Siegfried: The Ring Comes of Age
By Thomas May

The Ring spans a large portion of Wagner's creative life and thought. Like a richly stratified rock formation, Siegfried is where the various phases layered within the cycle are most clearly revealed, coexisting side by side.

Wagner initially conceived the Ring in a spirit of revolution, with Siegfried front and center as its protagonist. He was to be the iconic hero of progress: "The man of the future," according to the composer, "whom we desire and long for but who cannot be made by us." The Revolutions of 1848 and 1849 that swept through Europe profoundly inspired Wagner's train of thought at this earliest stage of the project. He turned his focus to the dramatically supercharged tale of Siegfried's tragic betrayal and downfall, followed by Brünnhilde's redeeming sacrifice (the events now contained in the Ring's final opera, Götterdämmerung). Wagner hoped this would illustrate the possibility for revolutionary transformation of a society corrupted by greed and abusive power. The overthrow of the old order of the gods-as brought about by the love of Siegfried and Brünnhilde-was to symbolize this revolution.

As usual with Wagner, things didn't quite work out according to plan. The stand-alone work as he first envisioned it grew into a massive cycle of four intertwined operas, fed by the likewise evolving preoccupations of the omnivoracious Wagner. His outlook, moreover, shifted from the firebrand optimism that had triggered the project . It began to encompass not only ideas of radical artistic reform but a new, starkly contrasting philosophical attitude about the ultimate questions-an attitude that was resignedly pessimistic in temperament. The Ring served as a kind of sustaining Holy Grail in which Wagner gathered all his deepest intuitions.

Siegfried encapsulates the Ring's extraordinary heterogeneity. It marks the initial "cell division" of the cycle from one into multiple operas. Here Wagner first realized he could intensify the stakes of Götterdämmerung (which, at the time, he called Siegfried's Death) by showing his hero's youthful exploits onstage in a prelude opera-instead of merely recapitulating them as pre-existing facts. The idea was to take a lighter-spirited, comic tack that would have "the enormous advantage of acquainting the audience with the weighty myth in a playful manner, just as the fairy tale does with children," as the composer wrote. For all its darkly brooding atmospheres, Siegfried remains the Ring's hidden comedy: in the traditional sense of the protagonist overcoming obstacles and winning his beloved, but also in the colloquial sense-albeit with a tendency toward black humor.

This comic spirit (concentrated in the first two acts) dovetails neatly with the fairy tale recounted by the Grimm Brothers about a boy "who went forth to learn what fear is." He remains unable to acquire this emotion but at last, when he least expects it, encounters something that makes him shudder. Wagner was elated to find a way to graft this humorous fairy tale onto the legendary saga of the fearless, dragon-slaying hero who walks through a wall of fire. It again represented something of the "playful manner" of working his audience into the loftier subject matter at the heart of the opera. The latter includes both the hero's Oedipal defiance that shatters Wotan's power and the transfiguring step in Siegfried's education: his disturbing but ultimately liberating discovery of love.

Since Wagner had fused the tragedy of Siegfried with the mythic realm of the gods and their predicament-unifying their fates via the potent symbol of the corrupting ring of gold-these universes crisscross throughout the opera. Wotan, appearing in his earthly guise as the Wanderer, arrives to cast a powerful shadow before the hero enacts each of his climactic feats: the reforging of the sword Notung, the slaying of the monstrous Fafner and the ascent of the fire-enshrouded magic mountain to reach Brünnhilde.

And the two planes intersect at one of the most pivotal moments in the cycle-pivotal in structural and emotional terms-when Siegfried avenges his father Siegmund's death by splitting Wotan's spear with the same sword that the god had caused to fragment. This of course mirrors the overwhelmingly tragic climax of Die Walküre in reverse; it, in turn, foreshadows yet another tragic reversal (the moment when Siegfried himself is murdered by the analogous spear that Hagen wields in Götterdämmerung). But for the time being, the human and divine realms, having intersected, continue on in opposite directions: Wotan toward tragic acceptance of the end of the old order and Siegfried, bursting with youthful, reckless joy, toward new experience.

Wagner intended the Ring to operate as a "synthesis of the arts," but the story that it unfolds is itself a stunningly inventive synthesis from disparate sources, braided together out of ancient Nordic myth, medieval German epic, saga and fairy tale, along with modern folklore studies and commentary (which often provided Wagner's entrée into this material). In Siegfried-less convincingly at some points than others-we find this composite process at work: comedy and fairy tale inhabit the same world as cosmic myth, with overtones drawn from Greek tragedy (the Sophoclean encounter between Siegfried and the Wanderer).

There's yet another level besides that of genre on which Siegfried is the most hybrid part of the Ring. It stands alone by virtue of its long musical gestation, bridging Wagner's earlier and late styles. He began composing Siegfried immediately on the heels of Die Walküre, in September 1856, working his way through most of the second act by the following June. Up to that point, Wagner still thought it possible to complete the entire Ring within a few years. This wasn't an unreasonably optimistic estimate: After all, he had composed the cycle's first two operas and the two Siegfried acts at feverish pace-in less than four years.

Yet for a number of reasons-the increasingly dim prospect of getting the Ring performed and quite likely the fear of burnout-Wagner decided to leave his young Siegfried "beneath a linden tree," as he wrote to Franz Liszt, "in his beautiful forest solitude." He reluctantly confined him to his desk, "under lock and key, as though I were burying him alive." A bout of separation anxiety brought Wagner back to the score to finish his draft of Act Two in August; he then returned to complete orchestration of the first two acts in 1864. Otherwise, the hero, like Brünnhilde, was left to hibernate. A gap of 12 years away from the Ring intervened, during which Wagner explored strikingly new territory and created Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger (and also substantially overhauled his early opera Tannhäuser for a major Paris revival).

