‘Alles was ist, endet’: Living with the Knowledge of Death in Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen

LINDA HUTCHEON AND MICHAEL HUTCHEON I Alles was ist, endet': Living with the Knowledge of Death in Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen1 PRELUDE Richard Wagner's best-known work, Der Ring des Nibelungen, is famous for many reasons: its music, its Germanic mythic allegory, its sheer length. Called a stage-festival play for three days and a preliminary evening, the Ring 'cycle' (as it is known) runs at least fifteen hours. In other words, it is a major investment of time and energy for audiences. But it is also an engrossing story of the struggle for a golden ring - and therefore for power - among giants, humans, Nibelung dwarfs, and the Teutonic gods. It contains several infamous love stories: that of the siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde , and also that of their offspring, Siegfried, and Brilnnhilde, the Valkyrie (who happens to behis aunt). There are many stories in the Ring2 and, it goes without saying, there are many possible critical approaches to it. When critics tell the story of the Ring - and, whatever their theoretical inclinations and disciplinary deformations, they do end up telling their version of that story - they inevitably have to focus their narrative on one of the work's dominant themes) or else on a character. Some critics, like 1 Thanks to Russell Kilbourn, Helmut Reichenbacher, Erika Reiman, and Jill Scott, graduate research assistants who, while working on Tristan lind Iso/dewith us, inspired new thinking on the Ring as well. A special thanks to the members of WIPE (Work in Progress in English) at the University of Toronto for their consistently helpful suggestions, corrections, and advice. 2 Among those stories are the many different sources on which Wagner drew. On these sources, see Mertens, 246-54i Weston; Cooke; Lindenberger, 'Wagner's Ring'; E. Magee, 1-56. On the scholarship on the sources, see Deathridge, 208, 215. Wapnewski, after listing the sources (42), notes that the 'crucial point is that Wagner's role was not primarily an interpretive one. He had no desire either to carryon and preserve an old tradition or to revive and renew it. Wagner was using traditional fonns and themes in order to establish new ones of his own' (42). Dahlhaus also claims that the myths were 'restored in order to be destroyed' ('Wagner's Place,' 114). 3 It is likely true that, as many have pointed out, in a very real sense the Ring is about everything. If so, then it probably is not only (to use George Bernard Shaw's terms) the 'coyer subtleties of the score' that give this work its 'Beethovenian inexhaustibility and toughness of wear' (106). For Shaw, writing in 18g8, the Ring, 'with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its water~maidens and Valkyries, its wi5hing~cap, magic ring, enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today, and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity' (1). He found its obsession with power, love, and death 'frightfully real, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 67, NUM8ER 4, FALL 1998 790 LINDA HUTCHEON AND MICHAEL HUTCHEON Carolyn Abbate, have focused on Brunnhilde, the Valkyrie who is reduced to being a mere mortal but who ends up as the engine of redemption.4 Curiously, though, relatively few have been interested in Wotan, the major god figure whose actions start the entire plot. Wagner himself, of course, changed his mind, over time, about whose story he wanted to tell: the Ring certainly began as the tale of Siegfried's death (Siegfrieds Tod was the name of his first sketch based on the medieval tale of the Nibelungenlied). We would argue that it soon became the story less of Siegfried's death than of Wotan's dying, as Wagner not only drew upon other Nordic mythic materials as he wrote his own libretti, but also simply grew older himself.5 The reading of the Ring that we offer here is the result of collaborative work by a literary theorist and a physician, with all the disciplinary and frightfully present, frightfully modem' (11). For other related allegorical readings, see Darcy. This is a view that has since been shared by many, including Lindenberger, for whom the Ring is a 'long chronicle...