotan, all-Father, war-Father, a god who wills the destruction of the world he has ordered according to his will.

.....

The Ring begins in the depths of the Rhine, with Alberich stealing the Rhine's gold. But that isn't the earliest of Wagner's Ring myths. Before Alberich committed his crime against nature, Wotan was acting in the world. Through most of the Ring, Alberich appears to be the original sinner; the first to have wrested consciousness from nature. But by the fourth opera, Götterdämmerung, we hear confirmed what we long before came to suspect—that another, greater figure, before Alberich, committed a similar act and is also, for all his attempts at justice, a source of evil in the world. This, of course, is Wotan himself.

The orchestra tells us that there is a connection between the power of Alberich and the power of Wotan as early as the first change of scene in the Ring. Alberich's Ring, that symbol of consciousness, is represented musically in a curiously ambivalent, rounding theme. Then, as the scene changes from the river's depths to the sky's heights, the Ring motif transforms itself gradually until we hear and see Wotan's newly fashioned, impregnable mountain castle, Valhalla. The music implies that Wotan as well as Alberich is shaping nature into power for world domination.

And Wotan's was the real original sin, the first ambivalent wresting of consciousness from nature. That historian of Romanticism, Morse Peckham, once suggested that Wagner should have written yet a fifth opera, all about Wotan, and placed it before Das Rheingold, and called it Die Weltesche, “The World Ash Tree.”

Let's make an opera here—Die Weltesche—out of information from Act II of Die Walküre and from the many flashback speeches of the operas yet to come.

Let's say: in the beginning was Wotan. A sky god. He didn't create the world, but he was determined to find what held the world together, and he was ambitious about gaining control over it. In our reconstructed first opera, Wotan traces the world's secret to a great ash tree, fed at the roots by a clear spring—the archetypal “tree of knowledge” and “spring of knowledge” familiar from many mythologies. Wotan asks the three Norns who spin the world's fate from the whispers of the spring if he can drink there, and is told he will have to sacrifice one of his eyes to do so. (In mythologies, there is always a price to be paid for wisdom. In some versions of Wotan's story, he hangs suspended in torment on the tree for nine days and nights.)

Wotan says he will give an eye to know the secret of the world. In other mythologies, Oedipus and Teiresias and Samson are all given insight when they lose their outer sight. But they lose both eyes. Wotan loses only one. His case is different. Henceforth, he will see, with his remaining eye, what he has asked to see—the world without. And he will understand it. But he will not see the world within. He will need help to understand himself.

So, with his outer-directed wisdom, interpreted for him each night by the Norns in dreams, Wotan comes to understand the natural forces that sustain the world—earth, air, fire, and water, forces he must bend to his will. He reaches up and breaks off a bough from the great ash tree, and makes it into a spear. On the weapon, which henceforth never leaves his hand, he notches in runic script the treaties he makes with the four elements.

With his treaties, he establishes dominion first over his own sky people—Fricka, whom he weds, and her brothers Donner and Froh, and her sister Freia. He is more far-seeing than they, who know only their own domains.

He then establishes his rule over fire. Loge, the fire god, is hard to tame, for of his nature he possesses, not Wotan's knowledge of the workings of the world, but quick intelligence of how to put the world to practical purposes. But Wotan soon subdues Loge with his spear.

By the end of our projected opera Die Weltesche, Wotan has not yet bent to his will the lower elements of water (the Rhine and his daughters) or earth (Erda), or those lesser beings of earth, giants and humans and dwarfs. These seem not to present much of a problem—though, as we know, they soon shall. Meanwhile, the world Wotan has subdued has reacted against his ambition. The wound he made in the World Ash Tree has begun to fester, and the tree to wither, and the spring to dry up.

