The Nibelung’s Ring: Siegfried 1

Before we go on with the third of the operas in Wagner’s vast tetralogy The Nibelung’s Ring, I’d like to take a moment to talk a little about my trolls. Yes, this sequence of posts has gotten a fair amount of trolling, and I’m sorry to say that none of it has been interesting enough to put through. Nearly all of it, to be precise, is obsessed with the notion that Wagner can’t possibly have intended the economic and political subtexts that I’ve discussed here.

I note with some amusement that when George Bernard Shaw discussed these same subtexts more than a century ago in The Perfect Wagnerite, his acclaimed commentary on The Ring, he got exactly the same ignorant arguments flung at him by the trolls of his day. (I’ve wondered now and then, in fact, if any of my trolls might be descendants of one or more of Shaw’s.) Be that as it may, Wagner himself laid out this interpretation in detail in his letters, and every serious student of Wagner’s ideas accepts that he had these things in mind when he wrote The Ring. Doubtless that won’t have any influence on those who can’t be bothered to do their own research, or even read the earlier posts in this sequence, but that can hardly be helped.

For those who take seriously the world of ideas that Wagner described in his letters and Shaw set out imperfectly in his commentary, on the other hand, the action of The Ring is moving toward a tremendous crisis as the orchestra warms up for the opening bars of Siegfried. In the world of myth and folktale, in the interval between The Valkyrie and Siegfried, Wotan’s hapless daughter Sieglinde made her escape to the depths of a trackless forest, where she met Mime the Nibelung, Alberich’s weak brother.  There she gave birth to the child she conceived with her brother Siegmund, and died.

Mime—remember that his name is pronounced “Meemeh,” he’s not one of those silent performers in white facepaint—takes care of the child, Siegfried, and raises him to young manhood. This isn’t an act of ordinary mercy, for Mime is far from alone in the forest.  In a cave in the forest’s depths dwells Fafner, the giant we met back in The Rhinegold.  Fafner has used magic to turn himself into a dragon, and guards the golden hoard he won from the gods, including the Ring.  He doesn’t do anything with any of it.  “Ich lieg und besitz—lasst mich schlafen” is his motto:  very roughly, “I keep what I have—let me sleep.”

Mime has no intention of letting him sleep. He wants the treasure of the Nibelungs for himself, but he doesn’t have anything like the courage and strength he would need to confront a dragon. That’s Siegfried’s job. Mime has raised him for the sole purpose of killing the dragon, after which Mime intends to take everything for himself.  As we’ll see, the Nibelung is not planning on letting Siegfried survive the fight with the dragon for one minute longer than necessary. He has no love to spare for his fosterling; to him, Siegfried is an instrument, to be used for a single purpose and then discarded.

Nor does Siegfried have any love for Mime. When we first see Wotan’s grandson, he is driving a bear ahead of him as a practical joke, to terrify Mime.  He loathes the little Nibelung, and in the first scene he extracts by raw force the secret of his origin and the names of his parents from Mime, who had hidden these things from him until that moment. Learning that he is unrelated to Mime is a source of immense joy to Siegfried; all he wants from Mime thereafter is a repair job on his father’s broken sword, and then he plans on leaving Mime and the forest behind forever.

That is to say, Siegfried has had a ghastly childhood. His only exposure to love has come at a distance, from watching mother animals tending their offspring; such parenting as he received from Mime was aimed entirely toward preparing him to be exploited for Mime’s own purposes—and anyone who thinks a child will not pick up on this has never spent time around children.  Our golden-haired hero is thus as loveless as he is fearless, and very nearly brainless into the bargain. He is guided wholly by his passions, and as we will see, he can be manipulated with perfect ease by those who know how to use those passions as levers.

It’s a harrowing portrait.  What makes it all the more fascinating is that when Wagner wrote it, the study of child psychology was itself in its infancy, and only a few people had really begun to grasp the kind of damage that can be inflicted on a child who receives no affection at all in its early years. The staff in orphanages in his time were still baffled by the way that infants warehoused in their facilities would literally waste away and die for want of affectionate touch. The less immediately lethal phenomenon we may as well call “Siegfried syndrome,” the process by which emotional starvation in childhood can produce adults who are outwardly active, even robust, but have no inner life aside from passions and a few clichés picked up from their society, is still not as well understood by social psychologists as it was by Wagner.

