Sex and Death in Siegfried: Freud and Wagner

I can understand that there is a desire to make Wagner sexy and appealing to a modern audience. This is how you get naked Rhinemaidens in latex on stage. It is natural that a Freudian interpretation becomes tempting. The sexuality in Siegfried should be obvious enough, and this is certainly a potent part of the brew that is Siegfried.

As for the intellectual relationship between Wagner and Freud, there is actually a direct connection between them - and that is Schopenhauer. The published text of the Ring bears a dedication to Arthur Schopenhauer. What is often not realised is that Freud in later life confessed to having borrowed his idea of the subconscious directly from Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer's concept of the Blind Will (die blinde Wille) you have the direct antecedent of Freud's idea of das Es (the Id), the power of desire that drives human beings (libido). Even the idea of the unconscious can be found directly in Schopenhauer's writing. I suspect that it was this that inspired Wagner to give the following final words to Isolde:

vertrinken...versinken... unbewusst - höchste Lust!

Freud actually uses the term "das Unbewusste" for the unconscious.

However, to really understand Siegfried - and with it the entire Ring cycle - you must understand that there is another aspect, much darker, and more profound that compliments the theme of Sex - and that is Death. In between these two themes, there is a third theme that bridges them and that is the theme of Angst. By Angst, I do not mean mere "anxiety" (that is a poor English translation) but rather I mean fear or better still - terror. Just as there is a blind will, so there is blind terror.

When Siegfried finds himself before Brünnhilde, confronted for the first time with the sight of a divinely beautiful woman, he learns the meaning of fear. His is the terror of a naive child who is extremely abruptly confronted with his sexuality. He is not in the least bit afraid of a dragon, but a woman reduces him to a terrified trembling mess, crying out for his mother. As he kisses the sleeping Brünnhilde he says:

So saug' ich mir Leben aus süssesten Lippen,
Sollt' ich auch sterbend vergeh'n  

Thus do I suck myself out life from these sweetest lips
Even though I should expire and die  

In giving himself to Brünnhilde, he also resigns himself to Death. This is a moment not unlike Kundry's kiss in Parsifal, a moment that paradoxically leads to a Schopenhauerian resignation from willing (Resignation von Wollen) and redemption, but here it is not Siegfried who will be awakened to the ultimate truth of the destiny of the world, but Brünnhilde herself. The music around this dramatic passage becomes very high and chromatic. There is both a sense of terror and wonder to the music in equal measure.

If being so abruptly confronted with his sexuality is terrifying to a naive boy, it is equally terrifying to Brünnhilde. She is innocent about sexuality, after all she is a kind of Teutonic angel - an Angel of Death - but an angel nonetheless. She gains her sexuality when she becomes mortal flesh and blood, and loses her immortality. Confrontation with her carnal self is also a confrontation with her mortality, with Death itself.

Now those who like to think they have got to the bottom of things by reducing all things to sexuality à la Freud will congratulate themselves for being doubly clever on figuring out what is already blatantly sexual by Victorian standards. For while the French may refer to orgasm as la petite mort, in fact the Ring is ultimately more about la grande mort. It is in part about the coming to grips with the transitory and ephemeral nature of all things, a theme partly Schopenhauerian, but thereby also Buddhistic in essence. It is a metaphysical mourning over the fact that even the Immortal Gods turn out to be mortal after all. The Ring is a confrontation with our own mortality, with Death itself. In his letter to Roeckel, Wagner thus writes:

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. 

Not only that, but Wagner is actually a step or so ahead of Freud. In Freud's famous Wednesday club, one famous member of that inner circle of thinkers was Gerhard Adler. In contrast to Freud, Adler thought that the drive for power - not sexuality - was the subconscious motivator of human behaviour. Even sexuality to Adler might have been about engendering a more powerful clan of offspring. So is this Blind Will about a sexual drive or a power drive? That is a question that Wagner partly asks when the Ring that can confer absolute power becomes the ring of love, symbolising the union between Siegfried and Brünnhilde. The themes of Love and Power become inexorably intertwined. And into this mixture is blended the themes of Sex, Death, Angst (terror) and ultimately of Redemption.

You might ask what it is a redemption from. That is simple. It is a redemption from a world ruled over by the god of vengeance, rage and war, where humans are but the blind playthings of the gods and of destiny. Gloucester in the Shakespeare work with a similar primaeval setting says it well:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,
They kill us for their sport. 

King Lear Act 4, scene 1, 32–37

Even Siegmund, who seems for a moment will rise to break the bonds of slavery to the gods, is risen up in their favour only to be crushed by them like an insect. Of all humans only Siegfried has cut himself loose from the chains of bondage to the gods and destiny. He is the first Free Man.

If this is a world in which humans are but powerless insects before the gods, it is equally a loveless world, where women like Sieglinde are given away into marriage like cattle, to be trapped as a beast of burden in servitude to a patriarchal brute. And it is to this Free Man, Siegfried, that Brünnhilde gives herself freely, not in bondage, but in Love. Though her confrontation with her sexuality and mortality exposes her to a terrrifying vulnerability that she has never before known, she rises above her Fear of Death itself, as blind terror yields to blind passion. "Damned be the gods" is her attitude as both she and Siegfried surrender to their sexuality in blissful abandon: leuchtende Liebe - lachende Tod! Yet in doing so they have each also abandoned themselves to Death - la grande mort - itself. They have sewn the seeds of the ultimate apocalypse that will be Götterdämmerung.