The Götterdämmerung of it All!: A "Ring" for Our times

Note: This essay was originally published in VAN Magazine. All images are by Arthur Rackham from his 1911 collection.

I've long accepted the fact that I am one of tens of thousands of people who suffer from Wagner derangement syndrome. Many people listen to or watch the works of Wagner, but only an errant few become lifers. Given the sheer baggage of Wagner and the irksome coincidence of our shared surname, this is, of course, devastating. Many times I have had to explain myself and my behavior—that is, a very public obsession with “Der Ring des Nibelungen”—and all I’m able to answer with is: Well, there’s so much in there, you can lose yourself forever. That being said, I’ve never been one for combing through the minutiae of leitmotif categorization or other such musical rabbit holes. If anything, the music of the “Ring” has been overstudied and its text understudied. It is a listenable piece of literature on the scale of prestige television. A work of mythical syncretism, the sheer complexity of the story leads one to the same obsessiveness as the vast specificity of its music. However, it’s not just the story and its scoring that are responsible for so many long days and nights of rumination, but also the time in which I’ve been watching, listening to, or reading the “Ring.”

When I began writing a series of essays about the “Ring” in late October of 2024, the world was, if you can believe it, a much more stable place. Since that time, the situation in the United States has devolved into an atavistic, Walkürian chaos in which all norms and institutions have been either hijacked or dismantled for the twin purposes of enrichment for the few, and mass immiseration and terror for the many. We are all Brünnhilde and the gods have locked us in a hot car.

Before January (ed. note: 2025), there was enough emotional room for me to keep a critical distance from the cycle, which, then as now, I work primarily with as a text. This is why, as I wrote in my first essay about the Wälsung twins, I basically agreed with Theodor Adorno’s reading of the “Ring” as a fundamentally bourgeois work, which, while systemic in scope and dialectical in logic, is rather bleakly anti-humanist when viewed in its totality, something Adorno believed was also expressed in its music, especially the use of leitmotif. But as I started working more through the characters of Siegmund and Sieglinde, it became clear that my analysis and Adorno’s were beginning to diverge.

By recentering the work around “Die Walküre,” an analytical possibility—really more of a compromise—emerged in which the melancholic aperture of the “Ring” could be shifted away from the right and towards the left. While I concede that the cycle remains on the whole a work of bourgeois individualism whose political undercurrent can be described as a conservative anarchism, I don’t entirely agree with the claim that its sentiment is primarily cynical. Perhaps this is because I needed it to be good, to end in fulfillment. The “Ring” had since outlived its role for me as a topic of mere literary and musical fascination. Strangely, the more time I spent with it, the more the cycle became both field guide and allegory for real, unthinkable life. The more that life has disintegrated, the more I’ve sought out its music and text as a means of distraction, consolation and reassurance.

One is only able to feel and think this way because enough time has passed: not only since midcentury’s fraught, post-Nazi relationship with Wagner—and the (controversial) rehabilitation efforts made by Wolfgang and Weiland Wagner at Bayreuth—but also since the height of postmodern cynicism. Adorno, for example, wrote his left critique of the “Ring” in the 1930s, when Wagner was at his most irredeemable. The 21st century has mostly been spent stripping the man himself down to his problematic nuts and bolts and trying to reconcile a new era of liberal politics with the work of a largely illiberal artist.

As far as performances go, the mixed results of this effort have ranged from the 2006 Copenhagen “Ring”—a feminist rendition in which Sieglinde, not Siegmund pulls the sword Nothung from the ash tree —to the 2013 Frank Castorf Bayreuth staging wherein montage meets a half-serious critique of oil meets an annoyingly triumphant belief in the end of history. But history has clearly not ended, and the struggle underlying the “Ring” is more relevant to historical conditions today than it was for the majority of the 20th century. It may even be the first time the cycle has been useful as an allegory for our present world system since the heyday of failed revolutions and runaway industrial capitalism under which it was written. If Adorno represented the left interpretation of the “Ring” at midcentury, then George Bernard Shaw, who, in The Perfect Wagnerite saw the “Ring” (positively) as representational of capitalist expansion, was Adorno’s 19th century equivalent, and perhaps, in sentiment, a better precedent for a new project of radical interpretation.

And we need one! Our alarming moment of fascist ascendency calls for fresh readings of the cycle more attuned to contemporary political reality. (You know, the “Götterdämmerung” of it all.) That these interpretations can and perhaps should be from the left owes itself to a present-day far right that is so stupid, anti-intellectual and anti-art that Wagner no longer appears on the staff list of its pantheon of myth and symbology. While not negating Wagner’s many despicable qualities, this does grant audience members a little more breathing room than before.