It’s interesting to note in this context that Siegfried was evidently the inspiration for an entire industry of wild-children stories, generally featuring a child raised by animals.  Mowgli, the hero of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and Tarzan of the Apes, the most famous creation of pulp writer Edgar Ruce Burroughs, are only the most famous nowadays of an ample crowd of such figures, and a glance at chronology shows that they began to appear in modern Western literature only after The Nibelung’s Ring became an iconic cultural phenomenon.

Nearly all these stories, however, went the opposite direction from Wagner. They glorified the experience of the wild child, using it to critique the society of their time by contrasting it with a supposedly more robust and healthy life in nature. The irony here is that this same period saw the first scientific studies of children who were raised by animals—it does happen now and again in isolated regions—which consistently found drastic developmental retardation in such children due to the lack of normal human socialization. The contrast here echoes a theme we’ve already discussed in this sequence of posts: the relationship between the dreams and the realities of Romantic politics.

The Romantic movement, as my readers will remember, embraced the notion that the steaming mess we call modern society is hopelessly unnatural, a breach in the normal and healthy order of things. Only the oppressive structures of politics, economics, and society, in this way of thinking, keeps the unnatural modern system in place.  Break the grip of the system, the logic proceeds, and people will naturally revert to the better system that nature intends for them. That was the great vision of the Romantics, and of course it’s still a popular set of beliefs today—listen to any of the current neoprimitivists talking about the joys of hunter-gatherer society and you’ll get as fine an example of Romantic ideology as you could find in anything from Wagner’s day.

That’s what lies behind all those feral-child stories. Mowgli and Tarzan are Romantic heroes, raised wild and free in the world of nature rather than being forced into the dismal machinery of civilized childraising and schooling, and that’s why they’re portrayed as stronger, wiser, and better than other people. Tarzan in particular has become an archetypal presence in modern Western society, the apotheosis of Natural Man.  He’s very nearly the only reason anybody remembers Edgar Rice Burroughs these days—Burroughs was a dreadful writer even by pulp standards, but he had a knack for catching culturally potent imagery and splashing it around with gusto, and those forms have outlived the clumsy prose in which they were first embodied.

The distance between Mowgli and Tarzan, on the one hand, and those unfortunate children who were actually raised by animals and thus never picked up such basic human skills as spoken language, on the other, is one measure of the yawning gap between Romantic fantasy and the sadly unromantic reality in which we find ourselves.  Another can be spotted easily enough by seeing what happens in those cases—they are tolerably common—where some would-be educational reformer lets children run wild on the assumption that they will somehow get around to educating themselves.

As it happens, I spent most of four years in an elementary school run along those lines, one of many such experiments to pop up during the Sixties.  I learned essentially nothing during those years other than how to hide from bullies.  It was a profound relief for me to get back to an ordinary classroom in which a teacher maintained discipline and expected pupils to pay attention to lessons and learn from them. Mind you, there are plenty of problems with the standard model of education in America, and plenty of alternatives that do a better job of teaching children than that standard model does; some of these were influenced in one way or another by movements that spun off from the Romantic movement; but none of them give students a Siegfried education of the kind I briefly endured.

Wagner’s portrayal of Siegfried is thus edgy in one way when it’s taken literally, as a portrayal of  the way a fairy tale situation would play out in the real world. It becomes even more edgy when Wagner’s philosophical and political subtext is kept in mind. Remember that in the Feuerbachian system Wagner constructed, the gods, giants, and Nibelungs all have a social meaning, and the process that gives rise to Siegfried can be mapped out in the social world of Wagner’s own time.

We traced the first steps in that process in the last two posts in this sequence. Wotan, who stands for the privileged intellectual classes of Wagner’s time, set in motion a project to seize the Ring for his own purposes, using poor Siegmund and Sieglinde for his cat’s-paws.  That project failed, and an important part of that failure resulted from the blatantly transparent nature of Wotan’s manipulations. That played out, as we’ve seen, in the French Revolution and its aftermath, as intellectuals—Wagner among them—found that they could be called to account by the ruling classes for their attempts to incite revolution.

