The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (20 page)

Brünnhilde confronts Wotan’s wrath.
Because she has disobeyed his command, he sentences her to be exiled from Valhalla and locked into a magic sleep until the first mortal man who passes shall waken her.
Brünnhilde pleads to be protected from an ignoble fate, and Wotan relents to the extent of surrounding her couch with Loge’s magic fire which only the bravest will be able to penetrate.
He bids a long, sad farewell to his noble beloved daughter.

Siegfried

In a cave, Alberich’s former minion Mime is struggling to reforge the remnants of Nothung.
He has reared Sieglinde’s son Siegfried, entrusted to his care by Sieglinde when he
found her dying in the forest.
Mime knows that Siegfried could be the one to win him the Ring and its worldly powers.
He hopes to arm Siegfried – a rough-edged, innocent and fearless boy – with Nothung and send him out to find and kill the Ring’s owner, the giant Fafner, who has now transformed himself into a dragon, the better to guard his treasure.
But Siegfried loathes and despises Mime, who tells him for the first time the truth about his parental origins.

Wotan appears in the disguise of a traveller (the Wanderer) and challenges Mime to a game of riddles, which Wotan wins.
Mime forfeits his head, but, as he leaves, Wotan announces that he will let the fearless hero who wields Nothung take that prize.

Mime realizes that this hero must be Siegfried.
He now plots to poison the boy after he has killed Fafner and recovered the Ring.
Siegfried succeeds in reforging Nothung and sets out to search for Fafner.

Alberich still hopes to recover the Ring.
He is lurking outside Fafner’s cave when his old antagonist Wotan appears, still disguised as ‘the Wanderer’.
Wotan is friendly: he warns both Alberich and Fafner of Siegfried’s arrival, but fails to persuade Fafner to give up the Ring.

Mime prowls in the shadows, tailing Siegfried and waiting for him to kill Fafner.
But nothing goes according to Mime’s plan: Siegfried does kill Fafner, but the dying dragon warns him of Mime’s treachery, realizing that he is acting on Mime’s orders.
After accidentally tasting Fafner’s blood, Siegfried is able to understand the helpful messages of a singing Woodbird – she advises him to take the Ring and the Tarnhelm from Fafner’s cave.

Alberich and Mime quarrel over the treasure.
When Siegfried emerges, Alberich scuttles off.
Mime offers Siegfried the poisoned drink, but Siegfried turns on Mime and kills him without remorse.
The Woodbird leads Siegfried towards Brünnhilde’s fire-encircled rock.

Wotan summons the wise earth-goddess Erda, hoping to learn the future from her.
She can tell him nothing.
He tells
her that he has renounced all his ambitions, and now wants nothing except an end to the curse of the Ring and the beginning of a new order.
First, he must put his grandson Siegfried to the test by barring his way to the rock.
Siegfried pours scorn on Wotan the Wanderer, unaware of his true identity.
He shatters Wotan’s spear with Nothung – a symbol of the end of Wotan’s power – and Siegfried breaks through the magic fire and awakens Brünnhilde.
Siegfried has never seen a woman before and believes Brünnhilde to be his mother.
In fact, she is his aunt, a relationship which does not prevent the two from falling in love.
Brünnhilde renounces her divinity and she and Siegfried vow to face the world together without fear.

Götterdämmerung

Erda’s daughters, the Norns, weave the rope of destiny.
They explain Wotan’s past history and look forward to the day when Valhalla and its inhabitants will be consumed by fire, superseded by a new race of heroes.
But when they come to talk of Alberich and the Ring, their rope snaps and they can see no further.

Siegfried and Brünnhilde emerge from consummating their love in ecstatic mood.
Brünnhilde sends Siegfried off to pursue deeds of glorious adventure – as token of his fidelity, he gives her the Ring and sails off down the Rhine.

In the hall of the tribe of the Gibichung, its chieftain, the weak-minded Gunther asks his scheming half-brother Hagen what he can do to consolidate his power.
Hagen is also Alberich’s son, and is plotting to win back the Ring.
Hagen replies that both he and his sister Gutrune should marry, telling them what he has heard about Brünnhilde and Siegfried.

