The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Richard Wagner · Ein Bühnenfestspiel für drei Tage und einen Vorabend, a stage festival play for three days and a preliminary evening · four dramas, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, scored as one work · words and music by Wagner, to his own poem in German · about thirty roles, a large orchestra and a chorus in the last evening · about fourteen to fifteen and a half hours of music in performance
Mode
Bühnenfestspiel, a stage festival play for three days and a preliminary evening; one music drama across four evenings, without set numbers, carried by a web of motives in the orchestra
Mythos
The gold stolen from the river, the cursed ring, the world-ash cut for the god’s spear, the Norns’ rope that breaks, the maiden ringed by fire, the fearless boy, the dragon, the twilight of the gods; built from the Eddas, the Völsunga saga, the Thidreks saga and the Nibelungenlied
Phase
From before history, in the river, to the last day: a theft and a contract, a god’s free hero shown unfree, a free hero made and destroyed, the gold returned and the gods’ hall in flames; the poem written backward, the music forward
Presentation
Concert music; four dramas, the first in one act of four scenes played without a break, the others in three acts, the last with a prologue; Wagner’s own alliterative German verse, set through-composed; a chorus only in the last evening
Register
From the Rhinemaidens’ play and Mime’s whining to Wotan’s monologue, the annunciation of death, Hagen’s watch and the immolation
Scale
Gods, giants, dwarves and humans; labour, capital, law, the family, the state and the sacred; about thirty roles, four evenings, fourteen to fifteen and a half hours of music
Governing Proposition
A dwarf curses love to take gold from a river, a god takes the ring made from it to pay for his hall, and every power that follows is bought at that price; the god, bound by the treaties that made him lord, can make only heroes who do his will, and comes to will his own end. The wager of the work is that one drama can run from the first cause to the last day across four evenings, carried by an orchestra that remembers what everyone on stage forgets, and close with the gold back in the river.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins before anything has happened. Out of silence the double basses sound a low E flat; a fifth is added above it; then the horns enter one by one, and the sound gathers until the river is moving. The prelude to Das Rheingold is 136 bars long and holds the one chord of E flat major from its first bar to its last. Nothing in it is a theme in the operatic sense. It is a chord set in motion, and the motion is the Rhine. When the curtain rises it is on the river’s depths, and on three Rhinemaidens at play, whose first words are hardly words: “Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle, / walle zur Wiege!”
“Weia! Waga! Surge, you wave, swell to the cradle!” Six of the eight words begin with W.
Alberich, a Nibelung, comes up from below and courts the three, and they mock him. The gold in the river can be made into a ring that gives power over the world, and the price of it is love. He pays the price: “So verfluch’ ich die Liebe!”
“Thus I curse love!” He takes the gold and is gone. The first sounds of the work are play, and its first deed is a renunciation. Everything that follows across four evenings is bought at that price, and the music that carries it grows from the prelude’s one chord: the figure that rose from the river will become Erda, the earth, and, turned downward, the twilight of the gods.
Above, the gods wake before Valhalla, the hall the giants Fasolt and Fafner have built for Wotan, and the fee is Freia. In Nibelheim, Alberich’s enslaved smiths forge his hoard to the rhythm of eighteen tuned anvils; with the ring and the Tarnhelm he is master there, until he is captured and the ring is wrested from him. He curses it: “Wie durch Fluch er mir geriet, / verflucht sei dieser Ring!”
“As it came to me by a curse, cursed be this ring!” The curse works at once, and Fafner kills Fasolt. Erda rises to warn Wotan: “Alles, was ist, endet.”
“All that is, ends.” The gods cross a rainbow into their hall, and below them the Rhinemaidens lament the gold. The preliminary evening has set out the whole cause in one act, played without a break.
Movement II
Die Walküre leaves the gods for a hut. Siegmund, a fugitive, takes shelter in Hunding’s house, where a sword stands in the trunk of an ash, and meets Hunding’s wife, Sieglinde. They are twins, children of the Wälsung line Wotan founded, and Hunding grants the stranger the night under the right of hospitality. In the night the door opens on the spring storm, and Siegmund sings “Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond”
“Winter storms have yielded to the month of bliss”. He draws the sword from the ash, and brother and sister leave as lovers. It is the most human act in the cycle: two fugitives, a hut, a sword, and the alliterative verse at its best.