My final verdict on the “Ring” is as a struggle between two dialectical forces: fatalism, and conviction—in this case, that love, and by extension the human condition, should triumph over power and greed. The fatalism of the “Ring,” Schopenhauerian or not, is a relinquishment of agency in favor of the consolation offered by a definite end, while its conviction seizes agency, real or imagined, in spite of—and perhaps also in service to—that same end. One’s interpretation ultimately derives from who one thinks is the winner of this core struggle. In a sense, all readings of the work originate from what exactly it means when Brünnhilde jumps on Siegfried’s funeral pyre, immolating not only herself but the gods awaiting their grim fate in Valhalla.

This central conflict is very much of our time. I vacillate wildly between fatalism and conviction on any given day. Like many, I read the news and feel as though I’m suffering a death by a thousand cuts. The more I read, the more I hear a little voice in my head telling me that there is genuinely no hope, that my enemies have won with such totality that the only real choice left for me is between fantasizing about leaving the country (or perhaps the world) and succumbing to a prolonged emotional breakdown as everything collapses around me. Disavowal is easier during the day. I must work for a living. But late at night, when I am most at the mercy of my own thoughts, I often find myself asking: If this is how you are going to behave in the face of despair, do you really believe in anything other than yourself? Is there nothing to be found in this life that is worth fighting or suffering for beyond your own power, your own material satisfaction?

This is when I start thinking about the “Ring” cycle.

Part I: "Das Rheingold" and "Die Walkure"

It is a dialectical fact that all systems contain the necessary ingredients for their own unmaking; this forms the basic premise of “Das Rheingold,” where the dwarf Alberich renounces love in exchange for greed and is rewarded with the allpowerful ring. However, within the cosmology of the cycle, this potentiality was always there—the gold had long shimmered at the bottom of the river—but for whatever length of mythical time, it remained unfulfilled, waiting for the right villain. The same can be said of the arch-god Wotan, who stole from the World Ash Tree in order to forge the spear of contracts with which he conquered the world. Like the gold, the World Ash Tree stood peacefully in the realm of the Norns, protected by otherworldly constructs, yet always at risk of someone coming to do the unthinkable. This violation of nature, echoed in the gold, created a hypocritical contradiction which repeatedly manifests itself in Wotan’s lax adherence to his own godly rules. When we meet him in “Rheingold,” he has already become a being that is simultaneously lawless and lawful, weak and all-powerful.

Wotan will come to make a lot of bad deals, but the one that proves fatal is his theft of the ring from Alberich. Using guile, he pilfers the ring to pay the giants Fasolt and Fafner for the work they put into building the palace of Valhalla. This payment comes in lieu of the goddess of youth, Freia, who was the original reward both parties agreed to. Here a second fundamental construct of the cycle has already been established. The Norns (back in deep, primordial time), the Rhinemaidens (who protected the gold) and Freia (the fair) are the first of the women—all women—in the “Ring” who will in some way be violated and wronged by men. To the gods, to Alberich, to the Gibichungs in “Götterdämmerung” and to Siegfried (who ultimately does their bidding), woman is primarily an object of extraction and exchange. Perhaps the truest pessimism in the “Ring” is the pessimism of womankind.

Incensed by Wotan’s theft, Alberich curses the ring, making it, too, a paradox of ultimate power and terrible weakness. Only misfortune will befall those who wear it, and those who don’t have it will endlessly long for it—Fafner kills his brother Fasolt in order to maintain control of it. For what purposes? What reward? To spend the rest of his days lurking in the woods in the form of a dragon, a pitiful hoarder of that which will destroy him. But something even worse is waiting in the wings. Near the end of the opera, Wotan receives a visit from Erda, the omniscient Earth Mother, who reveals to him that the once-deterministic future has been fractured, and, as long as the ring is in play, the end of the godly ancien régime could come to pass. We later learn that Wotan, in his inextinguishable greed, will rape Erda simply because he is not satisfied with the piecemeal knowledge she’s initially given him and hopes that, through coercion, she’ll give him more. The result of this union with Erda is the Valkyrie, Brünnhilde.

