BACK TO OPERA AGAIN

And now, O Nibelungen Spectator, pluck up; for all allegories come to an
end somewhere; and the hour of your release from these explanations is
at hand. The rest of what you are going to see is opera, and nothing
but opera. Before many bars have been played, Siegfried and the wakened
Brynhild, newly become tenor and soprano, will sing a concerted
cadenza; plunge on from that to a magnificent love duet; and end with
a precipitous allegro a capella, driven headlong to its end by the
impetuous semiquaver triplets of the famous finales to the first act of
Don Giovanni or the coda to the Leonore overture, with a specifically
contrapuntal theme, points d'orgue, and a high C for the soprano all
complete.

What is more, the work which follows, entitled Night Falls On The Gods,
is a thorough grand opera. In it you shall see what you have so far
missed, the opera chorus in full parade on the stage, not presuming
to interfere with the prima donna as she sings her death song over the
footlights. Nay, that chorus will have its own chance when it first
appears, with a good roaring strain in C major, not, after all, so very
different from, or at all less absurd than the choruses of courtiers
in La Favorita or "Per te immenso giubilo" in Lucia. The harmony is no
doubt a little developed, Wagner augmenting his fifths with a G sharp
where Donizetti would have put his fingers in his ears and screamed for
G natural. But it is an opera chorus all the same; and along with it
we have theatrical grandiosities that recall Meyerbeer and Verdi: pezzi
d'insieme for all the principals in a row, vengeful conjurations for
trios of them, romantic death song for the tenor: in short, all manner
of operatic conventions.

Now it is probable that some of us will have been so talked by the more
superstitious Bayreuth pilgrims into regarding Die Gotterdammerung as
the mighty climax to a mighty epic, more Wagnerian than all the other
three sections put together, as not to dare notice this startling
atavism, especially if we find the trio-conjurations more exhilarating
than the metaphysical discourses of Wotan in the three true music
dramas of The Ring. There is, however, no real atavism involved.
Die Gotterdammerung, though the last of The Ring dramas in order of
performance, was the first in order of conception and was indeed the
root from which all the others sprang.

The history of the matter is as follows. All Wagner's works prior to The
Ring are operas. The last of them, Lohengrin, is perhaps the best known
of modern operas. As performed in its entirety at Bayreuth, it is even
more operatic than it appears at Covent Garden, because it happens that
its most old-fashioned features, notably some of the big set concerted
pieces for principals and chorus (pezzi d'insieme as I have called
them above), are harder to perform than the more modern and
characteristically Wagnerian sections, and for that reason were cut out
in preparing the abbreviated fashionable version. Thus Lohengrin came
upon the ordinary operatic stage as a more advanced departure from
current operatic models than its composer had made it. Still, it is
unmistakably an opera, with chorus, concerted pieces, grand finales,
and a heroine who, if she does not sing florid variations with
flute obbligato, is none the less a very perceptible prima donna. In
everything but musical technique the change from Lohengrin to The Rhine
Gold is quite revolutionary.

The explanation is that Night Falls On The Gods came in between them,
although its music was not finished until twenty years after that of
The Rhine Gold, and thus belongs to a later and more masterful phase of
Wagner's harmonic style. It first came into Wagner's head as an opera
to be entitled Siegfried's Death, founded on the old Niblung Sagas, which
offered to Wagner the same material for an effective theatrical tragedy
as they did to Ibsen. Ibsen's Vikings in Helgeland is, in kind, what
Siegfried's Death was originally intended to be: that is, a heroic piece
for the theatre, without the metaphysical or allegorical complications
of The Ring. Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of the Saga cannot by any
perversion of ingenuity be adapted to the perfectly clear allegorical
design of The Rhine Gold, The Valkyries, and Siegfried.




SIEGFRIED AS PROTESTANT

The philosophically fertile element in the original project of
Siegfried's Death was the conception of Siegfried himself as a type of
the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own impulses by
an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear, sickliness of
conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral crutches of law and
order which accompany them. Such a character appears extraordinarily
fascinating and exhilarating to our guilty and conscience-ridden
generations, however little they may understand him. The world has
always delighted in the man who is delivered from conscience. From Punch
and Don Juan down to Robert Macaire, Jeremy Diddler and the pantomime
clown, he has always drawn large audiences; but hitherto he has been
decorously given to the devil at the end. Indeed eternal punishment is
sometimes deemed too high a compliment to his nature. When the late Lord
Lytton, in his Strange Story, introduced a character personifying the
joyousness of intense vitality, he felt bound to deny him the immortal
soul which was at that time conceded even to the humblest characters in
fiction, and to accept mischievousness, cruelty, and utter incapacity
for sympathy as the inevitable consequence of his magnificent bodily and
mental health.