Who is this Wotan whose story we come so slowly to know? Is he supposed to represent in some way traditional notions of God? It is clear he is not a creator, and he is by no means omnipotent, much as he would like to be. He is not the source of life but a powerful manifestation of it. Wotan represents not so much some notion of God as what there is in man that has godlike potential. Early in the writing of the text, Wagner wrote to Röckel, “Take a good look at Wotan. He resembles us in every way. He is the sum total of our present consciousness.” Wagner's ambitious god represents man, taking that first evolutionary step towards consciousness, reaching for it, grasping it, using it for his own ends—but not understanding himself, and so having to come to terms with intelligence (Loge) and conscience (Fricka) and all-knowing intuition (Erda). They are all important to him. But none of them can give him that most important thing that the lost eye would have seen—his inner self, his Will.

If Wagner ever thought about writing something like Die Weltesche as his beginning, he soon thought better of it. He gives us the essential information about Wotan in installments, and withholds the whole of the World Ash story until the start of his fourth opera, Götterdämmerung. So, for most of the Ring, we think that Alberich, stealing the gold and fashioning it into a Ring and then putting a curse on it, is the source of evil in the world. Only later, when Wotan is hurrying towards his self-destruction, do we hear that, long before Alberich, Wotan performed a similar act, and paid a price for it. And thereafter, in Das Rheingold, he was guilty of fraud, theft, and deception. He too is a source of evil.

He thinks the Ring is what he needs. In Die Walküre he has begun a long-range plan to get it back for himself. He has surrounded himself with angel daughters, the Valkyries (the gatherers of the slain). They bring the greatest of fallen heroes from the battlefields of earth to his fortress, Valhalla (the hall of the slain). Those heroes now stand ready to protect him from future attack. He has also visited the earth in different shapes—as a storm cloud, a wolf, a hunter—and he has sired a race of mortals loyal to him. His earthly son is a special hero, begotten for the sole purpose of doing—his will. He has carefully seen to it that his son is completely free of all the old treaties that he is bound by. A free agent, an outlaw, this son will steal the Ring back for his father, and this time the father will incur no guilt. Wotan has prepared his son with a tough period of training in the forest, and provided a sword that knows no runes, and a sister to be his wife: disregard for all the old laws is an essential condition for this new hero's being free.

But poor Siegmund! Is he really free? Blood always tells in mythic stories. However much we love the son when, like his father, he draws his weapon from a great ash tree, we soon see that he is, also like his father, self-destructive and doomed. Siegmund can't understand why he is always at the center of trouble. It is the father's predetermined moral treaties, notched in runes on his spear, that demand that the outlaw son die; one cannot be an outlaw and escape the watchful eyes of Fricka, eager to protect the runes which secure her power too. Siegmund falls, and Wotan's runic spear shatters the rune-free sword. Wotan's plan for the future lies in pieces. “I am caught in my own trap,” he says when he realizes this has to happen. “I am the least free of all that lives!”

Could Wotan not have seen that this would have to be? No. Wotan cannot see to his own self.

But there is a character who really sees into Wotan. The character for whom the second opera of the Ring is named, the Valkyrie daughter Brünnhilde. Fathered from the intuitive Erda, she is a special Valkyrie, violent as the others, but also intuitive. That is why, in Act II, she stays with her father when he looks into himself. She says, in fact, that she is—his will. That when he speaks to her he speaks to himself. She exists only to do what he wants. So, when Wotan tells her that his treaties decree that Siegmund has to die, she, the embodiment of his will, knows that he really wants Siegmund to live. True to her nature, she tries to do, not what Wotan commands, but what Wotan really wants. She tries to save Siegmund. She fails, of course. The runes are fixed. Siegmund dies. And Wotan, to keep his power, has to punish her disobedience too.

The sky god then becomes a truly tragic figure. When he laid his plan for world-mastery, he didn't realize that he would come to love the erring but essentially innocent children he sired to do his work.

Wotan loves his daughter too much to destroy her completely. She will be reduced to mortal state, and put to sleep within a wall of fire, to be wakened by the only hero brave enough to pass through to her. Both father and daughter know, without articulating it, that even when she becomes a mortal she will still work his will, and that she will be wakened by Siegmund's son, who will inherit Siegmund's mission. So Wotan's plan will continue, but differently than he thought at first, and through other children.