It is only in “Die Walküre,” the cycle’s most important installment, that the conflict between fatalism and conviction—rather than the expected conceit of who does and does not have the ring—separates characters into opposing forces. The terrain for which these forces battle is the now-unmoored present: in other words, the unknown. Crucially though, Wotan does not begin this chapter as a fatalist. In fact, he is the opposite. For the first time in his life, he is afraid. And, as is often the case with men in power, his fear is sublimated through tyranny.

The gods of the “Ring” are essentially an elite class that rule over human beings, who to them are nothing but faceless slaves devoid of free will. Up until now, this was a mostly one-sided if stable arrangement in which humanity lived out a meager existence mediated by reasonable amounts of divine intervention. After the theft of the ring, Wotan decides to use humanity as an exploitable resource with which he can wage war with Alberich. He does this by plunging the human world into endless, senseless violence, the scale of which is only revealed in Act III, when the Valkyries (accompanied by the “Ride”) are preoccupied with heaping a cavalcade of dead bodies into a pile. In the human realm, warriors fight and die unceasingly for no other purpose than to assemble an army theoretically capable of reclaiming the ring before Alberich can, or in case Alberich does. This, however, is a plan with many contingencies; hence, Wotan takes matters even more into his own hands by wandering the earth under the pseudonym Wälse, and siring, with a mortal woman, the Wälsung twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde.

I strongly believe that any positive radical interpretation of the “Ring” has to begin with and be oriented around Siegmund and Sieglinde. To me, they are the most important characters in the entire “Ring.” It is not only that they are heroes and (problematically incestuous) lovers, they are the cycle’s truest heroes and its only lovers, as both their heroism and their love are rooted in something other than determinism. More than the ambiguous ending of the cycle, the twins ask and answer important questions about humanity: Without the intervention of the gods, of the powers that be, what could we accomplish? What does it mean, being human? What does it mean to be good, to be righteous? What can we make of this terrible world we’ve been given? The answer that emerges is not only one of love, but solidarity.



I think about Siegmund and Sieglinde all the time. Like, I don’t think there’s a single day I don’t think about them. I keep them very close to me in part because I see them as a model for how to maintain one’s own humanity at the absolute nadir of despair. To summarize what I’ve written in a series of four essays on the topic: Siegmund is born into Wotan’s miserable world, renounced by the gods (it’s mutual), orphaned, and made to endure endless abjection and a life of exile, all because Wotan implicitly believes that human freedom can only come from alienation and suffering to the extent that one loses any faith in a higher power. The same is true of Sieglinde. Here, the degrading existence Siegmund must endure is interiorized and refracted through a domestic lens, as Sieglinde is forced into marriage with the rich tribesman Hunding, a man who brutalizes her verbally, physically, and sexually.

It is precisely because of this hard-earned freedom that Siegmund is able to see Wotan’s world for what it really is: cruel. However, Siegmund’s long dinnertime testimony in Act I, Scene 2 demonstrates another underlying opposition to the godly order. Siegmund suffers under a patriarchal warrior culture of honor and shame, and, having been thoroughly othered by that system, he is able to repeatedly recognize and identify with the suffering of women at the hands of men. (One can even say that, following the way Hunding treats his guest, Siegmund is a feminized figure.) Through this mechanism of empathy, Siegmund is the only man in the entire cycle who does not see women as a means of extraction or exchange. Even before he meets Sieglinde, this shared protestation against exploitation and suffering is the conviction that drives Siegmund’s actions, despite the fact that it never once works out for him. This is because, for Siegmund, good is what one does, not what one is.

Sieglinde, meanwhile, is often maligned as a stereotypical seductress or damsel in distress, waiting for the right man to save her, for which she will reward him with sex. A typical opera woman! I have never liked this characterization. No hapless Elsa is Sieglinde. If we look a little closer, Sieglinde very much resists the same injustice as her brother. She, too, refuses to be objectified, a refusal in which Siegmund serves as both comrade and leverage. This is most evident at the end of the second scene wherein Hunding, for all intents and purposes, threatens to rape his wife. Siegmund looks at the two of them in horror; Sieglinde tries to gesture at the sword in the tree. But something more important transpires a little later in the background: She laces Hunding’s nightcap with sleeping powder. One wonders why Hunding has such a powder in the first place. His long-suffering wife surely knows. And this is the thing about Sieglinde: whether it’s the drug or the fragments of the sword, the tools of subjugation are used by her, albeit incompletely, to unmake their wielders’ world. Siegmund (famously!) does not save Sieglinde. It is far more useful to see them as a pair, two soldiers in the same battle—individualized, as all things are in the “Ring,” for emotional and corporeal autonomy, and against cruelty and shame.

