This is my second entry on
Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: #4: Richard Wagner In Bayreuth.
***
As an admirer of Wagner’s Ring (not just as a set of four
operas, but as a monumental music drama), I find the following superlatively
fascinating and enlightening. This is none other than Nietzsche’s interpretation
of the Ring in Chapter XI of Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: Richard Wagner In
Bayreuth. My commentary on this passage will follow at the next
opportunity, but meantime let Nietzsche take the floor all by himself. The
greatest and most delightful surprise, which is of course expected from Nietzsche,
is that his main hero in the Cycle is Wotan, which, come to think of it, makes
perfect sense, as soon as we are prepared to treat the Ring as a
four-part whole, rather than as a collection of separate pieces.---
In the Ring of the Nibelung the
tragic hero is a god whose heart yearns for power, and who, since he travels
along all roads in search of it, finally binds himself to too many
undertakings, loses his freedom, and is ultimately cursed by the curse
inseparable from power. He becomes aware of his loss of freedom owing to the
fact that he no longer has the means to take possession of the golden Ring—that
symbol of all earthly power, and also of the greatest dangers to himself as
long as it lies in the hands of his enemies. The fear of the end and the
twilight of all gods overcomes him, as also the despair at being able only to
await the end without opposing it. He is in need of the free and fearless man
who, without his advice or assistance—even in a struggle against gods—can
accomplish single-handed what is denied to the powers of a god. He fails to see
him, and just as a new hope finds shape within him, he must obey the conditions
to which he is bound: with his own hand he must murder the thing he most loves,
and purest pity must be punished by his sorrow. Then he begins to loathe power,
which bears evil and bondage in its lap; his will is broken, and he himself
begins to hanker for the end that threatens him from afar off. At this juncture
something happens which had long been the subject of his most ardent desire:
the free and fearless man appears, he rises in opposition to everything
accepted and established, his parents atone for having been united by a tie
which was antagonistic to the order of nature and usage; they perish, but
Siegfried survives. And at the sight of his magnificent development and bloom,
the loathing leaves Wotan’s soul, and he follows the hero’s history with the
eye of fatherly love and anxiety. How he forges his sword, kills the dragon,
gets possession of the ring, escapes the craftiest ruse, and awakens Brunhilde;
how the curse abiding in the ring gradually overtakes him; how, faithful in
faithfulness, he wounds the thing he most loves, out of love; becomes enveloped
in the shadow and cloud of guilt, and, rising out of it more brilliantly than
the sun, ultimately goes down, firing the whole heavens with his burning glow
and purging the world of the curse,—all this is seen by the god whose sovereign
spear was broken in the contest with the freest man, and who lost his power
through him, rejoicing greatly over his own defeat: full of sympathy for the
triumph and pain of his victor, his eye burning with aching joy looks back upon
the last events; he has become free through love, free from himself.
Now, once again. If you were to
pick for yourself the main hero of Wagner’s Ring
Cycle, who would it be? Putting this question in such a way, we come to the
obvious conclusion that at least in this choice Nietzsche is perfectly correct…
No wonder Wagner himself admittedly liked Nietzsche’s exposition.
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