". . .We must learn to die, in fact to die in the most absolute sense of the word; the fear of the End is the source of all lovelessness and it arises only where love itself has already faded. How did it come about that mankind so lost touch with this bringer of the highest happiness to everything living that in the end everything they did, everything they undertook and established, was done solely out of fear for the End? My poem shows how. It shows nature in its undistorted truth, with all its opposites intact, which in their manifold and endless permutations also contain elements which are mutually exclusive and self-repelling."
"But the decisive source of the disaster is not that Alberich was repelled by the Rhinemaidens - which was perfectly natural for them; Alberich and his ring could not harm the gods if the latter were not already ripe for the disaster. So where is the nub of the catastrophe? Look at the first scene between Wodan and Fricka, which eventually leads to the scene in Act 2 of Die Walküre. The rigid bond that unites them both, arising from love’s involuntary mistake of perpetuating itself beyond the inescapable laws of change, of maintaining mutual dependence, this resistance to the eternal renewal and change of the objective world - lands both of them in the mutual torment of lovelessness."
"The course of the drama thus shows the necessity of accepting and giving way to the changeableness, the diversity, the multiplicity, the eternal newness of reality and of life. Wodan rises to the tragic height of willing his own downfall. This is everything that we have to learn from the history of mankind: to will the inevitable and to carry it out oneself. The product of this highest, self-destructive will is the fearless, ever-loving man, who is finally created: Siegfried. - That is all."
"In detail: the power of evil, the actual poison of love, is concentrated in the gold, which is stolen from nature and misused in the Nibelung’s ring: the curse upon it is not redeemed until it is returned to nature, until the gold is once again delivered into the depths of the Rhine. This, too, Wodan does not learn until the very end, at the final goal of his tragic course: what Loge touchingly and repeatedly told him at the beginning Wodan most overlooked in his lust for power; at first he appreciates only the power of the curse - from Fafner’s deed; it is not until the ring must destroy Siegfried, too, that he understands that only the return of the stolen gold will atone for the evil, and he therefore associates the terms of his own desired destruction with this atonement of the original wrong. Experience is everything."
"Siegfried alone (the male alone) is also not the complete ‘man’; he is only one half, it is only with Brünnhilde that he becomes the redeemer; one alone cannot achieve everything; many are needed, and the suffering, self-sacrificing woman is the final true and knowing redeemer: for love is really ‘the eternally feminine’ itself. "
"So much for the most general and dominant features: all the more precise individual themes are contained within them .... After his separation from Brünnhilde Wodan is no more than a departed spirit: in accordance with his highest' intentions he can now only accept things, let things happen as they will; he can nowhere intervene decisively and that is why he has now become the Wanderer: look at him properly! he resembles us to a tee; he is the sum of the intelligence of the present, whereas Siegfried is the man of the future, willed and sought by us, but who cannot be made by us and who must create himself through our destruction. Like this - you' must admit - Wodan is most interesting to us; whereas he would appear unworthy to us, he would be an underhand plotter, if he were to give advice which was apparently against Siegfried, but in reality for him and thus - and this is the point - for Wodan himself: that would be a deceit worthy of our political heroes but not worthy of my jovial self-annihilating god. "
"Look how he faces Siegfried in the third act! Here, before his downfall, he is at last so involuntarily human that - despite his highest intentions - the old pride stirs again, stimulated, mark you, by - jealousy for Brünnhilde; for she has become his most sensitive point. It is as though he does not simply wish to be pushed aside, but to fall, to be overcome: but this, too, is in no sense a calculated trick: in his quickly inflamed passion he fights to win - a victory which, as he says, could only make him the more wretched. In expressing the characters’ motivation I felt I had to maintain an uncommonly delicate balance; naturally my hero cannot appear to be totally unconscious; rather I have tried to portray Siegfried as the most complete man I could conceive of, whose highest awareness is that all awareness can only be expressed in the utmost immediacy of life and action: to what immense pre-eminence I raise this awareness - which may almost never he expressed - you will realize from the scene with the Rhinemaidens. Here we discover that Siegfried is immeasurably knowing, for he knows the most important thing, that death is better than living in fear: he knows the ring, too, but scorns its power, for he has better things to do; he keeps it only as a symbol of the fact that he - never learned fear. You must admit it: the gods in all their glory must pale before this man! . . . "
"Let me tell you something more of Brünnhilde. I am afraid you have misunderstood her, too, if you regard her refusal to surrender the ring to Wodan as hard and selfish. Did it not register that Brünnhilde was severed from Wodan and all the gods because - of love, because while Wodan was all wrapped up in his scheming, she - only - loved? Since Siegfried completely re-awakened her she has no other knowledge than the knowledge of love. Now - the symbol of this love - after Siegfried has gone - is this ring: when Wodan demands it from her, all that comes to her mind is why she is separated from Wodan (because she acted out of love), and the only thing she now knows is that she has given up her immortality for the sake of love. But she knows that love is the only immortal thing: so Valhalla’s splendour may fall in ruins, but the ring - (love) - she will not sacrifice. For goodness’ sake, how wretched, mean and vulgar she would appear if the only reason for her refusing the ring was that she had found out (from Siegfried, for example) about its magic, its power? Surely you don’t seriously suggest this magnificent woman’s symbol of love is precisely this accursed ring, then that is just what I want you to feel, and to realise that this is the most awful, most tragic peak of the power of the Nibelung’s curse: for then you will realise the real need for the whole last drama Siegfrieds Tod. This is just what we still have to go through to reach a full appreciation of the evil of gold."
Röckel-Briefe, pp. 35-41
August Röckel was a composer and conductor. He was one of Wagner's closest friends - so much so that the two were described as being inseparable, like twins. Originally sentenced to death, Röckel served a thirteen-year prison sentence, alongside Michael Bakunin, for his part in the Dresden revolt, which Wagner managed to avoid by becoming a fugitive, first being sheltered by Franz Liszt in Weimar. Wagner wrote in a letter dated 15th March, 1851 to Röckel's brother, Edward, that "it was a pure accident that I, too, was not taken prisoner in company with Heubner and Bakunin" even though "I was actively engaged in the revolutionary movement up to its final struggle." Wagner and August Röckel maintained a correspondence. Röckel's eventual release permitted an emotional reunion. The above letter was written while Wagner lived in exile as a dissident liberal thinker in Zurich.
August Röckel was a composer and conductor. He was one of Wagner's closest friends - so much so that the two were described as being inseparable, like twins. Originally sentenced to death, Röckel served a thirteen-year prison sentence, alongside Michael Bakunin, for his part in the Dresden revolt, which Wagner managed to avoid by becoming a fugitive, first being sheltered by Franz Liszt in Weimar. Wagner wrote in a letter dated 15th March, 1851 to Röckel's brother, Edward, that "it was a pure accident that I, too, was not taken prisoner in company with Heubner and Bakunin" even though "I was actively engaged in the revolutionary movement up to its final struggle." Wagner and August Röckel maintained a correspondence. Röckel's eventual release permitted an emotional reunion. The above letter was written while Wagner lived in exile as a dissident liberal thinker in Zurich.
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