In short, though men felt all the charm of abounding life and
abandonment to its impulses, they dared not, in their deep
self-mistrust, conceive it otherwise than as a force making for
evil--one which must lead to universal ruin unless checked and literally
mortified by self-renunciation in obedience to superhuman guidance, or
at least to some reasoned system of morals. When it became apparent to
the cleverest of them that no such superhuman guidance existed, and
that their secularist systems had all the fictitiousness of "revelation"
without its poetry, there was no escaping the conclusion that all the
good that man had done must be put down to his arbitrary will as well as
all the evil he had done; and it was also obvious that if progress were
a reality, his beneficent impulses must be gaining on his destructive
ones. It was under the influence of these ideas that we began to hear
about the joy of life where we had formerly heard about the grace of God
or the Age of Reason, and that the boldest spirits began to raise the
question whether churches and laws and the like were not doing a great
deal more harm than good by their action in limiting the freedom of the
human will. Four hundred years ago, when belief in God and in revelation
was general throughout Europe, a similar wave of thought led the
strongest-hearted peoples to affirm that every man's private judgment
was a more trustworthy interpreter of God and revelation than the
Church. This was called Protestantism; and though the Protestants were
not strong enough for their creed, and soon set up a Church of their
own, yet the movement, on the whole, has justified the direction it
took. Nowadays the supernatural element in Protestantism has perished;
and if every man's private judgment is still to be justified as the most
trustworthy interpreter of the will of Humanity (which is not a
more extreme proposition than the old one about the will of God)
Protestantism must take a fresh step in advance, and become Anarchism.
Which it has accordingly done, Anarchism being one of the notable new
creeds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The weak place which experience finds out in the Anarchist theory is
its reliance on the progress already achieved by "Man." There is no such
thing as Man in the world: what we have to deal with is a multitude of
men, some of them great rascals, some of them greet statesmen, others
both, with a vast majority capable of managing their personal affairs,
but not of comprehending social organization, or grappling with the
problems created by their association in enormous numbers. If "Man"
means this majority, then "Man" has made no progress: he has, on
the contrary, resisted it. He will not even pay the cost of existing
institutions: the requisite money has to be filched from him by
"indirect taxation." Such people, like Wagner's giants; must be
governed by laws; and their assent to such government must be secured
by deliberately filling them with prejudices and practicing on their
imaginations by pageantry and artificial eminences and dignities.
The government is of course established by the few who are capable of
government, though its mechanism once complete, it may be, and generally
is, carried on unintelligently by people who are incapable of it the
capable people repairing it from time to time when it gets too far
behind the continuous advance or decay of civilization. All these
capable people are thus in the position of Wotan, forced to maintain as
sacred, and themselves submit to, laws which they privately know to be
obsolescent makeshifts, and to affect the deepest veneration for creeds
and ideals which they ridicule among themselves with cynical scepticism.
No individual Siegfried can rescue them from this bondage and hypocrisy;
in fact, the individual Siegfried has come often enough, only to find
himself confronted with the alternative of governing those who are not
Siegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this dilemma will
persist until Wotan's inspiration comes to our governors, and they see
that their business is not the devising of laws and institutions to prop
up the weaknesses of mobs and secure the survival of the unfittest, but
the breeding of men whose wills and intelligences may be depended on to
produce spontaneously the social well-being our clumsy laws now aim at
and miss. The majority of men at present in Europe have no business
to be alive; and no serious progress will be made until we address
ourselves earnestly and scientifically to the task of producing
trustworthy human material for society. In short, it is necessary to
breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses predominate, before
the New Protestantism becomes politically practicable. [*]

     * The necessity for breeding the governing class from a
     selected stock has always been recognized by Aristocrats,
     however erroneous their methods of selection. We have
     changed our system from Aristocracy to Democracy without
     considering that we were at the same time changing, as
     regards our governing class, from Selection to Promiscuity.
     Those who have taken a practical part in modern politics
     best know how farcical the result is.


The most inevitable dramatic conception, then, of the nineteenth
century, is that of a perfectly naive hero upsetting religion, law and
order in all directions, and establishing in their place the unfettered
action of Humanity doing exactly what it likes, and producing order
instead of confusion thereby because it likes to do what is necessary
for the good of the race. This conception, already incipient in Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations, was certain at last to reach some great
artist, and be embodied by him in a masterpiece. It was also certain
that if that master happened to be a German, he should take delight
in describing his hero as the Freewiller of Necessity, thereby beyond
measure exasperating Englishmen with a congenital incapacity for
metaphysics.




PANACEA QUACKERY, OTHERWISE IDEALISM

Unfortunately, human enlightenment does not progress by nicer and nicer
adjustments, but by violent corrective reactions which invariably send
us clean over our saddle and would bring us to the ground on the other
side if the next reaction did not send us back again with equally
excessive zeal. Ecclesiasticism and Constitutionalism send us one way,
Protestantism and Anarchism the other; Order rescues us from confusion
and lands us in Tyranny; Liberty then saves the situation and is
presently found to be as great a nuisance as Despotism. A scientifically
balanced application of these forces, theoretically possible, is
practically incompatible with human passion. Besides, we have the same
weakness in morals as in medicine: we cannot be cured of running after
panaceas, or, as they are called in the sphere of morals, ideals. One
generation sets up duty, renunciation, self-sacrifice as a panacea. The
next generation, especially the women, wake up at the age of forty or
thereabouts to the fact that their lives have been wasted in the worship
of this ideal, and, what is still more aggravating, that the elders who
imposed it on them did so in a fit of satiety with their own experiments
in the other direction. Then that defrauded generation foams at the
mouth at the very mention of duty, and sets up the alternative panacea
of love, their deprivation of which seems to them to have been the most
cruel and mischievous feature of their slavery to duty. It is useless to
warn them that this reaction, if prescribed as a panacea, will prove as
great a failure as all the other reactions have done; for they do not
recognize its identity with any reaction that ever occurred before.
Take for instance the hackneyed historic example of the austerity of
the Commonwealth being followed by the licence of the Restoration.
You cannot persuade any moral enthusiast to accept this as a pure
oscillation from action to reaction. If he is a Puritan he looks upon
the Restoration as a national disaster: if he is an artist he regards it
as the salvation of the country from gloom, devil worship and starvation
of the affections. The Puritan is ready to try the Commonwealth again
with a few modern improvements: the Amateur is equally ready to try the
Restoration with modern enlightenments. And so for the present we must
be content to proceed by reactions, hoping that each will establish some
permanently practical and beneficial reform or moral habit that will
survive the correction of its excesses by the next reaction.