Siegfried stops off on his journey down the Rhine.
Gunther and Hagen welcome him, and he naïvely tells them about himself – including the vital information that he has given the Ring to Brünnhilde.
Gutrune then gives Siegfried a drugged potion which causes him to forget his past.
In this oblivious state, he falls for Gutrune and offers to marry her,
and to fight on Gunther’s behalf and find him a wife.
Gunther suggests that Siegfried should use the Tarnhelm which hangs round his waist to disguise himself as Gunther and bring Brünnhilde back from the rock.
The drugged Siegfried, who does not recall anything that has occurred between him and Brünnhilde, happily agrees.
A ferocious oath of blood brotherhood is sworn – in which Hagen does not participate – and Siegfried sails back up the Rhine.

Meanwhile, Brünnhilde sits on her rock.
She is visited by Waltraute, one of her Valkyrie sisters, who tells her that after his spear was smashed by Siegfried, Wotan returned to Valhalla, where he waits in passive resignation for the curse of the Ring to be broken and the end of the gods to ensue.
Waltraute begs Brünnhilde to hasten this inevitable process by giving up the Ring: Brünnhilde adamantly refuses – for her, the Ring embodies her union with Siegfried.
So her horror is all the more intense when Siegfried, disguised by the Tarnhelm as Gunther, arrives on the rock, pulls the Ring from her finger and informs her that she will now be his wife.

The ghost of Alberich appears to his son Hagen in a dream, urging him to recover the Ring.
Brünnhilde is dragged in to the hall of the Gibichung, where she is appalled to see Siegfried, no longer disguised, in the arms of Gutrune and wearing the Ring on his finger.
Siegfried, his memory still drugged by the potion, is baffled by her rage.
Siegfried is married to Gutrune, and Brünnhilde joins forces with Hagen to revenge herself on Siegfried.

Siegfried rests on the banks of the Rhine, where the Rhinemaidens appear to warn him of the curse on the Ring, but this means nothing to him.
He is joined by Hagen and Gunther, who gives him an antidote to the potion, and his memory slowly returns – as he begins to recall his encounter with Brünnhilde, Hagen stabs him in the back (his only vulnerable point, as Brünnhilde has revealed).
A funeral procession takes his dead body back to the hall of the Gibichung.

Gutrune is horrified at the murder of her husband and the double-dealing of Hagen.
In the ensuing fracas, Hagen kills
Gunther and attempts to seize the Ring from Siegfried’s finger.
But the dead man’s hand resists him.

Brünnhilde now realizes how she has been duped by Hagen’s treachery.
She prepares a funeral pyre for Siegfried, takes the Ring from his finger and after a long peroration, rides her faithful horse Grane into the flames.
In a cataclysmic climax, the hall of the Gibichung catches fire and the Rhine bursts its banks.
The Rhinemaidens recover the Ring from Brünnhilde, and Hagen is drowned in a last desperate effort to seize it from them.
In the distance, a vision of Wotan and the conflagration of Valhalla can be seen; the old order is finished, and the last chords of the cycle suggest hope and renewal.

What to listen for

The
Ring
is constructed musically round a series of melodic themes or tags, known as ‘leitmotivs’ (or
‘leitmotiven
’). This term is not used by Wagner, who preferred to talk of
‘Grundthemen
’‚ or ‘fundamental themes’, but it became current in his lifetime through the guides to his work published by Hans von Wolzogen.
Each leitmotiv is attached to a particular dramatic theme, symbol or character.
They recur, combined and contrasted, throughout the cycle.

Wagner has the reputation of being a very ‘loud’ composer, but he was generally considerate of singers and their needs.
A good conductor should not allow his orchestra to play so loud that they are either drowned or exhausted by the effort of communicating the words or sustaining a phrase.
The even greater challenge for a conductor of the
Ring
is to build its overall shape and development, so that the very first note of
Das
Rheingold
seems inexorably tied to the last note of
Götterdämmerung.
The
Ring
is not a series of discrete numbers or arias, but a complex and continuous drama united by the leitmotivs.

*

Das
Rheingold
may, vocally, be the least lyrical and most expository of the four operas, but it contains several wonderfully imaginative orchestral passages, including the magical opening which seems to rise from the darkest primeval
depths of the Rhine (orchestrated for double bass and bassoon) to its sun-dappled surface, where the Rhinemaidens splash and frolic in innocently sensual harmony; the thrilling descent into Nibelheim, with its relentlessly clanging anvils; and the glowing climax, with its ever so slightly ironic undertone, which accompanies the procession of the gods over the Rainbow Bridge entry into Valhalla.