Act II is the turn of the cycle. Fricka, guardian of marriage, demands Siegmund’s death, and Wotan, bound by the law he keeps, loses the argument with his wife. Alone with Brünnhilde, his daughter, he tells the story the audience saw on the first evening, and changes it as he tells it. He is lord through treaties, and they bind him: “der durch Verträge ich Herr, / den Verträgen bin ich nun Knecht”
“I who am lord through treaties am now the treaties’ slave”. He had wanted a hero who would act freely against the god’s will, and every hero he makes is his own will again: “Zum Ekel find’ ich / ewig nur mich / in allem, was ich erwirke!”
“To my disgust I find only myself, for ever, in all that I bring about!” What he wants now is one thing: “das Ende”
“the end”.
Brünnhilde goes to tell Siegmund he must die: “Siegmund! Sieh auf mich!”
“Siegmund! Look at me!” She offers him Valhalla; he refuses it without Sieglinde; and the goddess disobeys the god. Siegmund is killed all the same. In Act III the Valkyries ride, and Sieglinde, the mother of the hero to come, breaks into the melody that will end the cycle: “O hehrstes Wunder!”
“O most sublime wonder!” Brünnhilde pleads, and Wotan punishes the daughter he loves. His farewell, “Leb’ wohl, du kühnes, herrliches Kind!”
“Farewell, you bold, glorious child!”, ends in the magic fire he sets round her sleep: “Wer meines Speeres / Spitze fürchtet, / durchschreite das Feuer nie!”
“Whoever fears my spear’s point, let him never pass through the fire!”
Movement III
Siegfried opens in Mime’s cave in the forest. Mime is a whining foster-parent to a boy who knows no fear, and he cannot forge the sword the boy needs. The Wanderer comes to the cave and plays a game of riddles with him, and the game tells the audience what it has seen two evenings running. Then Siegfried forges the sword himself: “Nothung! Nothung! Neidliches Schwert!”
“Nothung! Nothung! Coveted sword!” Beside him, against the forging, Mime cooks the poison he means to give him. The act sets the free hero, at last, against the one who raised him.
Act II is the forest, outside Fafner’s cave. The forest murmurs in divided strings; Siegfried kills the dragon; the woodbird sings to him. There Wagner stopped. He had composed the first two acts in 1856 and 1857, and he did not return to the work until 1869. In the twelve years between he composed Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger, and when the music resumes in Act III its style has changed. The seam shows, and it is part of the work.
Act III opens on the Wanderer and Erda. Then the Wanderer bars the way to the fire, and the sword breaks the spear that carries his treaties: the order of contract is broken by the free hero it needed and could not make. Siegfried crosses the fire and finds the sleeper: “Das ist kein Mann!”
“That is no man!” Brünnhilde wakes to the light: “Heil dir, Sonne! Heil dir, Licht!”
“Hail to you, sun! Hail to you, light!” The evening ends in a duet whose last words join what the cycle will not let stay joined: “leuchtende Liebe, lachender Tod!”
“radiant love, laughing death!”
Movement IV
Götterdämmerung was written first. The poem began in November 1848 as Siegfrieds Tod, the death of Siegfried, and the three dramas before it were written afterward, in reverse order, to tell what led to it. In the prologue the three Norns pass the rope of fate between them and ask one another “Weißt du, wie das wird?”
“Do you know how it will be?” The rope breaks. Then dawn on Brünnhilde’s rock, the dawn duet, and Siegfried’s journey down the Rhine in the orchestra alone.
The human world is the Gibichung court on the Rhine, and its counsel is Hagen, a half-brother of the house. Siegfried is given a drug of forgetting and forgets Brünnhilde, and the orchestra remembers her under every line he sings. Hagen keeps watch while the hero rows away: “Hier sitz’ ich zur Wacht”
“Here I sit on watch”, the darkest music in the cycle. Waltraute comes to Brünnhilde with a narration that goes over the ground again. Then the ring is taken from Brünnhilde by the man she woke.