It is at this point where we must talk about love. It’s always been a belief of mine that Wotan never intended for his children to fall in love with one another—in part because that love puts them under the jurisdiction of Fricka, who has, as we will see, many reasons to thwart her husband’s plans. And yet, Wotan himself created the conditions under which such a love was all but inevitable. These conditions of privation and loneliness are also what grant such love its profundity. The love between the twins is utopian, built on mutual compassion and shared acknowledgement of suffering, and is thus unlike any other love in the “Ring.” When Sieglinde sees Siegmund for the first time, he is desperate, weak and injured. Like her, he has nothing, not even his own name. Sieglinde shares this state of namelessness with this stranger, her brother. When Siegmund asks who she is, she identifies herself only as the property of her husband, no different than the four walls that surround her. Because Siegmund is the woeful recipient of naught but misfortune, once this miraculously kind stranger has tended to him, his immediate thought is to leave her be so as to not bring any harm upon her.
What does Sieglinde say to him when he informs her of this?

“Nicht bringst du Unheil dahin,
wo Unheil im Hause wohnt!”
(You can’t bring calamity into the house
where calamity lives!)
(I’ve chosen to use English quotations—sourced from the John Deathridge translation —in this essay for reasons of brevity.)

And so they wait for the husband, who immediately barks at the wife to prepare a meal and, at the dinner table, interrogates her guest, whose presence undermines both Hunding’s sexual and political authority. Imagine what it must be like to be Sieglinde, how it must feel to hear the stories of a man who suffers similarly, who risks his life to defend, of all things, a girl being forcefully married off by her brothers, and for no other reason than because it is just? Is there any wonder that, in doctoring the drink, Sieglinde risks her life to save Siegmund’s? Alone in the night, she tells him everything: about her own sham wedding, the sword, the mysterious yet familiar wanderer who left it for her. She speaks to him in the hushed language of comradeship, and he returns this speech in kind. He will free the sword and liberate her. Through tenderness, she has already liberated him. This solidarity is the bedrock upon which love is built.

The twins’ love is one of mutual identification, a recognition of the self in the other through which alterity is eliminated altogether. This recognition creates a narrative momentum that carries the rest of the first act. It manifests in the guessing and gazing, the hesitant questions, the hands caressing faces, the peals of voices, the metaphor of love-sister and spring-brother whose unity will drive out the chill of winter, all enveloped in a music of bliss. We know how it ends, passionately on the bearskin rug. (Long live our Wälsung blood!) But rather than being an aberration, incest, for reasons of structural misogyny within the “Ring,” is a necessary precondition for a utopian love like this. It reflects an understanding of gender in which true parity between man and woman is unnatural and unrealistic. Hence, for there to be no self and other, that man and that woman must be literally, physically the same. Siegmund is Sieglinde, and Sieglinde is Siegmund. They are part of the same fate, the same project, the same physicality. There cannot be one without the other. Fraught as it may be, this problematically realized absence of otherness is also what makes the twins’ love so moving and why generations of listeners have been willing to begrudgingly accept it.

Part II: "Die Walküre," cont.

In the “Ring,” fatalism and conviction battle on a terrain of the unknown. What I mean by that is: through the forging and theft of the ring, the world order has been pushed into a state of instability. What comes after such a moment will be by necessity different from all previous experience. Like all historical conditions, especially the one we’re living in right now, this post-ring world is unique. It can only be dealt with via novel means mined from the same stuff as the condition itself. As we have seen, Wotan responds to uncertainty with further despotism, rooted in a desire for control, and a need to reset things to the way they were—even though this is all but impossible. (As they say, the only way out is through.) Siegmund and Sieglinde are a threat to this same status quo. As a free man and a free woman, the twins present a structural challenge to godly supremacy, and thus an unresolvable problem for the world order. Fricka sees this. Under the guise of propriety and anger at her husband’s infidelity, she demands that Siegmund, her rightful slave, be killed in service to her honor. Wotan, then, is faced with a choice, the same choice as Alberich, and later, the same choice as Siegmund: Will it be power or will it be love?

At this point, the contradictions once underlying Wotan’s world have now undermined it. He realizes that his plans for the ring, his compassion for his son, and his ability to have total dominion over the way of things, are all crumbling before his one eye. And so his despotism transforms seamlessly into fatalism. Let the gods fall, Wotan tells his daughter, Brünnhilde. All that is left is the end. In anger and despair, Wotan forsakes agency, and, though he makes a few desperate attempts in “Siegfried” to understand the goings on of the world, he can no longer intervene in a substantial way and relinquishes the desire to try.