It’s what happened thereafter that guided Wagner in his precise and uncompromising portrayal of Siegfried.  After the failure of the attempted European revolutions of 1848-1849, the spread of socialist ideas among a subculture of working-class agitators became the new hope of radical intellectuals across Europe. Some intellectuals dabbled, or more than dabbled, in the emerging socialist underground of the time—William Morris, whose role as one of the grand old men of English socialism has been mentioned already, is a good example here.  Others simply watched and hoped. They dreamed that, while the ideal of liberty had been set aside for pragmatic reasons by the intellectual classes, it would be seized by working class radicals who would overthrow the system all by themselves.

That notion was a significant cultural force during the period from the 1850s through the First World War, and it left remarkably clear tracks through society and the arts. Consider one of the most popular poems in America during those years, Edwin Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe,” which appeared to instant acclaim in 1898 and made its author’s reputation as a serious poet back when that still counted for something. It was inspired by Millet’s then-famous painting of a blank-faced, slack-jawed rural laborer leaning on his hoe.  You can read it here.

It’s a very strange poem, which combines apparent compassion and dehumanizing contempt for its subject in equal measure:

Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes.
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Anyone who’s actually spent time around rural working class people knows just how utterly false Markham’s portrayal is. Rapture, despair, grief, hope, and all the other dimensions of the normal human condition were just as common among rural farmers, urban factory workers, and other members of the nineteenth century’s underclass as they were among privileged intellectuals of Markham’s own class. Eugene Genovese’s fine 1975 study Roll Jordan Roll: The World The Slaves Made is among other things a good counterweight to Markham’s fantasy, showing that even under actual slavery, people are capable of creating and transmitting culture, not to mention experiencing everything Markham insists they cannot experience.

Yet notions of Markham’s type pervaded intellectual culture during the years when Wagner’s operas dominated the musical scene—you can see it just as clearly in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, where the upper and lower classes appear as the beautiful and ineffectual Eloi and the brutal troglodytic Morlocks respectively. It fed the conviction, by turns horrified and ecstatic, that someday the dread Morlocks would surge up out of their subterranean crawlspaces and devour the beautiful Eloi once and for all. That’s in Markham’s poem too:

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God
After the silence of the centuries?

Keep in mind that Markham’s poem wasn’t read and celebrated in working class circles. It was among the intellectuals and the upper classes generally that this poem, and this kind of rhetoric more generally, was wildly popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Listen carefully and you can hear Wotan’s voice behind it all, and behind the conviction on the part of privileged radicals all through the same period that the coming social revolution would inevitably be followed by a transfer of power from “kingdoms and kings” to privileged radicals—after all, how could those brothers of the ox possibly govern themselves? Of course they would have to turn to the smartest people in the room to do it for them.

Those of my readers familiar with more recent forms of privileged radicalism can doubtless think of comparable attitudes, but we can leave that for now.  The point I want to make here is that Wagner’s original version of The Ring, embodied in his early essay “The Nibelungen-Myth,” echoed that same vision in symbolic form.  In the climactic scene of that sketch, Siegfried’s death and Brunnhilde’s self-sacrifice are followed by a vision in which she leads him to Valhalla, while the ring goes back to the Rhine. Siegfried’s death atones for the sins of the gods, and so Wotan’s castle in the air remains undimmed in its splendor as the curtain comes down.

At that stage of the composition, and for some time thereafter, Wagner still intended to call the climactic opera of the sequence The Death of Siegfried.  It was only at a later stage that he retitled the final opera The Twilight of the Gods. That change was anything but arbitrary.  It signaled his realization that the gods of his Feuerbachian pantheon, the ideals of nineteenth-century polite society and the intellectual classes that upheld them, were not going to be able to atone for their sins vicariously by offering up proletarian revolutionaries. They themselves were going to pay the price—and the proletariat was going to exact it.