The Rise of Intellect in Wagner’s Ring (1971)

The Rise of Intellect in Wagner’s Ring S. K. Land I When Brünnhilde argues with her master in Die Walküre Il.ii, Wotan makes an angry attempt to silence her: Was bist du, als meines Willens blind wählende Kür?— 1 From the orchestra the horns, bassoons, and lower strings make fortissimo pronouncement of the emphatic motif associated with Wotan’s spear, the symbol of his authority. The god is attempt­ ing to assert control over the daughter, best loved of the nine, who calls herself his “will” {Wille). As Wagner argued at length in Oper und. Drama, the virtue of Stabreim is its ability to establish through phonology associa­ tions or antitheses between particular words and concepts. (Stabreim entails a use of language akin to music in so far as it allows the word to derive meaning from its place in a phonetic pattern rather as the musical note derives meaning from its place in a tonic pattern.) It is a verse form which, in Wagner’s hands, demands that particular attention be paid not only to each word but also to each root-syllable. By means of the Stabreim, Wotan’s words to his rebellious daughter here bring to a focal point certain crucial issues of the drama. The phrasing and rhetoric of Wotan’s question echo Brünnhilde ’s earlier plea: wer—bin ich, wär’ich dein Wille nicht? (p. 93) But there is every difference between Brünnhilde’s conception of her task as the exercise of free choice in natural harmony with Wotan’s desires, and Wotan’s description of the Walküre as the “blind” instrument of his will. Wotan is the maiden’s master, but he goes beyond the rights of his mastery in trying to reduce her to a mindless automaton. For by nature the Walküre is a re21 22 Comparative Drama sponsible agent. The very name Walküre, or Valkyrie, is an Old Norse word combining valr = slain with kyrja = chooser.2 The element kyrja, a cognate of the archaic German Kür which Wotan uses here as an epithet for Brünnhilde, becomes super­ fluous if the “choice” is to be dictated. When Wotan uses his conscious authority to constrain a hitherto unconscious function he establishes a paradox. The Walküre must choose freely, for in her freedom of action lies the true freedom of Wotan’s will. Her choice is naturally his own, as Brünnhilde well knows, and when Wotan binds her in sleep it is really his own freedom of action which is anaesthetized. He has chosen to limit his own power of choice.3 The appearance of the concept of will here and elsewhere in Die Walküre and in Siegfried should not, at this stage, lead us to a consideration of Schopenhauer’s terminology. All four of the Ring poems were complete by 1853 when they were privately printed, but it was not until the late summer of 1854 that Wagner first encountered Schopenhauer’s work and read Die Welt als Wille und VorstellungA At the time of writing the poems, al­ though as eclectic as ever in his philosophy, Wagner was much influenced by the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, and in particular by his Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit.5 In those years Feuerbach’s name was closely associated with ideologies of social reform and revolution. It is to him, and to the ideas for a mythology which Wagner derived from him, that we must turn for a further explanation of Wotan’s use of the word “Wille.” The concept of Mythos set out in the second part of Oper und Drama (published 1851) is indebted to Feuerbach’s ideas of social necessity and the primacy of sensation. The Mythos, Wagner writes, exists as “a mere image formed by Phantasy” in the mind of “the Folk.” It is necessary that the image be realized in terms of sensible reality, and this realization is the task of art. Of art Wagner offers a boldly narcissistic definition: “Art (Kunst), by the very meaning of the term, is nothing but the fulfilment of a longing to know (kennen) oneself in the...