Back on earth, Siegmund is also presented with this same unknown, this same futureless world—replete, even, with mass death and interminable pain. Yet unlike Wotan, he can see a fundamental truth: that what is known is just as, if not more intolerable than what is not known. Siegmund’s temporal domain is the present. He acts in spite of grand narratives, possesses no teleological beliefs in an ultimate justice or a resolution of strife. Existence is only what he makes of it in service to what he believes. When he reunites with Sieglinde, his love for her becomes so meaningful to him that he will do anything to not only protect and nurture it, but to shape his world in love’s image: to go forth into that great if indeterminant springtime.

For our contemporary purposes, it would be a mistake, however, to claim that Siegmund does any of this out of a sense of hope. I don’t really believe that there is any hope in Siegmund’s life. There is an almost existentialist quality to the way he aimlessly perseveres after enduring abuse after abuse, defeat after defeat. (The same, frankly, can be said of many of us.) This shrugging off of hope is not, to be clear, nihilistic in sentiment precisely because Siegmund possesses no telos, no true certainty about what will happen and his role in it. This is evident from Siegmund’s very first meeting with his sister (who he does not yet know is his sister). In fact, one can say that she gives him this conceptual freedom. On the threshold of her hearth, he tells Sieglinde, “Misfortune pursues me, wherever I flee; misfortune pulls me closer, wherever I stay – You, woman, may it never reach! On foot and alert, I must be gone.” In accordance with his previous experiences, he will keep going. He will move on. And yet, at the first sign of a different outcome, he abandons his certainty. He reorients his entire life because Sieglinde, who suffers herself, does not want him to go; because, despite what he’s told her, she asks him to stay; because they share a fraught resilience.

Love is the most important force within the “Ring.” It sharpens conviction into a spear with which the world can be won or lost. However, it would be wrong to draw an equivalency between love and hope. Love rewards Siegmund with hope, but it also rewards him in other, more important ways: with sustenance, direction, the power of solidarity, a greater will. It’s no wonder, then, that after Wotan’s other illegitimate daughter, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, visits Siegmund and warns him that he is going to fatally lose his battle against Hunding—albeit in exchange for the endless pleasures of Valhalla—Siegmund rejects her and Valhalla, too. Of course he does, because, unlike his father, he believes in something other than himself.

Sieglinde is no mere object that can be exchanged for some reward. Siegmund’s place is with her, with humanity. Compared to the tangible depth of human love, eternal bliss rings pretty hollow. As a result of this renunciation, Siegmund dies, at the hand of his own father, for love. He does this not because he is stubborn or arrogant or foolish or inherently tragic but because conviction is all there is. As a character, he forces us to acknowledge the burden of our own agency. In the end, his is a right to die. The lesson we should take from Siegmund is not that we should live and act as though there is no hope, but that hope cannot be discovered or lost. It can only be created by the choices we make, forged in the same fires as unadulterated belief. It is this conviction contra hope that makes Siegmund a hero—the hero. This is why, though it takes another two operas, it’s his vision of freedom through love that ultimately comes to fruition. Such freedom can and must only mean the destruction of the system responsible for all misery and subjugation.



This distinction is not as politicized in “Die Walküre” as I make out here, in part because the “Ring” is a pageant of individual actors. But the end, as viewed through the lens of Siegmund, gives depth to his struggle and offers us something to hold onto in the gray waters of the unknown. Siegmund dies in that realm, as does Sieglinde, as have countless revolutionaries who never got to see their vision of a better world come to pass, albeit in ways that they could not have possibly foreseen, and which often tread a longer path of struggle they or anyone would’ve wanted.

In the “Ring,” the synthesis of our two competing forces is Brünnhilde, the final hero of the cycle and by far Wagner’s most progressive female creation. But to become that hero, Brünnhilde must first overcome an attachment to both her father and the privileges of godhood—and that’s before we even get to Siegfried. “Die Walküre” shows Brünnhilde at her bravest. She schemes against her stepmother and pleads with her father to let Siegmund live. When he refuses, she struggles to obey, tentatively following his commands only to reject them later on in lieu of her own sense of morality. This choice exposes the greatest irony of the whole cycle, which is that the mighty defender of the status quo that Wotan seeks is not Siegmund, but Brünnhilde. He is unable to see what’s right in front of his face because his daughter, brilliant though she may be, is a woman.

