Understanding Destiny: Götterdämmerung (Part I)

One of the remarkable things about Wagner is how much of a late bloomer he was. This means that Götterdämmerung was actually the first part of the Ring cycle to have its text written. It was originally entitled Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfrieds Death), but Wagner soon realised that he needed to expand on it until it eventually blossomed into the four part work it is today. However, that means that writer of the text is very much the author of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, whereas the mature master who composed the music is more the creator of Tristan or Parsifal.

Some people find the text of Götterdämmerung to be lacking in the dramatic and literary maturity found in works such as Tristan. You often hear complaints about there being too many complicated plots involving funny potions to erase Siegfried's memory and then conveniently restore it.  In fact, that is what my own reaction was as well on first encountering Götterdämmerung, and I have heard the same complaint from others. Some may even have wondered why Wagner, the mature writer, didn't improve on the text of Götterdämmerung when he came around to setting it to music.

To really understand Götterdämmerung, what you need to appreciate is that there is a narrator of overwhelming importance throughout the work - the orchestra. It has been said that the singers on the stage express the day thoughts, whereas the orchestra express the night thoughts. That is one way of looking at it, but ultimately the orchestra is an omnipresent eye-of-God narrator that has the final say on everything.

That is to say, that the orchestra is never an accompanying instrument, like a "giant guitar" to use Wagner's words, subordinate to the voices declaiming the literary-dramatic text. If the voices are not being accompanied, you may wonder what their relation to the orchestra really is. The answer is that the voices more like additional sections within the orchestra. Just as Wagner may sometimes allow instrumental soloists to take centre stage in the orchestra, so too may the voices have the spotlight placed upon them.

By the time Wagner came to Götterdämmerung, his heightened ability to narrate principally by means of the orchestral voice meant that he was far less reliant on the written text for narrative. The power of the story telling is transferred to the orchestra. Wagner the mature orchestral-narrator overrides Wagner the still-developing literary-dramatist. The literary-dramatic elements merely become "acts of music made visible" ("ersichtlich gewordener Tat der Musik").

Even the seemingly artificial use of memory potions isn't really necessary either. They do little more than provide a Romantic fig leaf that covers up what Siegfried really is: your archetypal all-conquering alpha male who sleeps around because all he has to do is look at a pretty girl and he forgets he has ever seen a woman before!

A stereotypical cover of a romantic novel. Siegfried and Brünnhilde are the mythical embodiments of the archetypal divine lovers destined for one another by Fate.

It seems that part of the reward for being the dragon-slaying Free Man, liberated of divinely ordained religious taboos, is that he also gets free sex, because all the women want him: something the Victorian era writer can only suggestively allude to.

All the memory potions do is make it easier for Brünnhilde, and with it the audience, to forgive his philandering. It's a get-out-of-jail card that Tiger Woods would have dearly loved to have been able to pull out. However, it also makes it easier for us to be sympathetic to Gutrune, as a victim of Hagen's evil plotting, rather than merely being a malicious seductress who wilfully steals the hero away from Brünnhilde. All blame for Siegfried's philandering is transferred squarely over to Hagen.

Even this euphemistic stylisation that absolves Siegfried of blame really doesn't fully change the fact that he suffers from more than a little bit of alpha male hubris - he is really an insufferably self-righteous womaniser. However mighty a phallic symbol he may brandish in the form of Nothung, it doesn't change the fact that he is just an arrogant prick, who regards himself above all of the social rules that constrain the rest of us to modesty and decency. The trouble is, as the hero who shattered Wotan's spear, he is above all the rules, and mores of humanity. This contempt for the rules of humanity is exactly that which made his father, Siegmund, a misunderstood social outcast, yet it makes Siegfried a hero. He has the touch of the air of a rock star anti-hero about him, and like Don Giovanni - the more of society's rules he breaks, the more everyone is fascinated by him.

This unbearable hubris comes out well in his encounter with the Rhine Maidens, who are so appalled by it they storm out in protest. Siegfried typically reacts by laughing:

der zieren Frauen eine
hätt' ich mir frisch gezähmt! 

one of these lovely women
would I have gladly had for myself - freshly caught!