Something of this is indicated near the end of Act III of Die Walküre, by a truly wonderful transformation in the music. The brutal theme of Wotan's ash-tree spear is quite literally dismantled by Brünnhilde. She breaks its precipitous downward thrust into four questioning fragments, as she pleads for understanding and forgiveness … And when her father understands and takes her in his arms, her new ordering of the menacing theme of the spear is transformed by Wagner's orchestra into something ineffable. Brünnhilde has in effect taken the age-old wisdom of the world's ash tree, destroyed the curse on it, and reconstructed it. The transformation of that brutal, menacing theme is, in brief compass, what the whole of the Ring is about. The spear which has ruled the world with force, through treaties and compacts made with nature, will in the future be replaced by something that Wotan has begun, despite himself, to feel for his daughter—a power mightier than his spear but built from it. A transformation of his will.

In the final two parts of the Ring, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, Wotan allows his Schopenhauerian world to be destroyed by his own children, in the hope that they can transform it into something new. This they eventually do, in the purification through fire and water that ends the cycle. And though Wotan is destroyed in the flames, the best part of him is transformed into a new power to rule a new world.

.....

Well, the longer I live with the Ring—or, shall I say, the older and, perhaps, the wiser I get—the more I identify with Wotan. And the same was true of Wagner. As he wrote his four texts in reverse order, tracing his story back to its beginnings, he saw Wotan grow and grow in importance. Each new preface was a further explanation of his father god—his greatest tragic figure, a figure for any of us who try to deal with the unanswerable questions of life, who come finally to the realization that our vision is partial, that almost any course of action will meet with contradictions, that often our conscious plans will not, and in some cases perhaps should not, succeed. “Take a good look at Wotan,” Wagner wrote. “He is us.”

Wotan's most beautiful music comes at the end of this second opera, Die Walküre. He kisses his daughter into mortality and looks into her eyes. She has said to him, justifying her disobedience, “My eyes are yours. I only saw what you could not see.” And again we wonder: Is this daughter who knows Wotan better than he knows himself—is she the vision he sacrificed when he wrested wisdom from nature? Is she, who says she is his Wille, the eye that sees to his inner self?

A promising new theme enters the Ring briefly but triumphantly in the third act of Die Walküre, when Sieglinde sings to the Valkyrie who has saved her, “Oh hehrstes Wunder!”—“Oh, mightiest of miracles!” Only recently, in newly published documents, have we discovered that Wagner thought of it as a theme for Brünnhilde. (Strange that we did not know, as Sieglinde immediately repeats the phrase to the words “Herrlichste Maid!”—“Most glorious of women!”) The exultant theme will not sound again until, at the very end of the Ring, it comes soaring quietly over the fire and water that have destroyed Wotan's world. It will signify the transformation of Brünnhilde, Wotan's Wille, into what the whole of Wagner's Ring is striving to create—a new world. There are many wonderful moments in Die Walküre, which is my own favorite of the four Ring dramas. But there seems to me no question that the greatest single moment in the cycle comes in the closing measures of Götterdämmerung, when that Brünnhilde theme sounds for the last time, and signifies the transformation of Schopenhauer's pessimistic world of Wille into something wholly different, a new world ineffably beautiful.

At that final moment we are all likely to exclaim, as Wagner did to Liszt, “Oh; I am in a state of wonderment! Everything within me makes music. And a new world stands before me.”

SIEGFRIED

act i: Young Siegfried, the son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, has been brought up after his mother's death by the dwarf Mime who, like his brother dwarf Alberich, has designs on the Ring. The Ring and all the treasure are still in the possession of Fafner, who has used the Tarnhelm to turn himself into a dragon, the better to guard his hoard. Mime keeps the boy Siegfried in the forest, far from any human contact, hoping that he will grow up strong enough to slay the dragon, but also stay child enough to give him the Ring when the dragon is slain. Siegfried wonders who his father and mother were, and insists that Mime reforge the sword fragments they have left him. This Mime, for all his Nibelung skills, cannot do.