DRAMATIC ORIGIN OF WOTAN

We can now see how a single drama in which Wotan does not appear, and of
which Siegfried is the hero, expanded itself into a great fourfold
drama of which Wotan is the hero. You cannot dramatize a reaction by
personifying the reacting force only, any more than Archimedes could
lift the world without a fulcrum for his lever. You must also personify
the established power against which the new force is reacting; and
in the conflict between them you get your drama, conflict being the
essential ingredient in all drama. Siegfried, as the hero of Die
Gotterdammerung, is only the primo tenore robusto of an opera book,
deferring his death, after he has been stabbed in the last act, to
sing rapturous love strains to the heroine exactly like Edgardo in
Donizetti's Lucia. In order to make him intelligible in the wider
significance which his joyous, fearless, conscienceless heroism soon
assumed in Wagner's imagination, it was necessary to provide him with a
much vaster dramatic antagonist than the operatic villain Hagen. Hence
Wagner had to create Wotan as the anvil for Siegfried's hammer; and
since there was no room for Wotan in the original opera book, Wagner
had to work back to a preliminary drama reaching primarily to the very
beginnings of human society. And since, on this world-embracing scale,
it was clear that Siegfried must come into conflict with many baser
and stupider forces than those lofty ones of supernatural religion and
political constitutionalism typified by Wotan and his wife Fricka, these
minor antagonists had to be dramatized also in the persons of Alberic,
Mime, Fafnir, Loki, and the rest. None of these appear in Night Falls On
The Gods save Alberic, whose weird dream-colloquy with Hagen, effective
as it is, is as purely theatrical as the scene of the Ghost in Hamlet,
or the statue in Don Giovanni. Cut the conference of the Norns and the
visit of Valtrauta to Brynhild out of Night Falls On The Gods, and the
drama remains coherent and complete without them. Retain them, and the
play becomes connected by conversational references with the three music
dramas; but the connection establishes no philosophic coherence, no
real identity between the operatic Brynhild of the Gibichung episode
(presently to be related) and the daughter of Wotan and the First
Mother.




THE LOVE PANACEA

We shall now find that at the point where The Ring changes from
music drama into opera, it also ceases to be philosophic, and becomes
didactic. The philosophic part is a dramatic symbol of the world as
Wagner observed it. In the didactic part the philosophy degenerates into
the prescription of a romantic nostrum for all human ills. Wagner, only
mortal after all, succumbed to the panacea mania when his philosophy was
exhausted, like any of the rest of us.

The panacea is by no means an original one. Wagner was anticipated in
the year 1819 by a young country gentleman from Sussex named Shelley, in
a work of extraordinary artistic power and splendor. Prometheus Unbound
is an English attempt at a Ring; and when it is taken into account that
the author was only 27 whereas Wagner was 40 when he completed the poem
of The Ring, our vulgar patriotism may find an envious satisfaction in
insisting upon the comparison. Both works set forth the same conflict
between humanity and its gods and governments, issuing in the redemption
of man from their tyranny by the growth of his will into perfect
strength and self-confidence; and both finish by a lapse into
panacea-mongering didacticism by the holding up of Love as the remedy
for all evils and the solvent of all social difficulties.

The differences between Prometheus Unbound and The Ring are as
interesting as the likenesses. Shelley, caught in the pugnacity of his
youth and the first impetuosity of his prodigious artistic power by
the first fierce attack of the New Reformation, gave no quarter to
the antagonist of his hero. His Wotan, whom he calls Jupiter, is the
almighty fiend into whom the Englishman's God had degenerated during two
centuries of ignorant Bible worship and shameless commercialism. He is
Alberic, Fafnir Loki and the ambitious side of Wotan all rolled into
one melodramatic demon who is finally torn from his throne and hurled
shrieking into the abyss by a spirit representing that conception
of Eternal Law which has been replaced since by the conception of
Evolution. Wagner, an older, more experienced man than the Shelley of
1819, understood Wotan and pardoned him, separating him tenderly from
all the compromising alliances to which Shelley fiercely held him;
making the truth and heroism which overthrow him the children of his
inmost heart; and representing him as finally acquiescing in and working
for his own supersession and annihilation. Shelley, in his later works,
is seen progressing towards the same tolerance, justice, and humility
of spirit, as he advanced towards the middle age he never reached. But
there is no progress from Shelley to Wagner as regards the panacea,
except that in Wagner there is a certain shadow of night and death come
on it: nay, even a clear opinion that the supreme good of love is that
it so completely satisfies the desire for life, that after it the Will
to Live ceases to trouble us, and we are at last content to achieve the
highest happiness of death.

