Die Walküre begins with a storm, but unlike the one which Donner had used to clear the sultry atmosphere towards the end of Das Rheingold this is a harrying, battering storm which leads the first human being we have encountered in the Ring to find shelter in a hut built round an ash tree. Once the elements have subsided, the music traces his exhaustion, as he collapses on the hut’s floor. The noise disturbs a woman, and she comes in to see who the stranger might be.
The first thing that strikes us about this music, apart from its warm expressiveness, is its tentativeness. These are people lost, bewildered in the face of what life is doing to them. The contrast with Das Rheingold is instantly established. There, though issues became rapidly obscure, everyone’s feelings were clear. Among those primitives, the idea of self-knowledge could gain no purchase, because no one had any doubts about how they felt and what they wanted. Hence the hard-edged quality of that work, the sharpness of the conflicts, and the unforgiving nature of its impact. Hence, too, its incomplete character. Its ending is a carefully false one, undermined by its own assertiveness; and, recalling Wagner’s formulation about our feelings being put at rest, we realise that they have hardly been awoken yet. We have been – and the more one gets to know Das Rheingold, the truer it becomes – fascinated but rarely moved. As soon as Die Walküre begins we are moved by the helplessness of two people of whose origins we as yet know nothing. The man is quickly established as a wounded hero, the woman as an unhappy wife, longing to express a tenderness that she normally isn’t permitted. When she brings the man a drink of mead, and they share it, a long melody for solo ‘cello brings a depth and intensity of longing into the work which, even on first hearing, make an unforgettable impression.
The First Act of Die Walküre has a sureness of touch and a perfection of structure which puts it into a different class from anything which Wagner had previously attempted or achieved. It delineates, as had never been done before in drama, the gradual but inevitable growth of passion from anxiety and sympathy. That takes place in the text and the action, but still more so in the orchestra, now allotted a much more central role than it had had in Das Rheingold. There are very many long stretches in Act I, in particular, during which no one speaks, but their feelings develop and change, charted with uncanny mastery by the orchestra. That is partly because, despite the mutual sympathy of Siegmund and Sieglinde (we only learn their names in the closing minutes of the Act, Hunding having insisted on his from the outset), they are both, in the light of their wretched lives, too nervous to give away anything that they don’t have to, and for them, as for so many epic figures, to let people know one’s name is to give them a power over one. Oral communication, until Sieglinde has drugged Hunding to make sure he doesn’t disturb them, is kept to immediate, practical purposes. Siegmund tells the married pair his history, though under an assumed name, and concealing his parentage, under duress. It is only when Hunding is safely asleep, and Sieglinde is acting from the conviction that the man who can pull the sword from the tree has at last arrived, that they urgently tell one another as much as possible, though still being cagey about their true origins – life has taught them the harshest lessons, and trust, even between people with an immediate sympathetic bond, is only slowly established.
Characteristically, once the door has swung open to admit the spring moonlight, Siegmund is intent on lyrical outpourings, while it is Sieglinde who wants to move things along, to find out who he really is, who his father was, what is the source of the overpowering attraction which they feel for one another. I mean that that is characteristic of Wagner’s men and women – the woman leads the way, the man rhapsodises. But what both are doing equally is discovering their feelings. When Siegmund launches into his Spring Song, it begins (to the reproaches of many commentators) as an aria about winter being vanquished; but before he has got far into it, he abandons the regular form in which he has begun, and moves into a premonitory image of spring being lured by Love, so that the ‘sister-bride’ is freed by her brother – all this before they discover that they are the Wälsung twins. Rapture contained in metrical form gives place to determination unconstrained, and the move from one to the other gives an immense release of energy, taken over at its climax: ‘vereint sind Liebe und Lenz!’ (Spring and Love are made one!), by Sieglinde telling ‘Wehwalt’ (Woeful), as she still pretends to think Siegmund is called, ‘Du bist der Lenz, nach dem ich verlangte’ (You are the spring for which I longed). They move, inexorably thanks to Sieglinde, to their moment of recognition, when Siegmund’s admission that his father was Wälse (as he knew Wotan) leads to Sieglinde’s ecstatic naming of him, giving him the will and energy to pull the sword Nothung from the tree.
This Act is so surely constructed, so full of warmth, and so moving in its progression from darkness and despair to love and light, that it is the one to play to anybody who doesn’t know Wagner, and wants to find out what is so extraordinary about him. Amazing as the movement from Lohengrin to Das Rheingold is, the advance from that work to this Act is still more breathtaking, since the Act shows how Wagner can encompass a progression of emotions in a short space, leaving one with the impression, typical of him, that life has changed after this. The world is transformed by the advent of love: that sentimental cliché seems to achieve artistic dignity and strength through the glory of this Act, in which control and inspiration are in perfect balance. For the incestuous twins, of course, life can never be the same again: but for how much longer can it be better?