Wotan, who also has an interest in the prospective hero, visits Mime disguised once again as a mysterious stranger, “the Wanderer.” Wotan challenges Mime to a game of wits with his life as forfeit, and defeats him. As Wotan leaves he tells the frightened Mime that only one who has never learned fear can forge the sword anew, and he leaves Mime's life to be claimed by whoever that fearless one might be. Mime immediately questions Siegfried and discovers that he has never learned fear, not even the fear of the forest's fire-breathing dragon. Mime knows then that young Siegfried will indeed be able to kill Fafner and get him the Ring—but that the boy might also be the one who will take his life. Siegfried, anxious to learn fear, leaps to the anvil and joyously reforges his father's sword himself, while Mime lays his plans to slay the boy after the boy has slain the dragon.

act ii: Deeper in the forest, Alberich and Wotan, in their first encounter since Das Rheingold, try to rouse the slumbering dragon-giant Fafner with warnings that he will soon lose the Ring. Mime brings Siegfried to the place and leaves him there. While the forest murmurs, Siegfried wonders again about his mother, and imitates the song of a friendly forest bird, first on a reed pipe and then on his blasting horn. The dragon wakes and attacks. Siegfried slays it in a mighty battle, and Fafner, dying, warns him that there is a curse on the gold he has guarded. The boy, tasting the dragon's blood, is suddenly able to understand the three messages the bird is singing: he must claim the golden treasure in the dragon's cave, beware of Mime who intends to kill him, and rescue a maiden who slumbers on a nearby mountain encircled by fire. Siegfried finds the Ring and Tarnhelm in the dragon's lair, slays Mime before Mime slays him, and follows the forest bird towards Brünnhilde's mountain.

act iii: At the foot of that mountain, Wotan summons Erda from the earth and questions her—in vain, for she has begun to lose her powers. The sky god admits to himself the truth of what the earth goddess told him long ago: the world he has ruled will soon end. He predicts that Brünnhilde when she wakes will make a better world. But when Siegfried reaches the ascent to the mountain, Wotan, in one last effort to stop what must happen, confronts him. Siegfried, angered and uncomprehending, smashes the god's spear with the very sword the god had once given his father. Wotan vanishes on the instant, his power gone.

Siegfried scales the height, passes through the wall of fire, and finally learns fear at the sight of the slumbering Brünnhilde—the first woman he has ever seen. He wakes her with a kiss. She greets the sunlight, and then learns fear herself as the realization dawns that she is no longer a Valkyrie but a mortal woman and must give herself to a mortal man. Gradually the two fall in love over their reciprocal fears. They welcome the thought that they will someday die, and laugh at the impending end of the world.

The birth of the hero Siegfried was solemnly foretold in the closing measures of Die Walküre. After the father god Wotan had encircled his slumbering Valkyrie daughter with a wall of fire, he, and then the orchestra, solemnly intoned the famous “Siegfried” theme. Hardly any other opera has so impressive a close. Hardly any other character in opera has so impressive a moment. Wotan at that pronouncement seems truly to be a father god who sees into the future.

But he is no wiser than his slumbering daughter, Brünnhilde, who always saw more deeply into her father than he could himself. She said in Die Walküre that she was her father's will, and she seemed, in some strange way, to see with the eye that he had lost. She must have known, before he did, that the hero would someday come. And in fact it was she who first proclaimed Siegfried's coming, and sang his theme, when, several pages before her father's magisterial pronouncement, she sped Sieglinde to safety with the words, “You are carrying in your womb the noblest hero in the world.”

To find the hero with that famous theme, Wagner moved farther and farther back in his imagination. He wanted in this third opera of the Ring to conjure up primitive man in the springtime of the world. And his excitement mounted as his perception grew. He said of the human specimen that began to emerge in his verses: “I could see each throbbing of his pulses, each effort of his muscles as he moved. I saw the archetype of man himself.”