(gezähmt: means caught like game, especially game birds)

Of course, the sexual euphemism of "having" one of the Rhine Maidens is quite clear. It also highlights the sexual arrogance in the character Siegfried, who knows no fear. They warn him of his impending doom and all he can do is laugh how good a shag any one of the pretty birds would be.  Nor is this laughter an innocent one, for it has overtones of forceful capture by a predatory hunter and sexual violence.

Despite Wagner's air brushing over his character to try to present Siegfried as your idyllic hero of classicism, it is never adequate to stop enough brutal hubris in his character from coming through that we cannot but sympathise a little with Brünnhilde and Gunther, who, caught up in Hagen's plot to wreak vengeance upon Siegfried, seek his death in Act II:

Dir hilft kein Hirn,
dir hilft kein Hand
dir hilft nur - Siegfrieds Tod!

No brain shall help
nor no hand
naught can help
save Siegfried's death!

With that the original title of Götterdämmerung is uttered by Hagen: Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried's Death)

Nor should we forget that when they swear their oath of vengeance, they are swearing them by the God of oaths - Wotan. Likewise, when Siegfried swears his oath by Hagen's spear (Helle wehr! Heilige Waffe!), the oath too stands in the name of Wotan - the implication is that although Siegfried swears the oath, he does so in contempt, for he has already shattered Wotan's spear upon which all oaths are carved. It is certainly high irony, but it also reminds us of the omnipresence of our "eternal Gods" throughout Götterdämmerung. Even if Wotan is not there in person, he is still there in the music, constantly making his appearance in these scenes if only in leitmotivic form, yet that presence is all the more powerful for it. So yes, the plots and intrigues in Götterdämmerung are not only complicated, but also much more deeply and profoundly complicated than meets the eye.

With this we see that there exists in Götterdämmerung this over-riding sense of Destiny fulfilling itself - the inevitable consequence of the weight of the momentum set in train by all of the previous parts of the Ring cycle. This Destiny was made most clear was explored in the dialogue (which we saw was really a monologue) between Wotan and Brünnhilde in Act II of die Walküre. However, we also saw in the "leuchtende Liebe! Lachende Tod" that ended Siegfried, the resignation to Love and Destiny: a sort amor fati. It is ultimately this musical and dramatic inevitability that overcomes any supposed immaturity or weakness in the literary-dramatic aspect of Götterdämmerung-Siegfrieds Tod. For ultimately, the most important narrative here is not that of the "day thoughts" but those of the much deeper, more penetrating, yet subliminal, and omnipresent "night thoughts" from the orchestral narrative.

Indeed, it has reached a point where the music expresses not only hidden thoughts and emotions, like footnotes, but becomes that which expresses the essence of the drama. For Wagner, as for Schopenhauer only music had the power to express the very essence of the world itself. This is what Schopenhauer (to whom the published text of The Ring is dedicated) wrote in the World as Will and Representation:

Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Representations, but the copy of the Will itself, whose objectivity Representations are. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing-in-itself. Since, however, it is the same Will which objectifies itself both in the Representations and in music, though in quite different ways, there must be, not indeed a direct likeness, but yet a parallel, an analogy, between music and the Representations whose manifestation in multiplicity and incompleteness is the visible world.... 

This Will expresses itself in the actual world as the series of its deeds; but melody says more, it records the most secret history of this intellectually-enlightened Will, pictures every excitement, every effort, every movement of it, all that which the reason collects under the wide and negative concept of feeling, and which it cannot apprehend further through its abstract concepts. Therefore it has always been said that music is the language of feeling and of passion, as words are the language of reason.

That is, representational arts present only the apparent world, whereas music has a direct line to world in-itself, its absolute metaphysical essence. What you see on the dramatic stage is the apparent world, whereas music expresses the real world. It is the music that penetrates to the essence of things. The music says it all, the phenomenal world on the stage presents, at best, only "acts of music made visible".