Disturbing the Universe: Wagner's Musikdrama by David Vernon

Author:David Vernon [Vernon, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Candle Row Press
Published: 2021-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Subverting the Fairy Tale:

Siegfried

After the emotional maelstrom of Die Walküre, the dark, dark comedy of Siegfried. A work of enormous, malevolent power and strength, Siegfried begins in the obscurity of a cave before journeying to the forest and finally the sunlit hope of the mountain heights. The Ring’s second day is a ghostly, sinister and sardonic work of light and shade which anticipates the gloomy humour of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, Anton Bruckner’s vast orchestral landscapes, and the ironic, magisterial symphonies of Gustav Mahler. For all the murkiness, it is one of Wagner’s most distinctive and enthralling scores, with an instrumental palette both exploding with flamboyant colours and exploring the infinite shades of black, brown and grey. It is a musikdrama dominated by male voices, before being seized by the vivid vocal pyrotechnics of a roused soprano.

In many ways, Siegfried is a folk or fairy tale straight out of the Brothers Grimm. With its simple narrative arc, it is an adventure and a coming-of-age story containing bears, riddles, dragons, stolen treasure, talking birds and sleeping beauties, as well as confrontations with a father and an evil stepmother — for Mime is, as he himself says, both a maternal and paternal figure to the orphaned Siegfried. Add to this familiar figures (one-eyed strangers, scheming brothers, virginal heroines) and geographically memorable locations (a mysterious, womblike cave, a liminal forest, a spacious mountaintop), and the stage is set for a traditional and transitional rite-of-passage yarn for a hero: Siegfried.

Yet Siegfried is in constant negotiation with itself about both the eminence of its protagonist and the narrative genre in which he is to be found. It develops and disrupts its fairy-tale traits and questions the positive standing of its hero. The quest and discovery elements, among other features, assert the recognizable topography and structure of fairy tales, but this hero is both better and worse than we expect, his encompassing fiction both more surreal and more realistic. Wagner problematizes the status and surroundings of the hero, challenging us to enquire what heroism means to us and where we think we will find it. This, the scherzo of the ‘Ring Symphony’, is a mercurial, unpredictable and seditious creature of shifting certainties and volatile values. If modernity stresses complexity and ambiguity, then both Siegfried and Siegfried are some of Wagner’s most modern creations.

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