Wagner now had to deal, for the first time, with a hero who wasn't, like the Dutchman or Tannhäuser or Lohengrin or the dying Siegfried, a mature man. “Young Siegfried,” as the third opera was first called, would trace the hero's progress from boy to man. It would trace, in fact, the passage out of childhood. That meant that, again for the first time, Wagner would have to combine myth (which is in the main pessimistic, and reflects an adult psychology) with features of Weltmärchen, or fairy tales (which usually deal optimistically with the problems of childhood).

Young Siegfried may be almost full-grown as his opera begins, but emotionally he is still a child, companioned only by a dwarf, that fairytale symbol of arrested psychic growth. The lonely boy desperately needs other companionship. When he first appears he tells us he has been wandering in the forest, sounding his horn in the hope that it would call some true friend to his side. And when as if in answer a bear comes charging out of the trees; it enters his head that he could use this new companion to force the dwarf Mime to give him the knowledge he needs, and especially the sword he needs (the sword's name, Nothung, means “need”), to become a man.

Many people are shocked at young Siegfried's primitiveness, perhaps especially when, in Act I, he sics the bear on the helpless Mime. But the boy has never been taught gentler ways. He has learned just this much—that threatening Mime is the only way he can learn anything more. We ought not to censure but to pity him. He is thirsting for knowledge, hungry for love. And, though he doesn't know it, he is in mortal danger. Mime has of set purpose deprived him of all knowledge, and kept him from all human relationships. He has raised the boy for one purpose only—to slay the dragon that guards the Ring. Once that is done, Mime plans to do what he intended from the start—kill the boy, take the Ring, and rule the world.

Small wonder the boy befriends, as a child would, the animals, birds, and fishes for the little knowledge and love they can give him. Recall how T. H. White, drawing on mythic sources, had young King Arthur live with fishes, birds, and badgers, to learn from them. Recall how Walt Disney, with intuitive insight, gave Snow White a family of forest creatures for companion protectors as she waited amid the dwarfs for her awakening to maturity. Recall how Luke Skywalker learned his skills in the forest from the dwarf Yoda, and came to maturity when he discovered his true parentage.

More than anything, young Siegfried needs to know who his father and mother are. Mime, to keep him a child, insists that he is the boy's father and mother both. Perhaps Dr. Mime knows that a boy can become a man only when, psychologically, he has become his father and his mother. He certainly knows that this boy has it in him to kill the dragon: in myths, a dragon-slayer has the sign of the dragon in his eyes. Earlier, in Die Walküre, Hunding had seen the dragon glancing in the eyes of Siegfried's father and mother. Mime sees the same in the son: when he found the orphaned Siegfried he called him “the little dragon.” In any case, it is only when Siegfried finally learns something of his true father and mother that he is able at last to spring into action, forge his own sword from the shattered pieces left by his father and saved by his mother, and begin his passage out of childhood.

Now, as is the rule with both hero-myths and fairy tales, all of this depicts psychological maturing. It is even possible to think of it as taking place within the psyche of any one of us who, like a child, listens. In our day, at Bayreuth, Wagner's grandson Wieland set Act I of Siegfried in the dark inside of a human brain; a century ago Wagner himself, as he darkened his auditorium, began Siegfried with a motif first identified as “purposeful brooding.”

In the first act of Siegfried, as in much of the Ring, we are probing the human soul. Twentieth-century psychiatry, with evidence from dreams, can provide meanings for everything we see in Act I—the forest is the unconscious, the horn the impulse towards consciousness, the dwarf an obstacle to growth, the bear psychic energy summoned in need, the sword made anew from shattered pieces the assimilation of a lost father and mother, the longed-for Ring mastery over all the forces of the psyche. We may or may not find these explanations, with their all-too-sexual associations, particularly helpful. (As Freud is said to—or at least ought to—have remarked, “There are times when a cigar is only a cigar.”) All the same, Wagner's orchestra keeps compelling us to ask what the images mean. “The music,” says Thomas Mann in a famous essay, “seems to shoot up like a geyser from the precivilized bedrock depths of myth.”