Hagen summons the vassals with steerhorns, and the chorus, silent for three evenings, is heard at last. A double wedding, an oath sworn on a spear and a vengeance trio follow: the forms of grand opera that the earlier evenings had given up, kept because this evening was written first. In Act III the Rhinemaidens meet Siegfried by the river. Hagen gives him the antidote, and Siegfried narrates his life, over the music of the whole cycle, until a spear is in his back. The funeral march follows, built from the motives of the Wälsungs and of the hero’s life: the orchestra tells his story once more, now that he cannot.
Movement V
Brünnhilde has the last word. She orders a pyre, “Starke Scheite / schichtet mir dort”
“Pile up strong logs for me there”, and speaks to the god who made and punished her: “Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott!”
“Rest, rest, you god!” She gives the ring back to the Rhinemaidens and goes into the fire. The Rhine floods its banks; Hagen’s last cry is “Zurück vom Ring!”
“Back from the ring!”; and Valhalla is seen in flames. The last melody the orchestra plays is Sieglinde’s, from the third act of Die Walküre. The work ends where it began, with the gold in the river, and its last word is a memory.
The cycle took twenty-six years from the first poem to the last page of score. Wagner wrote the text backward, Siegfrieds Tod in 1848, Der junge Siegfried in 1851, then Die Walküre and Das Rheingold in 1851 and 1852, and composed the music forward: Rheingold from November 1853, Walküre from 1854 to 1856, the first two acts of Siegfried in 1856 and 1857, then the break, then the work resumed in 1869 and Götterdämmerung completed in full score on 21 November 1874. By order of Ludwig II and against Wagner’s wish, Rheingold and Walküre were given separately in Munich, on 22 September 1869 and 26 June 1870. For the whole he had a theatre built to his design, with a covered, sunken pit, and new instruments, the Wagner tubas, made for its orchestra. He drafted two other endings for Brünnhilde’s last speech, known as the Feuerbach and Schopenhauer endings, and set neither.
The first complete cycle was given at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth on 13, 14, 16 and 17 August 1876, Hans Richter conducting, with Amalie Materna as Brünnhilde, Franz Betz as Wotan and Georg Unger as Siegfried. Wagner was sixty-three, and Wilhelm I was in the audience. There were three cycles that summer, and the deficit kept the Ring from Bayreuth until 1896. Hans von Wolzogen’s guide of 1876 fixed most of the names its motives still carry. Nietzsche turned against it in 1888; Shaw read it as a parable of capital in 1898; Bayreuth served the Nazi state; Wieland Wagner set it on a bare disc from 1951; Solti and John Culshaw recorded it for Decca from 1958 to 1965; Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez placed it in the industrial nineteenth century for the centenary in 1976. What it shows has outlived every use made of it: that power is bought with love, that a contract binds its maker, and that the world remembers what its actors forget.
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not the charge, and most of the length is compelled. Rheingold is needed because the theft and the contract are the first cause; Walküre because the god’s free hero must be shown to be unfree; Siegfried because the truly free hero must exist before he can be destroyed. The subtractive test finds give in one recurring place: the narrations. The text was written backward, so the later dramas recount what the earlier ones stage. Wotan’s monologue changes the story as it tells it; the riddle game in Siegfried Act I, the Norns and Waltraute mostly go over the ground again. The Gibichung plot turns on a drug of forgetting the rest of the cycle does not need. These hold the axis at the lowest of the twelve.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: power over the world is bought by renouncing love, and an order founded on contract binds the one who made it. Alberich’s curse on love is the price of the gold. In Walküre Act II Wotan names the trap: “der durch Verträge ich Herr, / den Verträgen bin ich nun Knecht”
“I who am lord through treaties am now the treaties’ slave”. That holds of any ruler and any parent. Across four dramas the music discloses it as fully as the words: the ring’s figure becomes Valhalla’s, so the gods’ hall is heard to be made of the stolen gold, and the orchestra holds Brünnhilde under every line of the drugged Siegfried. Held below the top by the ending, which Wagner could not settle in words, and by Siegfried, too thin a vessel for what the cycle asks of him.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Height and frequency are both at the ceiling, across four evenings. The Rheingold prelude is the sublime of origin: 136 bars of one chord, a low E flat, a fifth, horns entering one by one, until the river moves and the curtain rises on it. Then the gods’ entry into Valhalla over the rainbow; “Winterstürme”; the annunciation of death; the ride of the Valkyries; Wotan’s farewell and the magic fire; the forest murmurs; Wotan and Erda; Brünnhilde’s waking, “Heil dir, Sonne! Heil dir, Licht!”
