Richard Wagner

As Jacques Barzun argued, Darwin and Marx with their scientific and political revolutions were not the only ones to reshape the previous century. In similar fashion Richard Wagner altered the way his contemporaries thought about the arts. Wagner has a decidedly mixed reputation, being either praised as the champion of German music and culture or blamed as the inspiration of decadent art and the grandfather of Nazism. These conflicting evaluations stem partly from Wagner's complex ambitions. Not satisfied with composing music, he wanted to change the world through his artwork of the future. In 1849 Wagner wrote, "My task is this: to bring revolution wherever I go" as he felt that "the hope of a regenerated state is linked with a cultural revolution effected through the popular art of the theater" (Barzun 232). In his music-dramas he depicted inspiring tales of heroism and valor taken from German myth and legend in order to awaken in the German people an awareness of their potential greatness.

Although it took him 25 years to realize his dream on the stage, early in his career Wagner discovered his ideal vision of the Aryan race in the figure of Siegfried from Norse and Germanic mythology. For him Siegfried represented "the true human being," not a conventional figure of history who interests us more for the details of his life but someone "purely human" (McCreless 55). This perfect being did not as yet exist; as Wagner explained, "Siegfried is the man of the future whom we long for but cannot ourselves bring into being, who must create himself by our destruction." He will herald a new heroic faith to succeed the old Christianity: at Wotan's words, "The god gives place to the eternally young [Siegfried]," Wagner told the singer, "It should sound like the announcement of a new religion" (Bentley 1, 58).

Originally Wagner planned to portray the protagonist's tragedy in one music-drama, The Death of Siegfried, the first sketch completed in 1848. Wagner then decided to preface this drama with an heroic comedy about the exploits of young Siegfried who kills a dragon and awakens a sleeping damsel with a kiss. In Young Siegfried (as part 3 was originally called) Siegfried grows up in the forest as a rowdy, boisterous, naive innocent of immense strength and prowess who thinks of bears and dragons as no more than playmates. He is loud, violent, and arrogant, a man of impulsive action rather than thought. He knows nothing of the ways of gods or men and little about the world outside of the forest. Siegfried defeats representatives of the three older races – Fafner the stupid giant, Mime the crafty Nibelung, and Wotan the ruler of the gods – without realizing the significance of his deeds. In Bentley's words he is “a crude emanation of the Vital Energy" or Life Force, as yet undeveloped (153).

Only in the final scene with Brunnhilde is Siegfried transformed into the mature romantic hero, and only then does he take on the stature to fulfill the lofty role Wotan has set for him. With Brunnhilde at his side Siegfried can now establish a new world order, one ruled by the natural bonds of love and not the unnatural restrictions of law and power. In The Death of Siegfried, the promise of the superior Walsung race is cut short by Hagen's treachery, but in the original ending even death does not defeat Siegfried. In her role as Valkyrie, Brunnhilde brings him back to life and takes him in triumph to Valhalla (not destroyed by fire in the 1848 version) to be welcomed by the gods as their new ruler (McCreless 9).

The final tragedy of Siegfried follows Aristotelian guidelines to some degree. When he first learns the fateful history of the ring from the Rhinedaughters, Siegfried scorns the danger of its curse and refuses to give it back (error, hamartia), for it represents a symbol of his conquests in battle and in love. This show of pride and possessiveness places him for the first time under the power of the ring's curse, opening the way for his first and only defeat (reversal, peripeteia) in the form of Hagen's spear. Just before his death, the spell of forgetfulness leaves Siegfried and he remembers his true love for Brunnhilde; he dies recognizing (cognitio) that he betrayed her and seems to envision their reunion beyond the grave.

However much Wagner conforms to the tradition that the hero must be aware of the cause of his destruction, a much more significant criterion for him is that he must above all follow his most human, his most natural instincts regardless of the consequences (McCreless 7). In Opera and Drama (1851) Wagner praised Antigone as the greatest of tragic figures because she upheld natural law in opposition to the unnatural laws of the state. Conversely, Wagner criticized Sophocles' treatment of Oedipus because in breaking the incest taboo, Oedipus violated no natural law, only the social norm. In Wagner's opinion we should be repulsed at Oedipus' punishment for a wrong he committed in ignorance and which nature does not condemn.