“What is it,” Mann asks, “that elevates Wagner's work so far above the intellectual level of all previous forms of musical drama?”

“Two forces have combined,” he answers. “Psychology and myth.”

Long before Freud and Jung discovered that psychology and myth illuminated each other, Wagner had intuited and exploited their interrelation. His contemporaries saw myth mostly as primitive science; it was man's first way of explaining the mysterious world around him. Wagner saw myth also as primitive psychology; it was man's first way of understanding the still more mysterious world deep within him.

So, on first hearing, the Ring seems to be about the cosmos—the elemental struggle of earth, air, fire, and water. But as we listen more it is impossible not to think that the human soul is the real landscape on which the four dramas of the Ring are enacted. Myth has always said as much about the psyche as about the cosmos, and—here is the astonishing thing about myth, and Wagner realizes it in this third part of the Ring—myth tells us that the patterns of the psyche within are identical with those of the cosmos without. When, in Act I, Wotan and Mime engage in their duel of questions, Mime asks about the three parts of the cosmos which Freud subsequently found in the psyche, and called the id, the ego, and the superego. And Wotan in turn asks the three questions most important to Siegfried's psychic growth—who are his parents? what is his sword? how are the fragmented pieces of his past to be forged anew for his future?

Wagner also introduced into the Siegfried myths a wholly new element—the folktale of the child learning fear. As we might expect, it was not so much conscious planning as intuition that was operating in Wagner when he did this. The tale of “The One Who Set Out to Learn Fear,” familiar to him from the Brothers Grimm, fastened on to him and wouldn't let him go till he put it into his text. He has Mime attempt to frighten Siegfried with the most fearful thing he can think of—the sound and the sight of the dragon's fire swirling through the forest. Siegfried, far from being afraid, longs to experience that fear—he seems to know, somehow, that the forest is symbolically his dark unconscious, and the fire the knowledge that can illuminate it. He sees fear as something from which he can learn.

But then, as Wagner's omniscient orchestra describes the fire-breathing dragon, something startling happens. “Deep down in the depths of the music,” says Thomas Mann, “there is a shadowy hint of the thing that will really teach him fear, a reminiscence of the sleep-banished maiden, of whom Siegfried knows nothing, but whom he is destined to waken.” Amid the dragon music we hear the motif of Brünnhilde's slumber.

Wagner here anticipates what contemporary writers on the psychology of myth have since discovered—that the myth of the hero (Oedipus or King Arthur or Siegfried) describes the psychological maturing of the adolescent male, and that devouring monsters in the hero-myth represent something precisely identifiable in the male psyche, namely the frightening aspect of the feminine. The “anima,” as Jung called the male's inner feminine, is potentially destructive, potentially creative; the maturing male must defeat its dangerous side and release its creative power. (So the medieval knight, when he finds his sword and slays his dragon, frees a maiden, and marries her.) Wagner saw the psychological truth of this long before we did, and hid the theme of the slumbering feminine deep within his fear-inducing dragon music.

No scene in the Ring is richer in these interpenetrations of music, myth, and psychology than the Forest Murmurs we spoke about in chapter one. Siegfried lies alone beneath forest trees which allow only intermittent shafts of morning light to appear, waiting for the moment when, with his horn, he can summon up the next “companion” to contribute to his maturing—the dragon. Just as modern psychology would have it, his thoughts turn to the feminine, to the mother he has never known. Subtly, gradually, the music re-creates, in this leafy enclosure, the feminine, watery world in which the Ring began. The murmuring of the Siegfried trees sounds like the rippling of the Rheingold waves. The cry of the Siegfried forest echoes the cry of the water creatures in Rheingold. And the forest bird in Siegfried intones almost note for note the Rhine maidens' song “Weia, Waga”—“Wander, you wave, waft to the cradle.”