The opera was unique at the time for its single-act span of 150 minutes (although Wagner did later sanction an interval) and absence of opportunities for prima-donna soprano or tenor.
Singers of the antagonistic bass-baritone roles of Alberich and Wotan often resort to a sort of rough-edged barking to make a dramatic effect and hide their vocal shortcomings, but Wagner preferred his music to be sung with firm tone and clean line.

*

Die
Walküre
opens with a prelude which graphically depicts the storm through which the hunted Siegmund is running.
Siegmund and Sieglinde, tenor and soprano, are two of the most human and sympathetic characters in all of Wagner’s work, and the way Act I charts the growth of their feelings for each other is intensely moving – a process culminating in two lyrical outpourings which answer each other: Siegmund’s ‘Winterstürme’ and Sieglinde’s ‘Du bist der Lenz’, followed by the frenzied excitement of the recognition of their true sibling identities and the wresting of Nothung from the tree.
This is one of the great scenes of German opera, and sopranos and tenors who lack the sheer physical resources and nerve to sustain the longer, bigger roles of Siegfried and Brünnhilde find it wonderfully gratifying to sing.

Act II introduces Brünnhilde with her war-whoop cry of ‘Hojotoho’ – the first of many vocal challenges that this vast role proposes.
Only the very best sopranos sing the notes accurately; the rest just shriek them approximately.
The ensuing long dialogue between Fricka and Wotan, followed by Wotan’s monologue, together make this a stretch of the
Ring
which requires homework and concentration from the
listener if it is not to seem dull.
However, Brünnhilde’s solemnly beautiful encounter with Siegmund, known as the ‘Todesverkundigung’ (the ‘Announcement of Death’) has an immediate emotional impact.

Act III opens with the familiar ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, after which Brünnhilde meets Sieglinde and the latter sings the ecstatically arching phrases of ‘O hehrstes Wunder’ – difficult to sing with requisite tonal radiance at the end of a long evening.
The opera concludes with Wotan’s overwhelming farewell to Brünnhilde, in which the bass-baritone singing the role must appear to drop his godhead and stand before the audience as a proud but grief-stricken father mourning his beloved daughter.
This is some of the most poignantly noble vocal music ever written, capped by a depiction of the fire crackling round Brünnhilde’s rock which embodies Wagner’s brilliance as an orchestral colourist and scene-painter.

*

Siegfried
is an opera often regarded as comparable to the lighter scherzo which forms the third movement of many classical symphonies, and is marked by Wagner’s heftily Teutonic sense of humour, particularly evident in the scenes involving Mime (sung by a tenor whose voice must be deliberately grotesque without becoming tiresome).
Siegfried too, is in many respects a comic figure – boisterously boyish and unfeeling in his banter with the self-pitying Mime, naïve in his dealings with Wotan, the Woodbird and Brünnhilde.
Sadly, few tenors capable of singing the role have either the physique or acting skills to convey these facets of the role.

The opera is most delicately orchestrated and Act II is rich in representations of the glories of the natural world – music later adapted into a purely orchestral movement known as ‘Forest Murmurs’ – as well as the pantomime fun of the dragon Fafner.
Half-way through the act, the voice of the Woodbird (sung by a light lyric soprano) reintroduces the sound of women after two hours of exclusively male singing.

Act III was written after a gap of eleven years (in between, both
Tristan
and most of
Die
Meistersinger
were written) and
the changes the interim period wrought in Wagner’s musical style are noticeable – orchestral textures seem richer, deeper and warmer and the interplay of the leitmotivs seems more free, subtle and supple, with less obvious melodramatic ‘signposting’.
The opera concludes with the long scene between Brünnhilde and Siegfried, in the course of which both characters are born again in love.
For the soprano Brünnhilde, the challenge of this thirty-minute duet is monumental.
Starting cold, at a late stage in the performance, she hails the sun as she is awoken from her sleep, in stern declamatory phrases which lie low for a soprano and which are difficult to pitch and hold steadily.
Slowly, the goddess thaws into an exuberant young woman and the opera ends in ecstatic jubilation.
As one commentator puts it, ‘it’s like leaping out of bed and climbing a mountain very quickly without any breakfast’, often hindered by a Siegfried who will be running out of stamina just as Brünnhilde is getting into her vocal stride.
After her only performance of the
Siegfried
Brünnhilde, the renowned Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba developed a node on her vocal cords and didn’t sing a note for six months.