The Problem with Rhinegold
Argument: "Preliminary evening" or
not, this opera goes nowhere. It has neither a central character
to engage our sympathy, nor a central conflict to occupy our minds.
My first experience of Wagner was an inherited three-record set of
Rhinegold. It was a Decca/Solti production, in German of course,
and I didn't understand a word of it. But the music alone was
of such grandeur that I guessed something quite wonderful was going
on. The Valhalla theme in particular, especially near the end, sang
of some mighty and very beautiful accomplishment. To my untutored
ear it ranked with the finale to Beethoven's Fifth, or
the last movement of Sheherazade, as an expression of some
ineffable glory.
Then came the plot outline in Kobbe's book, then the libretto
in translation. What a disappointment! At the beginning of Rhinegold
a hardworking miner stumbles upon a rich seam and takes it from its
giddy, ill-appointed guardians. At the end, some layabout gods glorify
themselves at his expense. And in between we have nothing but din
- a thicket of uproar, of chop-logic, of deceit, of self-righteousness,
of ingratitude, brutality and injustice. In short, we have the makings
of a fine comedy. But no one laughs.
Do we have a tragedy, then, and, if so, who is the hero? In Alberich
and Fasolt, men struggling against miserable circumstances to enrich
their lives, we do have the stuff of tragic heroes. But Wagner dismisses
them from the scene well before the climax. They are Calibans, not
Cyrano de Bergeracs.
Does the work have a hero in any sense? Let's look at
the other main candidates in turn. In Fafner we have a hard-headed
contractor who demands to be paid, and, in short, is. Nothing heroic
there. Fricka brings an icy righteousness to the proceedings, winning
a few points for common sense and deportment, but none for risk-taking.
Neither she nor her sister Freia (of whose ten short passages in the
opera, nine are cries for help) is hero material. Loge, if we can
believe him, is a fellow of adventurous spirit, but he applies much
of his energies to rather cynical observation of other people's
business, feeding his lively taste for scandal. He has no more claim
to hero status than Ariel, Puck or Jiminy Cricket.
To Wotan, then. Is he, after all, the hero of the work? On the negative
side, at times his conduct seems unbecoming, unworthy of anyone let
alone a god. However tentative his agreement to sell his wife's
sister may have been, it is contemptible; his reminder to Fricka that
he lost his eye in wooing her is mean-spirited; his argument that
Fricka wanted Valhalla as much as he did is childishly irrelevant;
and his treatment of his building-contractors, Fafner and Fasolt,
is churlish.
Wotan is still the main character in the play, and perhaps we should
look harder for endearing qualities. Strangely enough, he emerges
from the gold robbery with some credit. When he first hears of the
gold, even of the power of the ring, he is revolted by the price to
pay for forging it - the renunciation of love. And when, a few seconds
later, he learns that the price has already been paid by Alberich,
his cry: I must have the ring! stems not from greed or envy
but from an instinct to protect his own race from a man newly capable
of destroying it. He has to do what a god has to do. Entirely focussed
on this obligation, he dismisses the giants (Freia with them) together
with the whole question of their payment, and is immediately assailed
by a second and more urgent call of the same duty: this time to save
the gods from the self-destruction that the absence of Freia
will cause. Wotan has no alternative to the robbing of Alberich! He
will pay for Valhalla with the gold, but keep the ring safely with
the gods.
He leaves Loge to manage the crime, confining himself to occasional
mockery of Alberich and the final wrenching of the ring from his hand.
Wotan has a distaste here for what he sees as a necessary duty, in
contrast to the vindictive relish displayed by Loge. When the robbery
is complete, and after Alberich has cursed the possessor of the ring,
Wotan rebukes Loge with Do not begrudge him [Alberich] his
venomous pleasure! Whatever weaknesses we may find in Wotan, we
must admit he took a strong stand against unnecessary violence. Earlier,
he had stopped Donner from attacking the giants with his hammer, prevented
both Donner and Froh from setting upon Loge, and, later, stepped between
Donner and Fafner.
But all these qualities that stamp him as leader of the pack would
avail him little in the District Court of Nibelheim. He was, and he
knew it, a thief. Worse, and more frustrating to an audience in search
of a hero, he was a hypocrite. And however much we may sympathise
with him later in the Cycle, as he becomes tangled in the web of his
own making, the fact remains that at the end of Rhinegold there
is little to pity or admire in the god who swaggers into Valhalla.
If it is not to be found in any sort of heroic struggle, where is
the drama in this "music drama", as Wagner called it? Many
critics argue it is to be found in a great conflict running through
the whole Cycle: the conflict between love and power.
I cannot find any love in Rhinegold. There is a passing shadow
of it in Mime's plaintive memory of how things used to be in
pre-ring Nibelheim: Carefree smiths, once we used to make jewellery
for our women, pretty ornaments, neat Nibelungen trinkets; we used
to laugh gaily as we worked. His community-minded nostalgia suggests
a sense of compassion for his fellow-Nibelungs, but Mime being Mime
it possibly derives from a heart that is faint rather than soft.
Fricka's heart seems to be stone cold. In the unrelenting barrage
of criticism and insult that she directs at her husband and his associates,
there is not a syllable of affection, even implied. She has no interest
in Wotan's grand plans. To her, love means fidelity, and she
speaks of fidelity using language related to bondage: Concerned
about my husband's fidelity I must sadly ponder how to bind him
to me. Wotan himself says nothing and does nothing that betrays
a loving nature. When Loge tells him that the price of the ring is
the renunciation of love, he does "turn away, displeased",
but he does not say anything. And he renews interest immediately and
emphatically when told that the awful price has already been paid
by Alberich: I must have the ring!
Freia, the very goddess of love, expresses none. In her only mention
of it, she blurts her revulsion for one of its forms: Fasolt threatened
me, he would come to carry me off as his sweetheart. Fasolt himself,
a barbaric blockhead, is difficult to dislike. Even after Wotan has
called him a lout, he stammers out his yearning for a loving relationship,
in words and music of great tenderness. Like Caliban in The Tempest,
he has dreamed of beauty and he cries to dream again. But even here
we have no love, merely a dim and piteous understanding of what such
a thing might be.
Alberich, the man who renounces love, never displays it. What he
seems to be renouncing is no more than a form of sensual gratification
that he imagines would be readily accessible, in any case, to anyone
who owned the world.
For an opera that boasts among its cast the Goddess of Love, and
is premised on the shocking concept of the renunciation of love, it
is strangely devoid of it.
Power, the other half of the dichotomy, does appear in the obvious
forms of bullying, sabre-rattling and frequent outbreaks of violence.
But the power inherited by Alberich, invested in the ring, and coveted
later by Wotan and Fafner, must have been greater than physical strength
to be worth its awful price. To be worth the renunciation of love,
it must have amounted to omnipotence. It must have exceeded Erda's
ability to know the future, and empowered its wielder with
an ability to control the future. How, then, do we account
for its utter failure to save Alberich from his chains, or even to
advantage him in a short scuffle, as Wotan tears the ring from him
with ease? And, as the new wearer of the ring, why was Wotan unable
to solve the relatively simple problem of the "Freia chink"?
Why couldn't he simply have turned his hat into gold and thrown
it on the pile?
As a drama, then, Rhinegold poses a problem for me. In the absence
of a hero to attract any sympathy, and in the absence of both the
love and the power which critics somehow see there in exciting conflict,
I am left to wonder what exists in the drama that the magnificent
music is meant to support. A few arguments and a bit of rough stuff
is simply not enough.
BARRY WALTERS June 1999
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10-Mar-2004
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