This reduction of the panacea to absurdity was not forced upon Shelley,
because the love which acts as a universal solvent in his Prometheus
Unbound is a sentiment of affectionate benevolence which has nothing to
do with sexual passion. It might, and in fact does exist in the absence
of any sexual interest whatever. The words mercy and kindness connote it
less ambiguously than the word love. But Wagner sought always for some
point of contact between his ideas and the physical senses, so that
people might not only think or imagine them in the eighteenth century
fashion, but see them on the stage, hear them from the orchestra, and
feel them through the infection of passionate emotion. Dr. Johnson
kicking the stone to confute Berkeley is not more bent on common-sense
concreteness than Wagner: on all occasions he insists on the need
for sensuous apprehension to give reality to abstract comprehension,
maintaining, in fact, that reality has no other meaning. Now he could
apply this process to poetic love only by following it back to its
alleged origin in sexual passion, the emotional phenomena of which he
has expressed in music with a frankness and forcible naturalism which
would possibly have scandalized Shelley. The love duet in the first act
of The Valkyries is brought to a point at which the conventions of our
society demand the precipitate fall of the curtain; whilst the prelude
to Tristan and Isolde is such an astonishingly intense and faithful
translation into music of the emotions which accompany the union of a
pair of lovers, that it is questionable whether the great popularity of
this piece at our orchestral concerts really means that our audiences
are entirely catholic in their respect for life in all its beneficently
creative functions, or whether they simply enjoy the music without
understanding it.

But however offensive and inhuman may be the superstition which brands
such exaltations of natural passion as shameful and indecorous, there is
at least as much common sense in disparaging love as in setting it up as
a panacea. Even the mercy and loving-kindness of Shelley do not hold good
as a universal law of conduct: Shelley himself makes extremely short
work of Jupiter, just as Siegfried does of Fafnir, Mime, and Wotan; and
the fact that Prometheus is saved from doing the destructive part of
his work by the intervention of that very nebulous personification of
Eternity called Demogorgon, does not in the least save the situation,
because, flatly, there is no such person as Demogorgon, and if
Prometheus does not pull down Jupiter himself, no one else will. It
would be exasperating, if it were not so funny, to see these poets
leading their heroes through blood and destruction to the conclusion
that, as Browning's David puts it (David of all people!), "All's Love;
yet all's Law."

Certainly it is clear enough that such love as that implied by
Siegfried's first taste of fear as he cuts through the mailed coat of
the sleeping figure on the mountain, and discovers that it is a woman;
by her fierce revolt against being touched by him when his terror gives
way to ardor; by his manly transports of victory; and by the womanly
mixture of rapture and horror with which she abandons herself to the
passion which has seized on them both, is an experience which it is much
better, like the vast majority of us, never to have passed through, than
to allow it to play more than a recreative holiday part in our lives. It
did not play a very large part in Wagner's own laborious life, and does
not occupy more than two scenes of The Ring. Tristan and Isolde, wholly
devoted to it, is a poem of destruction and death. The Mastersingers,
a work full of health, fun and happiness, contains not a single bar
of love music that can be described as passionate: the hero of it is
a widower who cobbles shoes, writes verses, and contents himself with
looking on at the sweetheartings of his customers. Parsifal makes an end
of it altogether. The truth is that the love panacea in Night Falls On
The Gods and in the last act of Siegfried is a survival of the first
crude operatic conception of the story, modified by an anticipation of
Wagner's later, though not latest, conception of love as the fulfiller
of our Will to Live and consequently our reconciler to night and death.




NOT LOVE, BUT LIFE

The only faith which any reasonable disciple can gain from The Ring is
not in love, but in life itself as a tireless power which is continually
driving onward and upward--not, please observe, being beckoned or drawn
by Das Ewig Weibliche or any other external sentimentality, but growing
from within, by its own inexplicable energy, into ever higher and
higher forms of organization, the strengths and the needs of which are
continually superseding the institutions which were made to fit our
former requirements. When your Bakoonins call out for the demolition of
all these venerable institutions, there is no need to fly into a panic
and lock them up in prison whilst your parliament is bit by bit doing
exactly what they advised you to do. When your Siegfrieds melt down the
old weapons into new ones, and with disrespectful words chop in twain
the antiquated constable's staves in the hands of their elders, the end
of the world is no nearer than it was before. If human nature, which
is the highest organization of life reached on this planet, is really
degenerating, then human society will decay; and no panic-begotten penal
measures can possibly save it: we must, like Prometheus, set to work to
make new men instead of vainly torturing old ones. On the other hand, if
the energy of life is still carrying human nature to higher and higher
levels, then the more young people shock their elders and deride and
discard their pet institutions the better for the hopes of the world,
since the apparent growth of anarchy is only the measure of the rate of
improvement. History, as far as we are capable of history (which is
not saying much as yet), shows that all changes from crudity of social
organization to complexity, and from mechanical agencies in government
to living ones, seem anarchic at first sight. No doubt it is natural
to a snail to think that any evolution which threatens to do away with
shells will result in general death from exposure. Nevertheless, the
most elaborately housed beings today are born not only without houses on
their backs but without even fur or feathers to clothe them.