In this analysis, which applies to his own dramas as well, Wagner contrasts two systems of morality: the old, life-frustrating, restrictive law code enforced by the state and church, and the spontaneous, life-affirming ethic of a fully aware human being. The representatives of the former, Creon and Wotan, can function only by means of the arbitrary exercise of power. Representing the latter, Antigone and Siegfried are free to follow the leading of inner necessity. Both these children of incestuous unions were born to be taboo-breakers who challenge conventional morality (Rather 55). However, as Nietzsche and Shaw both echo later, Wagner warned that society will condemn and put to death these defenders of "the free self-determination of the individual," branding them immoral without recognizing that they are living according to a higher, more human standard of morality.

Wagner's concept of this natural law of love was influenced by the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach to whom the composer dedicated his 1849 essay "The Artwork of the Future." For Feuerbach a philosophy based on metaphysical speculation or theological symbolism (i.e. the abstract religious idealism of Hegel) did not satisfy the needs of daily human existence. He proposed a more immediate, sensuous philosophy based on love, defining both epistemology and existence in terms of love: "What is not loved, what cannot be loved, is nothing. . . . Where there is no love there is also no truth. And only something that loves something exists; not to be and not to love is the same thing" (in Rather 66).

For Wagner the ultimate form of love was eros, sexual love: "Love in its fullest actuality is possible only between the sexes . . . all other love is only derived from that love, flows from it, relates itself to it or artificially imitates it" (in Rather 65). In Wagner's mythical universe Alberich's renunciation of love is the original sin that spoils the garden of Eden, and only the uniting of perfect lovers in supreme passion can bring redemption. In fact, Wagner cannot conceive of his savior Siegfried without Brunnhilde: "Siegfried alone (man by himself) is not the complete human being; he is merely the half. It is only along with Brunnhilde that he becomes the redeemer. To the isolated being not all things are possible; there is need of more than one, and it is woman, suffering and willing to sacrifice herself, who becomes at last the real, conscious redeemer" (in McCreless 5). The superman is not complete without the superwoman. In fact, it is Brunnhilde's supreme love, willing to reunite with Siegfried in death, that proves worthy to redeem their sins of mutual betrayal and to restore the natural order by returning the ring.

This philosophy of love which Wagner expounded to his friends as an answer to the Ring Cycle's mysteries did not satisfy all their criticism, nor was Wagner himself pleased with it for long. By the time it reached completion in 1852, the text of the four-night saga had taken on a dark, pessimistic tone. The conjoining of the Siegfried story with the fall of the gods, an element not found in any of the sources but of Wagner's own conception, placed on the entire work a somber shadow of nihilism and despair. It was not until he read the works of Arthur Schopenhauer in 1854 that Wagner found a philosophical system to explain his artistic intuition.

The keystone of Schopenhauer's thought is the concept of the denial of the will. The individual is not free but is at the mercy of the will, the ultimate primeval force underlying all existence. As the individual manifestation of the will exerts itself in the world, it comes into conflict with other individual wills, causing suffering and unhappiness. The only escape from this cruel but necessary state of struggle is the individual's denial of the will in deference to others. One must live the life of an ascetic or saint, denying all personal pleasures and desires, until the release of death, the ultimate renunciation of will and the only true good. (Schopenhauer rejected suicide as an ultimately selfish act.) Even sexual love becomes a means of asserting one's will by treating the beloved as a possession for one's own gratification. Agape, self-sacrificing universal compassion, replaces eros as the supreme form of love.

To his astonishment Wagner felt that Schopenhauer understood his masterwork more deeply than he himself did. He now realized that Wotan, not Siegfried, was the main tragic figure of the Ring, that it was his act of renunciation in atonement for his ruthless greed that formed the core of the legend and explained the significance of the fall of the gods. The climax of the entire work comes in Siegfried act 3 when Wotan acknowledges to Erda that he willingly accepts his inevitable doom (cognitio) and then loses to Siegfried in combat (peripeteia). The will that once ruled the world now wills to renounce its claims, relinquishing them to another race. Furthermore, the deaths of Siegfried and Brunnhilde are now seen as earthly images of Wotan's renunciation, their funeral pyre reflecting the conflagration of Valhalla. Their supreme love cannot save them, for by refusing initially to surrender the ring, symbol of their erotic love, for the universal good, they place selfish eros above selfless agape. One must renounce not only greed for power but sexual love as well if it conflicts with the needs of others.