“Hail to you, sun! Hail to you, light!”; the Rhine journey; Hagen’s watch; the funeral march; the immolation. Off the top: Siegfried Act I and the riddle scene sit long at a low register, and the Gibichung wedding choruses are loud rather than high.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Myth built, from first cause to last day, by one maker out of scattered sources. The cycle opens before history, in the river, and ends with the gold returned to it and the gods’ hall in flames. Its archetypes bear the whole weight: the theft from nature, the cursed treasure, the world-ash cut for the spear, the Norns’ rope that breaks, the maiden ringed by fire, the fearless boy, the dragon, the twilight of the gods. Erda gives the law: “Alles, was ist, endet.”
“All that is, ends.” The particular stays particular: Wotan is a god, a husband losing an argument with his wife, a father who loves the daughter he punishes. Held off the top by Siegfried, nearer the archetype than a person, and by the Gibichungs, who are types.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The inheritance was the opera of numbers, in Weber’s German line and Meyerbeer’s grand opera, and Wagner’s own Lohengrin. The departures are of kind and of scale: one drama across four evenings; continuous music without set numbers, carried by a web of motives in the orchestra; alliterative verse, Stabreim, revived from Germanic poetry in place of rhymed stanzas; a chorus withheld for three evenings; new instruments and a theatre built for the work. The stake was total: no theatre could stage it, Wagner broke off for twelve years, and the festival nearly ruined him. Held below the top because the harmonic swerve that most changed music belongs to Tristan, composed in the break, and because Götterdämmerung, written first, keeps grand opera’s oath scene, vengeance trio and wedding chorus.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that the world remembers what its actors forget, and its form is an orchestra that remembers. Motives grow from one another: the nature figure of the prelude becomes the Rhine, then Erda, then, inverted, the gods’ twilight; the ring’s figure becomes Valhalla’s. In Götterdämmerung Siegfried, drugged, cannot recall Brünnhilde, and the orchestra recalls her under every line; given the antidote, he narrates his life over the music of the whole cycle. The melody Sieglinde sings in Walküre Act III returns to end the work, so the last word is a memory. Made a play or a novel, the cycle would lose its witness. The cost: the narrations, where form becomes container, and the twelve-year seam in Siegfried.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and a literature as wide as any in music, running through incompatible readings, each sustained: Nietzsche’s turn against it in Der Fall Wagner (1888); Shaw’s parable of capital and labour in The Perfect Wagnerite (1898); Mann’s lecture of 1933; Adorno’s critique of its phantasmagoria and its caricatures, published in 1952; Donington’s Jungian reading (1963); Cooke’s unfinished study of its sources and meanings (1979); feminist, ecological and political readings since. Production answers differently in each generation: Wieland Wagner’s bare disc, Chéreau’s industrial nineteenth century. The questions stay open: what the ending means, whether Siegfried is hero or dupe, whether Wotan’s renunciation is wisdom or defeat. Held off the top only because a share of the literature serves the cult, not the work.