ANARCHISM NO PANACEA

One word of warning to those who may find themselves attracted by
Siegfried's Anarchism, or, if they prefer a term with more respectable
associations, his neo-Protestantism. Anarchism, as a panacea, is just as
hopeless as any other panacea, and will still be so even if we breed
a race of perfectly benevolent men. It is true that in the sphere of
thought, Anarchism is an inevitable condition of progressive
evolution. A nation without Freethinkers--that is, without intellectual
Anarchists--will share the fate of China. It is also true that our
criminal law, based on a conception of crime and punishment which is
nothing but our vindictiveness and cruelty in a virtuous disguise, is
an unmitigated and abominable nuisance, bound to be beaten out of
us finally by the mere weight of our experience of its evil and
uselessness. But it will not be replaced by anarchy. Applied to the
industrial or political machinery of modern society, anarchy must always
reduce itself speedily to absurdity. Even the modified form of anarchy
on which modern civilization is based: that is, the abandonment
of industry, in the name of individual liberty, to the upshot of
competition for personal gain between private capitalists, is a
disastrous failure, and is, by the mere necessities of the case, giving
way to ordered Socialism. For the economic rationale of this, I must
refer disciples of Siegfried to a tract from my hand published by the
Fabian Society and entitled The Impossibilities of Anarchism, which
explains why, owing to the physical constitution of our globe, society
cannot effectively organize the production of its food, clothes and
housing, nor distribute them fairly and economically on any anarchic
plan: nay, that without concerting our social action to a much higher
degree than we do at present we can never get rid of the wasteful and
iniquitous welter of a little riches and a deal of poverty which current
political humbug calls our prosperity and civilization. Liberty is an
excellent thing; but it cannot begin until society has paid its daily
debt to Nature by first earning its living. There is no liberty before
that except the liberty to live at somebody else's expense, a liberty
much sought after nowadays, since it is the criterion of gentility, but
not wholesome from the point of view of the common weal.




SIEGFRIED CONCLUDED

In returning now to the adventures of Siegfried there is little more
to be described except the finale of an opera. Siegfried, having passed
unharmed through the fire, wakes Brynhild and goes through all the
fancies and ecstasies of love at first sight in a duet which ends with
an apostrophe to "leuchtende Liebe, lachender Tod!", which has been
romantically translated into "Love that illumines, laughing at Death,"
whereas it really identifies enlightening love and laughing death as
involving each other so closely as to be usually one and the same thing.




NIGHT FALLS ON THE GODS

PROLOGUE

Die Gottrerdammerung begins with an elaborate prologue. The three Norns
sit in the night on Brynhild's mountain top spinning their thread of
destiny, and telling the story of Wotan's sacrifice of his eye, and
of his breaking off a bough from the World Ash to make a heft for his
spear, also how the tree withered after suffering that violence. They
have also some fresher news to discuss. Wotan, on the breaking of his
spear by Siegfried, has called all his heroes to cut down the withered
World Ash and stack its faggots in a mighty pyre about Valhalla. Then,
with his broken spear in his hand, he has seated himself in state in
the great hall, with the Gods and Heroes assembled about him as if
in council, solemnly waiting for the end. All this belongs to the old
legendary materials with which Wagner began The Ring.

The tale is broken by the thread snapping in the hands of the third
Norn; for the hour has arrived when man has taken his destiny in his
own hands to shape it for himself, and no longer bows to circumstance,
environment, necessity (which he now freely wills), and all the rest of
the inevitables. So the Norns recognize that the world has no further
use for them, and sink into the earth to return to the First Mother.
Then the day dawns; and Siegfried and Brynhild come, and have another
duet. He gives her his ring; and she gives him her horse. Away then he
goes in search of more adventures; and she watches him from her crag
until he disappears. The curtain falls; but we can still hear the
trolling of his horn, and the merry clatter of his horse's shoes
trotting gaily down the valley. The sound is lost in the grander rhythm
of the Rhine as he reaches its banks. We hear again an echo of the
lament of the Rhine maidens for the ravished gold; and then, finally, a
new strain, which does not surge like the mighty flood of the river, but
has an unmistakable tramp of hardy men and a strong land flavor about
it. And on this the opera curtain at last goes up--for please remember
that all that has gone before is only the overture.

The First Act

We now understand the new tramping strain. We are in the Rhineside hall
of the Gibichungs, in the presence of King Gunther, his sister Gutrune,
and Gunther's grim half brother Hagen, the villain of the piece. Gunther
is a fool, and has for Hagen's intelligence the respect a fool always
has for the brains of a scoundrel. Feebly fishing for compliments, he
appeals to Hagen to pronounce him a fine fellow and a glory to the
race of Gibich. Hagen declares that it is impossible to contemplate
him without envy, but thinks it a pity that he has not yet found a
wife glorious enough for him. Gunther doubts whether so extraordinary
a person can possibly exist. Hagen then tells him of Brynhild and her
rampart of fire; also of Siegfried. Gunther takes this rather in bad
part, since not only is he afraid of the fire, but Siegfried, according
to Hagen, is not, and will therefore achieve this desirable match
himself. But Hagen points out that since Siegfried is riding about
in quest of adventures, he will certainly pay an early visit to the
renowned chief of the Gibichungs. They can then give him a philtre which
will make him fall in love with Gutrune and forget every other woman he
has yet seen.