When Brünnhilde, serving her role as an envoy of death, visits Siegmund in the forest, she tells him matter-of-factly what will soon happen to him: He will die in battle and ascend to Valhalla where he’ll find beautiful women, endless charms, and be reunited his father. When Siegmund renounces heaven in favor of staying (and dying) with Sieglinde, his conviction persuades Brünnhilde to side with her half-brother instead of (and in direct opposition to) her father. In this, she is naive but sincere. She hopes that Wotan will see reason, will avert disaster at the very last moment. He won’t.

A woman of supernatural strength, the Valkyrie arms herself and tries to protect Siegmund in battle, only for Wotan to overpower the both of them, shattering Siegmund’s mythical sword and dealing the fatal blow. Upon seeing Sieglinde watching in horror, Brünnhilde knows that atonement starts with her. In an act of compassion for her half-sister, Brünnhilde flees the scene and later informs Sieglinde she’s pregnant with a great and noble hero who shall be called Siegfried. However, to avoid the wrath of her father, Sieglinde must roam the forest where the dragon Fafner lurks, because it is the one place Wotan still will not tread. This fate does not faze Sieglinde. Laughingly, almost, she descends into the great unknown with the fragments of her lover’s sword, assured that they will one day be used to dismantle the forces that shattered them.

Despite the efforts of the other Valkyries on the fell, parental discipline follows for their sister. However, Brünnhilde has not entirely embraced Wälsung thought. Once her father comes after her, the first thing she wants to do is negotiate, as she did before, with the same patriarchal power that is all too willing to treat his own children no better than objects. (Where else could Brünnhilde have learned how to negotiate with Siegmund over the fate of a woman?) Now, as earlier, Brünnhilde holds her own against her father because she does not fundamentally see herself as lesser than him. (This is not entirely incompatible with her acceptance of his parental authority.) However, a broader insight into Brünnhilde’s insubordination is that her actions are based not only on her capacity for free will or sympathy for Siegmund and Sieglinde, but also her profound disagreement with Wotan’s recent millenarian turn.

Brünnhilde ultimately disavows the same intolerable unknown that drove her father to violence and her brother to his untimely end. She refuses to believe that things can’t go back to the way they were. Her wish is to reset the clock to a time, not so long ago, when Fricka wasn’t as involved in family affairs, when Siegmund and Sieglinde were allowed to roam the wretched earth, when the slaughter of innocents brought good work for the Valkyries—all under the watchful eye of her doting father. How, she says to herself, could the world be ending when it remained perfectly intact so recently? Why is Wotan, who maintains and upholds the structures of that world, all too willing to comply with annihilation in advance?

This conflict between Brünnhilde and Wotan over Siegmund’s fate is ultimately irreconcilable. All the Valkyrie can do is try and mitigate the patriarchal harm that’s about to be inflicted on her. In a corporeal manifestation of his ownership over her, Wotan cuts his daughter’s wings, taking away her strength. He puts her to sleep and leaves her to the mercy of whatever man will find her first. Brünnhilde is unable to avert this degrading fate, but she is able to negotiate a compromise around the level of severity. Fine; she will become the possession of a man, an object for exchange and extraction. But she manages to convince Wotan to encircle her with a wall of flames. Only Siegfried, the purest of all heroes, a man who knows no fear, will be able to rescue her.

Part III: "Siegfried"

For many years, at the top of the fell, Brünnhilde sleeps, and waits. We are like her, in many ways. We long for what we imagine was yesterday’s stability. We still yearn for norms predicated on an irreparable degradation of nature and endless human exploitation, norms that were at least less aesthetically gauche and better managed by the now rather feckless “powers that be.” The ugliness that once lurked, if shallowly, beneath a despotic world’s gilded surface, has now been dredged up by those who wish to see its most destructive potential fulfilled. Like the gold from the Rhine, these potentialities have always come prepackaged with more “benign” forms of capitalism, lying in wait for those willing to use them to do the unthinkable.

Ours is a system in which all of humanity, even those once considered special, is a necessary sacrifice made at the nihilistic altar of insatiable greed. That is what the ring, and its precursory renunciation of love, represents. These are the violent conditions its existence brings to birth. A genocide on earth and mass suicide in heaven. Like Brünnhilde, many of us once threw our lot in with those who were already fighting. We tried to seize the moment, to intercede on behalf of humanity. And often, especially in the last decade, we thought that moment would be ours. We created the conditions for a hope that would be crushed time and time again. And yet, we say, and yet, and yet! But none of us realized that this great hurrah was the last off ramp before true disaster struck; before the boulder tore down the hill and crushed Sisyphus under the sheer weight of all that spent effort.