Score: 9.8 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work reorganised what a music drama, an orchestra and a theatre could be, with a cycle of evenings, a motivic orchestra that narrates, and a festival house with a hidden pit and a darkened hall. Its reach ran into politics too, through Bayreuth under the Nazis, which is reach and not credit. Tolkien’s denial, “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases”, is itself evidence of the pressure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bruckner took the tubas; Strauss, Mahler, early Schoenberg, Humperdinck and Elgar wrote in its orchestra; Debussy defined himself against it; the leitmotif became the working method of film scoring; Eliot set the Rhinemaidens’ refrain in The Waste Land.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across 150 years, with no discount for age. The form is whole: score and text are complete, and the performing version is Wagner’s. The presence is continuous: staged in every generation since 1876 in the major houses of Europe and the Americas, recorded from the 1950s, its extracts among the most performed orchestral music there is. Two charges. Presence is rationed: a cycle needs four evenings, a house of the first rank, and a Brünnhilde and a Siegfried few generations supply, so most audiences meet it in parts. And it carries wear from use: Wagner’s antisemitism, the readings of Alberich and Mime as caricature, and Bayreuth under Hitler. It has outlived each use, and the production tradition since 1951 is largely an answer to that wear.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Command of the orchestral medium is at the height of the art: one chord made to move for four minutes and more; eighteen anvils in a precise rhythm for a slave-city; the tubas’ dark chord for Valhalla and for Hunding; the forest murmurs’ divided strings; the sword motive’s C major trumpet; a funeral march built from the motives of the Wälsungs and the hero’s life; the immolation’s motive upon motive. Motives worked across four evenings, often in counterpoint, are a feat no earlier composer attempted, and the vocal writing is hard and mostly idiomatic. Off the top: the verse. The Stabreim is at its best in Walküre and stiff elsewhere, some of the Wanderer’s and Mime’s exchanges clot, and the backward making leaves joins the music must cover.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Rhinemaidens’ play in the first scene and the Gibichungs’ wedding hall. One law governs them, and it is the gold: stolen from the one, it returns to the one from the other, and the Rhinemaidens are there at both ends. Their lament at the close of Rheingold, “Traulich und treu / ist’s nur in der Tiefe”
“Only in the depths is there trust and truth”, is answered when Brünnhilde gives the ring back. The motivic genealogy carries one physics from Nibelheim to Valhalla to the forest. The tensions are real: the poem was conceived under two philosophies, Feuerbach’s and then Schopenhauer’s, and the two endings Wagner drafted and did not set show he could not say which law the ending obeys.
Score: 9.2 / 10
More orders are held than in any other work of music, and in one structure, the ring: the natural order of river, forest, fire and earth-goddess; labour and capital, in Nibelheim’s enslaved smiths, the hoard and the giants paid for building; law, in Wotan’s treaties, Fricka’s marriage law and Hunding’s right of hospitality; the family, in a father and his daughters, the Wälsung twins’ incest, a foster-father and a half-brother; the state and war, in the Gibichung court and the Valkyries gathering the slain; consciousness, in Wotan and Brünnhilde; the sacred and its end. They are integrated: the gold’s theft pays for Valhalla, and the god’s contract dooms the family he founds. Held below the literary summit because history appears as myth, not as a society’s time, and the human world is the thinnest.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well at 9.8, then The Sublime and Pressure on Tradition at 9.7, with The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve at 9.6. A literature and a stage history as wide as any in music, still unsettled on what the ending means; elevation from the prelude’s one chord to the immolation, across four evenings; a reorganisation of music drama, the orchestra and the theatre, carried on into film scoring; a myth built from first cause to last day; and a swerve of kind and of scale whose stake nearly ruined its maker.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.6: most of the length is compelled, but the narrations left by the backward making, the riddle scene, the Norns and Waltraute, retell what has been staged, and the Gibichung plot turns on a potion the rest of the cycle does not need. Next above it, The Inner Law at 9.2, held by the ending Wagner could not settle in words.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.5, The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.7, The Archetypal Deep at 9.6, The Swerve at 9.6, The Imperishable at 9.4 and The Unconcealment at 9.4 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.4. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · the score and German text of Der Ring des Nibelungen, the four dramas Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, and their performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto or recording was in hand. The four dramas are scored as one work, words and music together, as Wagner completed them, the music written after the break in Siegfried included; no single drama, production, performance or recording is the object. The two endings Wagner drafted for Brünnhilde’s last speech and did not set are evidence, not part of the work, and the concert extracts and arrangements are uses of it. The sources, the Poetic and Prose Eddas, the Völsunga saga, the Thidreks saga and the Nibelungenlied, with Aeschylus’ Oresteia as the model of a tetralogy, are weighed as inheritance. German is quoted only where the desk is certain of the words, and only the best known of them; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. The bar count of the Rheingold prelude is the one bar count given. Figures that could not be verified, among them the number of motives, the string count, keys beyond those named, the extent of the women’s chorus and the month dates of the poem’s printing, are not given; the running times are ranges across the recorded tradition, not measurements. The sound of the Stabreim as sung, and of the work as heard, is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.