We, the audience, acquire a sense of that all too soon after the curtain rises on Act II. The Prelude, one of Wagner’s most exciting, combines elements of the Wälsungs, with themes developed from the sword-motif and their love, an urgency suggestive of flight, and then, to enormously heavy scoring, the emergence for the first time of the Walküre motif. It is our first encounter with Wotan’s favourite daughter, Brünnhilde (her mother is Erda), in manic spirits at the thought of an impending battle at which she will do ‘War Father’s’ (Wotan’s) bidding. But she soon takes her leave, as she sees Fricka approaching – the battles she likes are not to Brünnhilde’s taste. And in a few moments we are back in the world of Das Rheingold, or that is how it seems at first. But before the strenuous argument between Fricka and Wotan has been under way for long, we realise that he is now a gentler, more troubled god, no longer even under the illusion that he is still on the ascendant, but rather fighting one of a series of rearguard actions. From this encounter, which becomes more painful for him and for us by the minute, he emerges humiliated. His idea had been that the rule of law should be replaced by that of love, and Siegmund and Sieglinde were to be his prize specimens. But Fricka, arguing with the same cogency as Fasolt and Alberich in Das Rheingold, points out that if he abjures the rule of law, then no one need obey him; what he wants is to make the law up as he goes along, while she is the guardian of sacred, and thus eternal, laws of marriage. To his reply that the twins had followed their own law, that of their hearts, and that he had not been involved, Fricka reacts with shrewd, unanswerable contempt. Who created them? And how can a creator disclaim responsibility for what his creatures do?
Clearly we are back with one of Wagner’s lifelong preoccupations: that of the ‘absolute artist’, alias a god who wants to share in the qualities of being fully human. In Das Rheingold we had the odd phenomenon of a god who tried to be, simultaneously, above the law and its exemplar, and made a miserable job of each. Here we have a god who claims to yield to the desires of his creations, but thereby offends against, indeed denies, the principles of his own wife, which are principles that he has delegated to her. With horrible accuracy Wagner shows us how Fricka is bound to win, since she is uninvolved with any of the characters she is arguing about. For her they are merely the prototypes of the wronged husband, the incestuous and adulterous twins, Wotan’s illegitimate progeny. Wotan has become, as he certainly had not at any stage in Das Rheingold, someone who cares passionately about the existence and happiness of mortals for whom he feels the tenderness of a parent. It is not surprising that he appeals to what is new, since all this is new to him, and is affecting him more than anything that is old does. He had, as he explains later to Brünnhilde, begotten Siegmund and Sieglinde in order to do for him what he was unable to do for himself – to right the wrongs which he had done, but without knowledge of what they were doing. But quite apart from the issue of whether he could do that, he finds himself desperately concerned for their welfare.
Wotan has come, in short, to realise the necessity of new ways of feeling, which entails new people to have them. Few are as willing or able as he is to experience life freshly. Certainly Fricka is not, and is armed with reasons why she shouldn’t be. Wagner gives marvellous expression to that in her exit number: after she has extracted from Wotan the oath that the Wälsung Siegmund shall fall in the forthcoming fight, she sings an arioso worthy of a baroque opera, and expressive of the kind of sentiments one finds there – ‘Deiner ew’gen Gattin heilige Ehre beschirme heut’ ihr Schild!’ (Your eternal consort’s holy honour her shield shall defend today!) – and she pauses briefly, the embodiment of self-confidence and self-righteousness, to speak to Brünnhilde.
The scene that follows is the moral and psychological heart of the drama, and of the whole cycle. Wotan is experiencing for the first time the complete thwarting of his plans, and is unable to do anything other than slump in misery, and then to cry out in his agony, to the same music and almost the same words as Alberich when Wotan had torn the Ring from his finger. Both realise the fathomlessness of their bondage. Alberich sings, ‘Der Traurigen traurigster Knecht!’ (The saddest of all sad slaves!), Wotan, ‘Der Traurigste bin ich von Allen!’ (I am the saddest of all beings!); Alberich had been caught by Wotan. Now Wotan is in an even worse position: ‘In eig’ner Fessel fing ich mich’ (I am caught in my own fetters). It is only Brünnhilde’s capacity to identify with him, or to try to understand how he can be suffering as he is, that leads him into the long, excruciated monologue of self-searching in which he reconstructs the past to see how it could have become so intolerable a present, one from which he can see no future except ‘Das Ende! Das Ende!’ He tells Brünnhilde a good deal that we already know, more that we don’t. From what we do know, it is clear that Wotan is being scrupulously accurate, at whatever cost to his self-esteem (and incidentally to the dismay of contemporary critics eager to find that he is an exemplification of that old-new concept, the unreliable narrator).