The scene at the Ring's beginning is a cradle song for the new world evolving. And the return of those feminine motifs at this midpoint in the Ring implies that the world, once alive with pristine innocence, now has a hero, Siegfried, who can make it new again. “The purpose of a hero,” Hegel said, “is to bring a new world into existence.”

There are other Freudian elements in the Forest Murmurs scene. Thomas Mann finds “a presentient complex of mother-fixation, sexual desire, and Angst.” And there is a fairytale element, too—in the bird that appears as if in answer to Siegfried's mother-longings. A little-known episode in the Cinderella story, reported by Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment, tells how Cinderella asked her father, not for beautiful clothes or jewels, as her stepsisters did, but only for “the first twig that presses against your hat.” This she planted on her mother's grave, and watered with her tears. It grew to be a wondrous tree where three times a day a white bird would meet her and tell what she needed to know. The mother's wisdom thus passed, with the father's assistance, into the child. Similarly in Wagner's opera the forest bird appears to Siegfried when he wonders about his mother, and eventually speaks to him three times (triple groupings are a feature of fairy tales), telling him what he needs to know. He is able to understand the bird after he has tasted the dragon's blood—that is to say, when he has defeated the destructive aspect of the feminine anima and released its creative potential.

Then, in Act III, comes the young hero's encounter with Wotan—a scene chock full of mythic images to conjure with. The mother's bird (intuition) flees before the father god's two ravens (called Reason and Memory in the old Eddas Wagner used). Wotan wears his hat across his face as he goes against the wind. He sees the eye he forfeited long ago now staring back at him from the boy's face. He knows that the treaties he has made with nature and notched on his spear have not ruled the world rightly. He holds that spear aloft so that the sword it once shattered may now, reforged by the son of his son, smash it in turn. Like the myths where Oedipus and Jason and Perseus encounter and defeat “the father,” the scene between Siegfried and Wotan depicts the young male's assertion of independence as he moves past the father of his father to find himself.

Or, more technically, his Self.

Wagner's young hero discovers his Self within Siegfried's most famous and suggestive symbol—the circle of fire around the slumbering Brünnhilde. That flaming barrier is there to symbolize the fear which he must experience in order to love, and the illumination which love will bring him. It means something too for the heroine—the final scene of Siegfried at last gives us something of the psychology of the maturing female. The wall of fire is there to protect her (as the wall of thorns protects Sleeping Beauty) from sexual awakening before she is ready for it.

As he passes through the encompassing fire, Siegfried once again sounds his horn to summon up a companion, and at last his longing for love is fulfilled, for at last he finds a companion to teach him fear. His frightened shout (“This is no man!” as he removes her warrior breastplate) is as psychologically right as her awaking, at his kiss, to greet, not him alone, but all the world: the response to love is life's complete answer to the child's wondering what the world means.

The “love duet” that follows is surely the strangest of all love duets in opera. It completes, triumphantly, a pattern, a maturing process in Siegfried that is also found in modern psychology. Carl Jung tells us that the male achieves wholeness only when he has faced three archetypal forces—the shadow, the anima, and the Wise Old Man—and then integrated these experiences in some circular, centripetal pattern which symbolizes his Self. In the course of Siegfried, the hero encounters, in correct Jungian order, Mime (the shadow), the dragon (the anima), Wotan (the Wise Old Man), and—in the circle of fire—Brünnhilde, who tells him, astonishingly, “I am your Self.”

Siegfried learns other astonishing things about the woman he wakens. She is not, as he first thinks, his mother, but there is something of his mother in her: the orchestra tells us he sees the dragon in her eyes. And she has a role to play, not just in his maturing, but in the world to which she awakes: like the virgin Athene pre-existing in the mind of Zeus, like Holy Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs, assisting the Creator at the making of the world, Brünnhilde knew the father god's will long ago. And it will be her role now to fulfill that will as the old world ends and a new world rises.

