Re: USCHO Music Thread: We All Have A Crush On Shirley Manson
Götterdämmerung done. The 4, and the 10, are complete.
This is the most straightforward and quickest of the four Ring operas. The plot is strangely mundane after all the world-historic consequences of the first three stories, but that is kind of the point, as the Ring turns out to be the story of the passage of humanity
from the Age of Gods through the Age of Heroes, to the Age of Man.
We open on Siegfried and Brunhilde shacked up on Brunhilde's enchanted fire rock, where every day she kisses him and sends him to commute to his job having adventures. Grane, her trusty steed from her Valkyrie days, is his ride. He takes the ring as a reminder of her love and goes off to meet great men and challenge them thusly: "now fight me, or be my friend"!
Literally meanwhile in another part of the forest, a race of people settled along the Rhine, the Gibichungs, is having some court intrigue. Machiavellian minister Hagen has convinced brother and sister rulers Gunther and Gutrune it will help their Q scores to get married and, for once in Wagner, not incestuously. Hagen's harebrained scheme is invite Siegfried to lunch, drug him so he loses his memory, have Gutrune seduce him and then get him to use Tarnhelm to impersonate Gunther, abduct Brunhilde and bring her back so they can stage a big double wedding to wow the citizens: Gunther/Brunhilde and Gutrune/Siegfried.
Gutrune and Gunther actually go for this, which says something about the leadership quality of this principality. When we find out in a bit they are all Alberich's kids we are not surprised. They leave saying "I'll be in my bunk," and Hagen has an evil aside revealing his Real Plan is to get the ring for himself and, you're way ahead of me, Rule Zee Vurld.
Remember how I said Tolkien stole everything? As Hagen rubs his hands together in anticipation he even says, verbatim, "then I shall be the Lord of the Ring!"
Act II: it works.
However, Brunhilde (quite understandably) aint happy and blows the whistle on Siegfried in the greatest woman scorned aria outside Verdi. The prior marriage comes as a huge and unwelcome complication to Gunther, Gutrune, and most importantly Hagen. (Alberich had stopped by earlier, maybe he could have mentioned it?)
Anyway, whom to believe? There are blood oaths at swordpoint and now a serious number of people, even more than usual, want to stab Siegfried: Brunhilde cuz oh no he di'nt. Gutrune because he may be a bigamist. Hagen because
he has to -- if it comes out Brunhilde is telling the truth then they're all f-cked. The Rhinemaidens because when they ask sensibly for the ring back (since the curse will destroy everyone who has borne it including Brunhilde and, now you mention it, Siegfried) he blows them off. Fine, we'll deal with your heiress, they say, leaving him all "why does everyone keep calling me 'meat'? I'm the one with the Porche."
In the worst picnic ever, Hagen gives Siegfried an undo potion to get him to remember, then immediately "honors" his blood oath by running him through, explaining Siegried has just admitted he perjured himself.
Gutrune says, "oh fish, he was telling the truth they were married, we shouldn't have done the whole wacky marriage scheme in the first place."
Brunhilde says, "oh fish, he was telling the truth he didn't remember we were married," builds a funeral pyre for him and rides poor old Grane into it.
The fire cleanses the curse from the ring so presumably Siegfried and Brunhilde go to Puppy Heaven. The Rhinemaidens grab it from the ashes and do an inappropriate happy dance given the circumstances. The flames reach Valhalla and it burns in the sky. The music peaks, and we are left with some incredibly beautiful lingering notes and a mass of common people, now without the supernatural, blinking out at the audience; facing the existential terror and absolute freedom of human life once we become aware that we are alone in the universe with no god or hero but ourselves. Fin.
The final ten minutes of Götterdämmerung, if done right, will save you from reading hundreds of pages of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. It's the most sophisticated dramatic experiment with the theme of human freedom until Camus and S1 of West World. And, because Wagner was a genius, it's also lyrically beautiful and you can dance to it. I give it a 7. The four plus hours of the final opera pass very quickly. There is nothing sluggish, there is very little incidental subplot to silt up the story. Everything moves freely. Brunhilde, who was kind of passed from man to man in Siegfried, is now her own person (even as she's abducted and ignored -- artists will have their ironies). She's the real voice of this work until the final moments, when literally everybody who had anything to say is dead and the music has the last word. As with Tristan und Isolde, that's a welcome and beautiful climax.
Wagner's works, in chronological order (* are the Ring Cycle):
Code:
4 Der fliegende Holländer
5 Tannhauser
7 Lohengrin
8 Das Rheingold *
6 Die Walküre *
10 Tristan und Isolde
9 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
5 Siegfried *
7 Götterdämmerung *
2 Parsifal
Wagner died exactly 80 years to the day of my birth, yet feels like he is from the future, or at least a possible and interesting future. Watching the 10 Wagner operas is much like seeing all of
Shakespeare's plays (though not on 38 consecutive nights). I'm sure I will keep coming back to each of these operas again and again as I age, testing how "they" change.
Thank you for giving me the forum to talk about them. I looked forward to that every time I was getting drowsy under one of Wagner's lengthy parenthetical musical phrases.
"Joy is not in things. It is in us." -- Richard Wagner, 1813-1883.