Gunther is transported with admiration of Hagen's cunning when he takes
in this plan; and he has hardly assented to it when Siegfried, with
operatic opportuneness, drops in just as Hagen expected, and is duly
drugged into the heartiest love for Gutrune and total oblivion of
Brynhild and his own past. When Gunther declares his longing for the
bride who lies inaccessible within a palisade of flame, Siegfried at
once offers to undertake the adventure for him. Hagen then explains
to both of them that Siegfried can, after braving the fire, appear to
Brynhild in the semblance of Gunther through the magic of the wishing
cap (or Tarnhelm, as it is called throughout The Ring), the use of which
Siegfried now learns for the first time. It is of course part of the
bargain that Gunther shall give his sister to Siegfried in marriage.
On that they swear blood-brotherhood; and at this opportunity the old
operatic leaven breaks out amusingly in Wagner. With tremendous exordium
of brass, the tenor and baritone go at it with a will, showing off
the power of their voices, following each other in canonic imitation,
singing together in thirds and sixths, and finishing with a lurid
unison, quite in the manner of Ruy Gomez and Ernani, or Othello and
Iago. Then without further ado Siegfried departs on his expedition,
taking Gunther with him to the foot of the mountain, and leaving Hagen
to guard the hall and sing a very fine solo which has often figured in
the programs of the Richter concerts, explaining that his interest in
the affair is that Siegfried will bring back the Ring, and that he,
Hagen, will presently contrive to possess himself of that Ring and
become Plutonic master of the world.

And now it will be asked how does Hagen know all about the Plutonic
empire; and why was he able to tell Gunther about Brynhild and
Siegfried, and to explain to Siegfried the trick of the Tarnhelm. The
explanation is that though Hagen's mother was the mother of Gunther, his
father was not the illustrious Gibich, but no less a person than our old
friend Alberic, who, like Wotan, has begotten a son to do for him what
he cannot do for himself.

In the above incidents, those gentle moralizers who find the serious
philosophy of the music dramas too terrifying for them, may allegorize
pleasingly on the philtre as the maddening chalice of passion which,
once tasted, causes the respectable man to forget his lawfully wedded
wife and plunge into adventures which eventually lead him headlong to
destruction.

We now come upon a last relic of the tragedy of Wotan. Returning
to Brynhild's mountain, we find her visited by her sister Valkyrie
Valtrauta, who has witnessed Wotan's solemn preparations with terror.
She repeats to Brynhild the account already given by the Norns. Clinging
in anguish to Wotan's knees, she has heard him mutter that were the ring
returned to the daughters of the deep Rhine, both Gods and world would
be redeemed from that stage curse off Alberic's in The Rhine Gold. On
this she has rushed on her warhorse through the air to beg Brynhild to
give the Rhine back its ring. But this is asking Woman to give up love
for the sake of Church and State. She declares that she will see them
both perish first; and Valtrauta returns to Valhalla in despair. Whilst
Brynhild is watching the course of the black thundercloud that marks her
sister's flight, the fires of Loki again flame high round the mountain;
and the horn of Siegfried is heard as he makes his way through them.
But the man who now appears wears the Tarnhelm: his voice is a strange
voice: his figure is the unknown one of the king of the Gibichungs. He
tears the ring from her finger, and, claiming her as his wife, drives
her into the cave without pity for her agony of horror, and sets Nothung
between them in token of his loyalty to the friend he is impersonating.
No explanation of this highway robbery of the ring is offered. Clearly,
this Siegfried is not the Siegfried of the previous drama.

The Second Act

In the second act we return to the hall of Gibich, where Hagen, in the
last hours of that night, still sits, his spear in his hand, and his
shield beside him. At his knees crouches a dwarfish spectre, his father
Alberic, still full of his old grievances against Wotan, and urging his
son in his dreams to win back the ring for him. This Hagen swears to
do; and as the apparition of his father vanishes, the sun rises and
Siegfried suddenly comes from the river bank tucking into his belt the
Tarnhelm, which has transported him from the mountain like the enchanted
carpet of the Arabian tales. He describes his adventures to Gutrune
until Gunther's boat is seen approaching, when Hagen seizes a cowhorn
and calls the tribesmen to welcome their chief and his bride. It is most
exhilarating, this colloquy with the startled and hastily armed clan,
ending with a thundering chorus, the drums marking the time with mighty
pulses from dominant to tonic, much as Rossini would have made them do
if he had been a pupil of Beethoven's.

A terrible scene follows. Gunther leads his captive bride straight into
the presence of Siegfried, whom she claims as her husband by the ring,
which she is astonished to see on his finger: Gunther, as she supposes,
having torn it from her the night before. Turning on Gunther, she says
"Since you took that ring from me, and married me with it, tell him of
your right to it; and make him give it back to you." Gunther stammers,
"The ring! I gave him no ring--er--do you know him?" The rejoinder is
obvious. "Then where are you hiding the ring that you had from me?"
Gunther's confusion enlightens her; and she calls Siegfried trickster
and thief to his face. In vain he declares that he got the ring from no
woman, but from a dragon whom he slew; for he is manifestly puzzled;
and she, seizing her opportunity, accuses him before the clan of having
played Gunther false with her.