In the duet Brünnhilde too, for the first time, learns fear. She is now a mortal woman, trembling on the brink of surrender to human love. When her fear is at its height, Wagner writes in his manuscript, “a beautiful idea occurs to her.” He has his orchestra intone the familiar melody of his separately composed “Siegfried Idyll,” while his text indicates that the “beautiful idea” is the Romantic notion, first stated by Goethe and always evolving in Wagner's mind, that the Ewig-Weibliche, the “eternal feminine,” will lead the aspiring masculine onward. As the duet hurries to its end, Brünnhilde's imagery, streaming throughout the text, is the feminine symbol, water; Siegfried's is masculine fire. And, very strangely for a “love duet,” the two lovers foresee the impending destruction of the old world through fire and water, and they laugh with joy. They seem to know that it will be through fire and water that the world will be transformed at the end of the Ring, and that it is they who will accomplish that transformation.

Each of them, we now know, sees with the lost eye of Wotan. Each is an embodiment of his will. It is now Wotan's will that the world of Wille be destroyed and transformed into something newer and purer.

.....

Siegfried is a pioneer's journey into areas drama had never before attempted, and psychology was only beginning to become aware of. Pioneering efforts are never completely successful. Early in the composition of Siegfried, Wagner wrote, “I am convinced that this will be my most popular work. It will make its way quickly and joyously and will pull the other pieces along, one by one, so that it will likely be the founder of a whole Nibelungen dynasty.”

That has not proved to be the case. In many theaters, Siegfried is the least often performed of the four Ring operas, possibly the least performed of Wagner's ten major works.

Reasons for this are not hard to seek. Long stretches of dialogue in Acts I and II fall in musical invention below the level of anything in the other parts of the cycle. More than two hours elapse before we hear a single female voice, and then we hear only an occasional chirp from the forest bird. The title role calls for an energetic youth with the vocal equipment of a forty-year-old Heldentenor, requires him to sing for hours over an often tumultuous orchestra, and then tests his exhausted voice against the radiant high Cs of a well-rested soprano. Alberich, when at last he re-appears, seems to have lost, not just the Ring, but most of his dramatic stature. And Mime can be seen, all too fatally, as an anti-Semitic caricature—Mahler certainly saw him as such. And though Mahler in his day didn't take offense, Mime's death at the proto-German hero's hands is, for many in our day, the Ring's most distasteful moment.

But perhaps the main reason for Siegfried's relative unpopularity is the startling newness, the perception, the daring at work as Wagner explores myth for its psychological insights. Some failure is, in so ambitious an undertaking, only to be expected. Wagner abandoned the Ring for a while, once he got his Siegfried under those forest trees in Act II. Then, when he'd finished Act II, he abandoned the Ring for almost twelve years, and turned to writing Tristan and Die Meistersinger. There were practical reasons for his doing this, but he likely felt as well that he lacked something of the naiveté essential to telling Siegfried's fairytale story. And perhaps he felt too that the Ring was becoming something even he couldn't understand.

All that said, Siegfried is a wonderful opera. It has, of the four Ring dramas, possibly the most delicate orchestral details (in the Forest Murmurs), the most important of the great confrontation scenes (the faceoff between Wotan and Siegfried), and the most rapturous single passage (Brünnhilde's awakening). And as the Ring continues to be performed with increasing frequency all over the world, our appreciation of Siegfried will surely grow. I don't think we've taken the full measure of it yet. We need to hear it more.

Bruno Bettelheim, in his book on fairy tales, tells us why children ask to hear the same stories over and over, in the dark, with their imaginations alerted: only by degrees can they absorb the wisdom the tales have to give. We too are coming by degrees to see what wisdom lies in the Ring. Wagner himself only gradually came to see that his intuitive musical myth was describing, not a social and political, but a psychological and metaphysical reality. It was asking: who am I? where did I come from? what is the meaning of life? what is the world? Those are not the revolutionary's questions, or the politician's. They are the philosopher's questions. And also the child's.

That, surely, is one reason why the myth-maker of Bayreuth was the first of all composers to darken his theater as he told his stories.