Excerpts from Götterdämmerung

After creating the opera Lohengrin in 1848, Richard Wagner wrote almost no music for five years. His life was violently disrupted by his involvement in the revolutionary uprising in Dresden in 1849, from which he was lucky to escape unharmed and un-jailed.

He made an exile’s home in Zurich and there drafted the outline of his next opera, which was to tell the story of the mythic German hero Siegfried. He didn’t immediately start writing the music or the libretto, however, as he would normally have done. Instead, he embarked on an immense series of essays setting out his views on art, opera, theater, and almost everything else. (This included his infamous antisemitic tirade “Jewishness in Music,” which would later become the foundation for the Nazi Party’s own antisemitic beliefs regarding Western art.) Wagner sensed that his own vision of and understanding of opera was undergoing a radical realignment, and used these writings to analyze his deepest instincts about “the opera of the future.” He eventually started composing Das Rheingold in November 1853.

Wagner thought the whole concept — which quickly ballooned into writing a cycle of four, full-length operas — would take him three or four years. In reality, he needed 21 years. After the “minor interruptions” of composing two other operas, Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger, the Ring of the Nibelung (as he called the four-opera group) was eventually completed in 1874. Finishing the Ring cycle was itself a superhuman achievement, but Wagner dared even further. He also helped design and build a special theater for his operas, and founded a summer festival for the sole purpose of performing them. Both the theater and the festival survive today, still serving that same purpose. The Bayreuth Festival opened in August 1876 with the first performances of the complete Ring of the Nibelung.

One of the most striking features of Wagner’s new style was the continu­ous flow of music from the beginning to end of each act, abandoning the older practice of composing operas in separate and distinct numbers — arias, duets, choruses, and so on. Wagner’s music, in contrast, is an organic substance that advances continuously with the action, using themes and musical motives that are often attached to — or comment on — characters in the action or concepts in the drama. In fact, many sections of Wagner’s operas can successfully — and satisfyingly — be performed in excerpts without the voices, since the drama is so strongly articulated in the orchestra.

The selections from Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods, the final opera of the Ring cycle) heard here represent Wagner’s mighty orchestra at its most powerful. At the start of the opera, Siegfried has rescued Brünnhilde from the fire-surrounded rock on which Wotan (leader of the gods) placed her, and the pair instantly fall in love. Having wrested the all-powerful, yet cursed Ring from Fafner the dragon, Siegfried now gives it to Brünnhilde as his bride.

As the first excerpt begins, dawn rises over the Rhine and Siegfried’s horn call is heard in the distance. The music rises majestically to a full-blown statement of Siegfried’s heroic theme and develops into a rapturous love duet for the couple. Brünnhilde’s motive as a Valkyrie (winged women warriors who escort heroes to the afterlife) is also interwoven into the musical fabric.

With a breathtaking change of key, Siegfried leaves the mountain-top rock and heads down the Rhine Valley. Brünnhilde watches him leave and hears his horn call recede in the distance. A vigorous section carries him along the banks of the Rhine, whose surging waters roll the music forward to a serene close.

Siegfried is soon tricked into taking a potion that causes him to betray Brünnhilde and steal back the Ring. Meanwhile, the evil Hagen is intent on destroying Siegfried in order to recover the Ring and its power for himself. In the final act of the opera, Siegfried is given a second potion to restore his memory but is stabbed by Hagen. Siegfried dies with Brünnhilde’s name on his lips.

The orchestra stamps out the rhythm of a solemn funeral procession as Siegfried’s lifeless body is carried over the cliff top. In Wagner’s stage directions, the moon breaks through the clouds and mist gradually fills the whole stage. Many of the opera’s motives are heard, including Siegfried’s horn call and Brünnhilde’s love theme.

In the final scene of the opera, Brünnhilde confronts Hagen. She takes the Ring from Siegfried’s lifeless hand, slips in onto her finger, and rides her steed to a glorious death, leaping into the blazing pyre on which Siegfried’s body lay. The whole scene fills with fire and the Rhine overflows. Hagen is drowned and the Ring is restored to its rightful owners, the Rhinemaidens. In the distance, Valhalla, the home of the gods, is seen in flames. Humanity is now left to a future without assistance (or interference) from the immortals.

The music conveys all of this in a stupendous display of orchestral wizardry. Themes from the entire Ring cycle are brought back in a kaleidoscope of interlocking motives and musical keys. And the final destruction of everything, which can hardly be explained in terms of the drama’s action, creates a sense of total fulfillment — which must have been felt by Wagner himself in 1874 as he completed the final pages of one the longest and most ambitious operas in history.

— Hugh Macdonald