Hereupon we have another grandiose operatic oath, Siegfried attesting
his innocence on Hagen's spear, and Brynhild rushing to the footlights
and thrusting him aside to attest his guilt, whilst the clansmen call
upon their gods to send down lightnings and silence the perjured. The
gods do not respond; and Siegfried, after whispering to Gunther that the
Tarnhelm seems to have been only half effectual after all, laughs his
way out of the general embarrassment and goes off merrily to prepare for
his wedding, with his arm round Gutrune's waist, followed by the
clan. Gunther, Hagen and Brynhild are left together to plot operatic
vengeance. Brynhild, it appears, has enchanted Siegfried in such a
fashion that no weapon can hurt him. She has, however, omitted to
protect his back, since it is impossible that he should ever turn that
to a foe. They agree accordingly that on the morrow a great hunt shall
take place, at which Hagen shall thrust his spear into the hero's
vulnerable back. The blame is to be laid on the tusk of a wild boar.
Gunther, being a fool, is remorseful about his oath of blood-brotherhood
and about his sister's bereavement, without having the strength of mind
to prevent the murder. The three burst into a herculean trio, similar
in conception to that of the three conspirators in Un Ballo in Maschera;
and the act concludes with a joyous strain heralding the appearance of
Siegfried's wedding procession, with strewing of flowers, sacrificing to
the gods, and carrying bride and bridegroom in triumph.

It will be seen that in this act we have lost all connection with the
earlier drama. Brynhild is not only not the Brynhild of The Valkyries,
she is the Hiordis of Ibsen, a majestically savage woman, in whom
jealousy and revenge are intensified to heroic proportions. That is the
inevitable theatrical treatment of the murderous heroine of the Saga.
Ibsen's aim in The Vikings was purely theatrical, and not, as in his
later dramas, also philosophically symbolic. Wagner's aim in Siegfried's
Death was equally theatrical, and not, as it afterwards became in the
dramas of which Siegfried's antagonist Wotan is the hero, likewise
philosophically symbolic. The two master-dramatists therefore produce
practically the same version of Brynhild. Thus on the second evening of
The Ring we see Brynhild in the character of the truth-divining instinct
in religion, cast into an enchanted slumber and surrounded by the fires
of hell lest she should overthrow a Church corrupted by its alliance
with government. On the fourth evening, we find her swearing a malicious
lie to gratify her personal jealousy, and then plotting a treacherous
murder with a fool and a scoundrel. In the original draft of Siegfried's
Death, the incongruity is carried still further by the conclusion, at
which the dead Brynhild, restored to her godhead by Wotan, and again a
Valkyrie, carries the slain Siegfried to Valhalla to live there happily
ever after with its pious heroes.

As to Siegfried himself, he talks of women, both in this second act and
the next, with the air of a man of the world. "Their tantrums," he
says, "are soon over." Such speeches do not belong to the novice of the
preceding drama, but to the original Siegfried's Tod, with its leading
characters sketched on the ordinary romantic lines from the old Sagas,
and not yet reminted as the original creations of Wagner's genius whose
acquaintance we have made on the two previous evenings. The very
title "Siegfried's Death" survives as a strong theatrical point in the
following passage. Gunther, in his rage and despair, cries, "Save me,
Hagen: save my honor and thy mother's who bore us both." "Nothing can
save thee," replies Hagen: "neither brain nor hand, but SIEGFRIED'S
DEATH." And Gunther echoes with a shudder, "SIEGFRIED'S DEATH!"




A WAGNERIAN NEWSPAPER CONTROVERSY

The devotion which Wagner's work inspires has been illustrated lately
in a public correspondence on this very point. A writer in The Daily
Telegraph having commented on the falsehood uttered by Brynhild in
accusing Siegfried of having betrayed Gunther with her, a correspondence
in defence of the beloved heroine was opened in The Daily Chronicle. The
imputation of falsehood to Brynhild was strongly resented and combated,
in spite of the unanswerable evidence of the text. It was contended that
Brynhild's statement must be taken as establishing the fact that she
actually was ravished by somebody whom she believed to be Siegfried,
and that since this somebody cannot have been Siegfried, he being as
incapable of treachery to Gunther as she of falsehood, it must have been
Gunther himself after a second exchange of personalities not mentioned
in the text. The reply to this--if so obviously desperate a hypothesis
needs a reply--is that the text is perfectly explicit as to Siegfried,
disguised as Gunther, passing the night with Brynhild with Nothung
dividing them, and in the morning bringing her down the mountain THROUGH
THE FIRE (an impassable obstacle to Gunther) and there transporting
himself in a single breath, by the Tarnhelm's magic, back to the hall
of the Gibichungs, leaving the real Gunther to bring Brynhild down
the river after him. One controversialist actually pleaded for the
expedition occupying two nights, on the second of which the alleged
outrage might have taken place. But the time is accounted for to the
last minute: it all takes place during the single night watch of
Hagen. There is no possible way out of the plain fact that Brynhild's
accusation is to her own knowledge false; and the impossible ways just
cited are only interesting as examples of the fanatical worship
which Wagner and his creations have been able to inspire in minds of
exceptional power and culture.