Not until 1869 did he begin to tackle Act Three, finishing the entire score in 1871. The musical composition of Siegfried was thus spread over nearly 15 years-far longer than was the case for the other three Ring operas. This long interval results in a stunning transformation of style apparent throughout the third act and readily discernible in the more complex, intricate textures of Wagner's orchestral fabric. He now enriches the sound world of the earlier Ring operas-which can be alternately muscular and vividly colorful in tone painting-with a subtler, more ambiguous palette of harmonies and timbres (via Tristan) and a riper opulence (the example of Die Meistersinger). Even more, Wagner has by now abandoned his more dogmatic theoretical strictures about the correct rapport between music and drama, with a decided tilt toward the musical side of the equation.

At the same time, Siegfried's first two acts benefit from the increasing fluency with which Wagner was deploying his new musical system by the mid-1850s, after several years of intense immersion in it. This portion of Siegfried recalls much of the world of Das Rheingold (particularly the latter's third scene, in Nibelheim), but now enhanced by a more complex, psychologically nuanced manipulation of its themes that is no longer limited to the linear exposition of the earlier opera.

Consider the prelude to the first act, which recombines the relevant motifs to present a shockingly close-up profile of the workings of Mime's mind. As he weighs the various factors of the dragon, the treasure it guards, his frustration at trying to repair the sword, the music broods. We've moved from the timeless "objectivity" of the Rheingold prelude to Mime's distinct point of view, even his subconscious. Similarly, after his unfortunate performance in the Wanderer's riddle game, the familiar fire music flares up to terrifying proportions, getting us right under Mime's skin as he cowers with an even more substantial reason to be fearful. It's like a reversal of the passages in Die Walküre where external nature mirrored emotions (the storm of Wotan's wrath): Here Mime's internal emotions mimic the forces of nature.

Throughout Act Two, Wagner effortlessly shifts among the iridescent repertoire of musical contours the Ring has thus far made available-from the shadowy, terrifying inertia of its prelude and the Nibelungs' squabbling to nature's healing presence in the Forest Murmurs, in which the melody of the Woodbird carries ambivalent reminders of the Rhinemaidens' lost "golden age." Siegfried's sudden ability to hear Mime's intentions-to distinguish appearance from reality-becomes a sort of metaphor for Wagner's orchestra in the Ring, which opens up a new plane of meaning to suggest what is "really" happening on stage. (During his only stay in London, in 1892, Mahler conducted some 18 performances of Siegfried. Some hear a prefiguration of his own tendency to juxtapose highly contrasting musical textures in what critic Derrick Puffett terms the "kaleidoscopic effect" of this second act.)

While the slaying of Fafner is the climax of the act and essential to Siegfried's rite of passage, his chilling murder of Mime introduces a deeply unsettling rupture. Despite his treachery, Mime's plans for the power he counted on from the ring were never so menacing as those of Alberich, and his strong characterization makes us reluctant to see Mime written out of the cycle. The argument that the Nibelungs are merely foils intended as caricatures-a perverse expression of Wagner's own indisputable anti-Semitism that poisons his art-is as reductive as the claim that Siegfried epitomizes brute, unthinking nationalism. Such discussions tend to ignore the many elements that don't accord with such a black-and-white interpretation. (Think of Hunding-the very image of the tribal "Volk"-who is a decidedly negative force in his self-serving appeal to blind convention.) With its deconstruction of the desire for world domination, the Ring's moral universe is far too complex to serve as any kind of propaganda.

Mime's disappearance forces Siegfried to face his loneliness. At last he is ready to move on from his narcissistic search for identity in reflections to the maturing that is dramatized in Act Three, where Siegfried finally does learn fear as the necessary prelude to love: His fear begins as the awakening sexual desire that had been dormant, just as Brünnhilde slept (and we recall from the opening scene of Das Rheingold how closely linked are desire and danger). Perhaps Wagner sensed that he needed to allow his own musical resources to ripen so he would be ready to convey the extraordinary transformations around which this act revolves: the thrusting aside of Wotan's old, corrupt order through Siegfried's discovery of love and through Brünnhilde's awakening to her own humanity.

The music depicting that awakening is of an overwhelming, ecstatic beauty: it signals a mutual process for both protagonists. Wagner introduces a new group of lyrical themes unrelated to the familiar network of leitmotifs. The latter, meanwhile, allow for complex associations between what the characters are experiencing inwardly and the objective world of the Ring: the fire once again becomes metaphor for an internal subjective state-the chaos of desire-and the fear this causes is clear from the sudden intrusion of the dragon's motif.

As the love music at last wins out, it casts aside the night that Tristan had associated with eros in favor of the sun. Even Tristan's alliance of love with death is spun into a defiant optimism-"enlightening love, laughing death!"-that presses on from the gloomy world Wotan has left Brünnhilde and Siegfried to inherit. It is as if Wagner (now approaching his 60s) had allowed himself to access the revolutionary fervor of long ago. Like the triumphal end of Das Rheingold, this attitude will prove to be premature-its extrovert C major to be countered by the pungent minor chord that opens Götterdämmerung. But set against the gods' hollow pomposity, the illusion here at least is one of joy that for now rings true.

Thomas May writes about the arts and is a frequent contributor to LA Opera programs.