Everything leads to the point of no escape: ‘der durch Verträge ich Herr, den Verträgen bin ich nun Knecht’ (I who am lord through treaties am now the slave of treaties). And Wotan immediately moves on to his great hope, that a hero entirely ignorant of him should do what he can’t do. But he at least half understands that that is not possible: ‘Zum Ekel find’ ich ewig nur mich in Allem was ich erwirke!’ (To my disgust I find always only myself in whatever I effect!). In his extremity of bitterness he blesses Alberich’s son, yet to be born, but clearly not a love-child; and hopes that he will destroy ‘der Gottheit nichtigen Glanz’ (the empty glitter of godhood). With that he has plumbed the depths of his self-loathing, and proceeds to give Brünnhilde her marching orders: Siegmund shall fall, Hunding shall vindicate marriage.
This scene is on a level of exploratory seriousness which is wholly new to opera, partly thanks to the number of factors which are involved, partly because Wagner uses his ever-developing powers to portray someone who has to recognise that the fundamental issues with which he is confronted are all within himself, and that the pressures he has been trying to avoid from the antagonists he has confronted cannot be vanquished by actions for which he has no responsibility – if there are any. This is not to say, as has been claimed, that the Ring is the anatomy of a single psyche: to see the other characters as projections of elements in Wotan is to effect a disastrous simplification and, in the end, de-dramatisation of the work. Though the monologue is obviously the most discursive part of the Ring, we do have to feel as well as think, and the carefully placed musico-dramatic climaxes ensure that we do.
Wotan begins, according to the directions, ‘in a stifled, muffled voice’, scarcely singing at all. He merely recounts, for some minutes, the point in his life where he lost the pleasure of youthful love (whatever that may have been) and began to yearn for power, and how that led to his deviousness. Attempting to be honest at a level which he has never, it seems, tried before, he proceeds along the time-honoured route that one takes in ultimate crises, that of trying to stick to ‘the facts’, uncoloured by feeling. But these facts precisely are about the progression of his feelings, and gradually his voice is coloured by self-reproach, bitterness, and glumly recalled moments of seeming success. The contrast with the world-destroying rage of a few minutes before is so striking that we stop contemplating his anguish, and find ourselves in a state, like Brünnhilde, of identification with him. The absence of any kind of posturing, the lack of self-exculpation or anything other than a candour that almost defies articulation, makes these bald opening stretches of Wotan’s monologue one of Wagner’s masterpieces of anti-rhetorical rhetoric. A highly dubious character, about whom we have had conflicting feelings, becomes at a stroke someone we cease to judge, instead joining him in trying to understand how he can have contrived so comprehensive a disaster for himself and everyone for whom he cares. So the fact that he is conveying a lot of information, which requires that we should be able to follow every word, since it is so complex, fits perfectly with the withdrawal of orchestral support.
As Wotan moves into territory with which we are familiar, leitmotifs from Das Rheingold creep into the orchestral texture, taking us back to what we had witnessed, but now rehearing it from the perspective of the chief protagonist in the drama. As he continues, revealing to Brünnhilde the stratagems he had employed for shoring up his morally undermined power, Wotan alternates between the hopes which he had and the ruin of those hopes that he faces, and is led ineluctably by the logic that Fricka had presented him with to his conclusion about his slave-like status. He reaches an insight which is familiar to Wagner’s characters throughout his works: if he can’t escape from his own limitations, then action of any kind is futile. In his other dramas, such tormented figures turn to a separate being, but in Wotan’s restricted godhood there can be no truly separate being, since he will always have had a hand in their existence. ‘Das And’re, das ich ersehne, das And’re erseh’ ich nie; denn selbst muss der Freie sich schaffen’ (The other for whom I long, the other I never see; for the free one must create himself). But if Wotan can give any sense to someone creating himself, it is only in terms of his being disobedient, or wholly ignorant, at least, of Wotan’s designs, so that there is no guarantee that he will achieve the god’s plans: on the contrary. This time round, the piling on of the agony by the orchestra is entirely inward – it voices Wotan’s state. If one doesn’t see that, then Wotan appears as no more than a guileful politician trapped by his own policies, which is how he is now almost always presented. That is to traduce one of the most shattering tragic effects any artist has contrived. At every level of his complex being Wotan is torn apart, and failure to grasp the horror of his plight, or attempts to reduce its dimensions, deprive us of insights into recurrent human agonies which are hardly to be gained elsewhere.