More plausible was the line taken by those who admitted the falsehood.
Their contention was that when Wotan deprived Brynhild of her Godhead,
he also deprived her of her former high moral attributes; so that
Siegfried's kiss awakened an ordinary mortal jealous woman. But a
goddess can become mortal and jealous without plunging at once into
perjury and murder. Besides, this explanation involves the sacrifice of
the whole significance of the allegory, and the reduction of The Ring to
the plane of a child's conception of The Sleeping Beauty. Whoever does
not understand that, in terms of The Ring philosophy, a change from
godhead to humanity is a step higher and not a degradation, misses the
whole point of The Ring. It is precisely because the truthfulness of
Brynhild is proof against Wotan's spells that he has to contrive the
fire palisade with Loki, to protect the fictions and conventions of
Valhalla against her.

The only tolerable view is the one supported by the known history of
The Ring, and also, for musicians of sufficiently fine judgment, by the
evidence of the scores; of which more anon. As a matter of fact Wagner
began, as I have said, with Siegfried's Death. Then, wanting to develop
the idea of Siegfried as neo-Protestant, he went on to The Young
Siegfried. As a Protestant cannot be dramatically projected without a
pontifical antagonist. The Young Siegfried led to The Valkyries, and
that again to its preface The Rhine Gold (the preface is always written
after the book is finished). Finally, of course, the whole was revised.
The revision, if carried out strictly, would have involved the cutting
out of Siegfried's Death, now become inconsistent and superfluous; and
that would have involved, in turn, the facing of the fact that The Ring
was no longer a Niblung epic, and really demanded modern costumes, tall
hats for Tarnhelms, factories for Nibelheims, villas for Valhallas, and
so on--in short, a complete confession of the extent to which the old
Niblung epic had become the merest pretext and name directory in the
course of Wagner's travail. But, as Wagner's most eminent English
interpreter once put it to me at Bayreuth between the acts of Night
Falls On The Gods, the master wanted to "Lohengrinize" again after his
long abstention from opera; and Siegfried's Death (first sketched in
1848, the year before the rising in Dresden and the subsequent events
which so deepened Wagner's sense of life and the seriousness of art)
gave him exactly the libretto he required for that outbreak of the
old operatic Adam in him. So he changed it into Die Gotterdammerung,
retaining the traditional plot of murder and jealousy, and with it,
necessarily, his original second act, in spite of the incongruity of its
Siegfried and Brynhild with the Siegfried and Brynhild of the allegory.
As to the legendary matter about the world-ash and the destruction of
Valhalla by Loki, it fitted in well enough; for though, allegorically,
the blow by which Siegfried breaks the god's spear is the end of Wotan
and of Valhalla, those who do not see the allegory, and take the story
literally, like children, are sure to ask what becomes of Wotan after
Siegfried gets past him up the mountain; and to this question the old
tale told in Night Falls On The Gods is as good an answer as another.
The very senselessness of the scenes of the Norns and of Valtrauta in
relation to the three foregoing dramas, gives them a highly effective
air of mystery; and no one ventures to challenge their consequentiality,
because we are all more apt to pretend to understand great works of art
than to confess that the meaning (if any) has escaped us. Valtrauta,
however, betrays her irrelevance by explaining that the gods can
be saved by the restoration of the ring to the Rhine maidens. This,
considered as part of the previous allegory, is nonsense; so that even
this scene, which has a more plausible air of organic connection with
The Valkyries than any other in Night Falls On The Gods, is as clearly
part of a different and earlier conception as the episode which
concludes it, in which Siegfried actually robs Brynhild of her ring,
though he has no recollection of having given it to her. Night Falls On
The Gods, in fact, was not even revised into any real coherence with the
world-poem which sprang from it; and that is the authentic solution of
all the controversies which have arisen over it.

The Third Act

The hunting party comes off duly. Siegfried strays from it and meets
the Rhine maidens, who almost succeed in coaxing the ring from him. He
pretends to be afraid of his wife; and they chaff him as to her beating
him and so forth; but when they add that the ring is accursed and will
bring death upon him, he discloses to them, as unconsciously as Julius
Caesar disclosed it long ago, that secret of heroism, never to let your
life be shaped by fear of its end. [*] So he keeps the ring; and they leave
him to his fate. The hunting party now finds him; and they all sit
down together to make a meal by the river side, Siegfried telling them
meanwhile the story of his adventures. When he approaches the subject of
Brynhild, as to whom his memory is a blank, Hagen pours an antidote
to the love philtre into his drinking horn, whereupon, his memory
returning, he proceeds to narrate the incident of the fiery mountain, to
Gunther's intense mortification. Hagen then plunges his spear into the
back of Siegfried, who falls dead on his shield, but gets up again,
after the old operatic custom, to sing about thirty bars to his love
before allowing himself to be finally carried off to the strains of the
famous Trauermarsch.

     * "We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of
     the word. The fear of the end is the source of all
     lovelessness; and this fear is generated only when love
     begins to wane. How came it that this loves the highest
     blessedness to all things living, was so far lost sight of
     by the human race that at last it came to this: all that
     mankind did, ordered, and established, was conceived only in
     fear of the end? My poem sets this forth."--Wagner to
     Roeckel, 25th Jan. 1854.