As the system eats itself alive, many of us–though of course not all–are no longer fighting like we did in our Wälsung days. Instead, we are like Brünnhilde, lying there, asleep. But worse than sleeping: we are waiting—for Siegfried. And here’s the thing about Siegfried, this savior, this great hero, who we hope will restore order to a dying world: He is worse than nothing. Siegfried is not like Siegmund. Sure, he has conviction, but it is insular. He believes in nothing beyond the borders of his own body. His is a world of simple domination, a sleight of hand that equates heroism with strength. Ebulliently, he harasses the antisemitic caricature that is Mime, his stepfather. He mends his real father’s sword. He slays the dragon. He puts on the ring. He examines the Tarnhelm—which allows him to assume any shape—and chooses to pocket it, because, arrogant as he is, no form is better than his own. A bird tells him where to go and what to want, for he has no inner locus of desire or direction.

All that stands between him and what he’s seeking is Wotan, dressed as a wanderer, and his once mighty spear of contracts, which Siegfried shatters simply because the old man is taking up too much pavement. And Wotan, after just a moment of hesitation, lets him. Wagner’s intent is for Wotan to achieve some form of transcendence here, the final development into who he needs to be. This transition from despair to acceptance is supposed to humanize him. But does it really, in the grand scheme of things? After all, for those he’s left behind, the old world has died, the new world waits to be born. As the apocryphal Gramsci quote goes, now is the time of monsters.

These worlds are about to meet. Siegfried can see Brünnhilde, sleeping on a mountaintop, surrounded with fire. Our great hero, sword in hand, runs through the towering flames to claim her without a second thought; his entitlement holds no bounds. When Brünnhilde wakes up and looks at Siegfried, for the first and only time in his life, he is afraid. He fears this woman because now he has seen himself beyond his own comprehension, reflected in the wide, soft eyes of the Other. Brünnhilde lets Siegfried take her, for his being here is proof enough of what she wants to believe: that someone will save the day and all will be right with the world. And so they embrace. And so they sing, loudly, about radiant love, joyful death.

Of course, Siegfried has no real knowledge of what love is. To him it is intoxicating, affirming, a matter of possession. It’s all he wants, until he’s told to want something else. Brünnhilde, however, does know, because Siegmund showed her, and this to Brünnhilde was worth losing everything, including her own dignity. In her new situation, she imagines herself to be Sieglinde, the love object, the woman a man is willing to die for. But Sieglinde was no less a quiet revolutionary than her brother. When it became clear that her and Siegmund’s vision of love could be carried on by the next generation, she endured nine months’ privation in the woods and died in childbirth for it. The people and the situation here are different, and will come to pass differently.

Part IV: "Götterdämmerung"

To watch “Götterdämmerung” is not so far off in sentiment from reading the news, in that it also shows a slow-motion descent into needless, cynical violence and misery, the likes of which only death can imbue with a higher meaning. But as far as the “Ring” cycle goes, the tone of the last opera diverges from the others. As I wrote in an essay on the character Siegfried, “Götterdämmerung” is based primarily on the courtly intrigue of the “Nibelungenlied,” which is a very different text than the Norse sagas from which most of the cycle is sourced. The “Nibelungenlied” is an ugly story in which a slightly more likable version of Siegfried is ensnared in a family plot to abduct and rape Brünhild, a woman that Gunther, the patriarch of this family, is not strong enough to conquer himself. What ensues is an agonizing train wreck of betrayal and revenge that ultimately leaves everyone, save for a single knight and his aging mentor, either beheaded or bleeding out on the floor of a Hungarian palace.

Wagner stuffs the front half of this story into the bodies of his existing characters. What makes “Götterdämmerung” more relevant to contemporary events than its medieval precedent is that, in the opera, all of these people are mind-numbingly stupid. The Burgundians become the Gibichungs, a family with no morals and no direction who have perfected the trifecta of lying, cheating, and stealing. Their aim is for self-enrichment as much as pure wantonness.

Through the Gibichungs, there can be a view of the “Ring,” along more Marxist lines, that the heart of its final tension is between the haute bourgeoisie—the gods—and the petite bourgeoisie—those who have made their riches here on earth, beginning with Alberich, who steals the promethean fire of exploitation and uses it to light the Nibelungen mineshafts as his brethren toil for gold. But much time has passed since then. Wagner’s Gibichungs are not imbued with the same superstition as his old villains and antiheroes. There is no talk of the Norns, the gods. This is not the slavish humanity puppeteered into conflicts and harvested by Valhalla. As far as who rules whom, the lines aren’t so clear cut between old and new, man and god, good and evil. The time of Siegfried was an interregnum during which human society changed significantly.