Having made us feel the full weight of Wotan’s predicament, how does Wagner free us from the sense that a radically new moral vision – which is self-evidently necessary for us as much as for the inhabitants of the world of the Ring – is bound to be trapped in its own dialectic? By the most audacious of means: the experience of his art will bring about our freedom. How could that be? Only if the art itself possessed such transcendent authority that it was able, at one blow, to sweep away the accumulated traditions by which we live, or by which, as it is now customary to say, we are ‘constituted’, and replace our old feelings with a set of new ones which are self-evidently superior. This is the implicit imperative in all of Wagner’s mature works. They don’t issue the command that emerges from Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo, ‘Du musst dein Leben ändern’ (You must change your life). They do change it – or that is the idea. But that seems to take us back yet again to the ‘absolute artist’, an idea of which Wagner was suspicious. There is no question that those who feel most dubious about his art feel that he is making a devilish bid for their souls, just as those who are most spellbound by it are happy to give themselves into its, or his, keeping. But that is a matter to be postponed until the very end, since it is evidently the ultimate issue.
Meanwhile, back to the Second Act of Die Walküre. Wotan ‘storms away’, leaving a dejected Brünnhilde to collect her now heavy weapons for the fight. As she leaves the scene, the Wälsungs come onto it, Sieglinde distraught, Siegmund vainly trying to calm her. She is overcome with self-disgust that she had ever yielded to Hunding, wholly inconsolable. And she is terrified that in the forthcoming combat Hunding will slaughter Siegmund. Finally she faints, Siegmund rests her head in his lap, and the stage is set for the turning-point of the whole cycle, the so-called ‘Annunciation of Death’.
Brünnhilde appears and gravely commands Siegmund to look at her. There follows a series of questions from Siegmund, answers from Brünnhilde, as to what she is, where she will take him, whom he will see in Valhalla. When Siegmund learns that Sieglinde must remain on earth, he declares his intention of staying with her. He has no interest in ‘Walhall’s spröden Wonnen’ (Valhalla’s paltry splendours) if he is to be separated from the one being he cares about. Brünnhilde is amazed. ‘Does this poor woman, exhausted and sorrowful, mean everything to you?’ she asks incredulously. Slowly, as Siegmund becomes ever more truculent, it begins to dawn on Brünnhilde what human love involves. And when Siegmund threatens to draw his sword and kill his sister-bride and himself, she is overcome by this manifestation of a kind of relationship of which she has had no inkling before. The scene has built up with majestic solemnity and grandeur, pathos and bemusement. And it gathers a momentum which leads to Brünnhilde’s decision with inexorable, exhilarating abandon: she will disobey Wotan’s command, defend Siegmund in battle and…
That is not, of course, what happens, or rather only some of it does. Wotan appears just as Siegmund, protected by Brünnhilde, is about to strike Hunding dead. Siegmund’s sword, planted in the tree for him by Wotan, is shattered on Wotan’s spear, and Hunding kills him. Wotan has upheld the laws of marriage, kept his word to Fricka, and the result is felt as cosmic catastrophe. Love has been defeated, Wotan’s for his children and theirs for one another; and the compassion which their plight awakened in Brünnhilde, making her into a different person from the whooping warrior maid, means that she will be the object of Wotan’s vengeance. Wotan gazes in anguish at his son’s body, momentarily paralysed with grief. Then he dismisses Hunding to Fricka’s presence in a hoarse whisper, and sets off in pursuit of Brünnhilde, who has gathered up the fragments of the sword and departed with Sieglinde.
Wagner could not, more economically and with surer dramaturgic skill, have written an act in which we are put into a more frightful state. The First Act seemed to inaugurate a new world. The Second revokes it with such devastating logic that it seems as if there is no further possibility open to us. Wotan has by this point reached tragic stature, but unlike most tragic figures who are driven to unspeakable deeds, he has the prospect of continuing to live with what he has done for an eternity. And Brünnhilde is going to have to pay for her disobedience. It is this last issue which provides the content for Act III, though before Wotan arrives on the scene Brünnhilde has sent Sieglinde off into the forest, with the assurance that she is pregnant with the world’s greatest hero. Then Brünnhilde awaits Wotan’s decree, and most of the Act is occupied by the second huge scene between them, Brünnhilde telling Wotan that she only did what he truly wanted her to, Wotan condemning her for precisely that, since what he wants by this time is bound to be forbidden. Heartbroken but adamant, he realises that he must abandon his other adored child, or he will once more be guilty himself of not enforcing the laws by which he governs. The argument continues between them, until Wotan agrees that Brünnhilde will only be awoken from the sleep into which he is going to put her by the mightiest of heroes. But she will still lose her status as a goddess, that by which she is defined, so he leaves it wholly unclear as to what will eventually happen to her. But at this stage our concerns are more with what will happen to him, a god who has gained our sympathy at every point as he has become less godlike. The world without love seemed to be intolerably glacial; with love, it has become a scene of sheer suffering.