This makes some sense if we think of the “Ring” as a 19th century work, emerging from a similar socioeconomic transformation in society, or even as a work of our own time which mirrors that transformation as the accumulation of wealth and power escapes the grasp of old political structures. The warrior class represented by Hunding has been civilized. Siegmund, the long-suffering proletarian (or more accurately, a liberal subject), still persists in his half-sister, in those mute faces that surround Hagen waiting for guidance, and perhaps even in Hagen himself. Adorno made the salient point that when Siegmund rejects heaven, he by corollary aligns himself with Alberich, even to the same (hotly contested) bit of music, the renunciation motif, when he pulls the sword from the tree. But that was the old generation, whose ties to the new exist primarily in the living memory of Brünnhilde. Many times, she fails to adapt to the world she wakes up in.

Hagen, the loyal vassal of Gunther and the villain of the first half of the epic poem, is transformed by Wagner into Alberich’s son and Gunther’s half-brother, whose main goal is not helping his liege lord but, of course, getting his hands on the ring. Hagen, however, is a richer character than his father. He has one foot in the heady world of rings and dragons and the other in this new, hierarchical human existence. Hence, the character he is closest to in sentiment is not Alberich, but Siegfried. Both are an expression of Wagner’s predilection for what can be called a conservative anarchism. Siegfried is an anarchist par excellence. In what is supposed to be a representation of total human freedom, he is a heat seeking missile in any environment he’s put in. Like Siegfried, Hagen believes in nothing. Like Siegfried, Hagen, to whom Alberich comes in a dream, is guided by blind, unavoidable fate—by the ring. He is given more structure via scheming and intrigue, but Hagen’s ultimate end lies in unavoidable destruction. He is as much a failure as a villain as Siegfried is as a hero.

When Siegfried arrives at the hall of the Gibichungs in search of adventure, instead of threatening to conquer their lands, like a child he proffers everything he has. (Fortunately, his poor socialization is humorous to others.) Rather than being the beautiful princess Siegfried tries to woo, Gutrune is in on the scheme and offers him a love potion that will not only erase Brünnhilde from his memory, but also erode his consent, rendering him helpless against her charms and the ulterior motives of her brothers. (In this respect, Siegfried becomes, albeit only temporarily, like his father: a feminized subject.) Gunther then makes Siegfried an offer he (literally) can’t refuse: Should Siegfried help him capture Brünnhilde for his wife, he will receive Gutrune’s hand in exchange.

Meanwhile, Brünnhilde sits up on her hilltop none the wiser. While admiring her ring, she receives a house call from her Valkyrie sister, one that echoes Erda’s visit to her father in “Das Rheingold,” in that she warns Brünnhilde to get rid of that fucking ring before something terrible happens. This visit demonstrates that things are not exactly settled in Valhalla, but Brünnhilde vainly refuses the offer. The ring is a token of Siegfried’s love, which for her is the most important thing in the world. This refusal, a final opportunity to prevent disaster, makes what will inevitably happen next even more brutal. It has taken this long, but the curse of the ring has finally been fulfilled in the way both Alberich and Erda prescribed.

Siegfried, fatalism’s unwitting acolyte, follows the course fate laid out for him. He dons the Tarnhelm, transforms into the shape of Gunther, reconquers the flames and subdues Brünnhilde with violence. He rips the ring from her finger and returns it to its own. The real Gunther then steps through the fire to finish her off, to add credence to the claim, shown by Alberich, Hunding and Wotan before him, that rape is the true arch-crime of the “Ring” cycle, a kind of marrow holding together its bones. This scene is dissonantly paralyzing. It holds the viewer hostage, in part because it invites a particular helplessness, one that says: nothing matters! Look at all that has come to pass, only for it to culminate in this! That’s what I meant when I said that Siegfried is worse than nothing: When his heroism is finally put to a real test, he fails spectacularly. He complies, he falls in line. It’s a dangerous game, waiting for him, especially with nothing but errant hope as collateral.



The cycle’s endgame is now in play. Because Gunther’s plan is as stupid as it is crass, Siegfried gets caught out by Brünnhilde as soon as she returns to the castle: First, because it is obvious that the real Gunther is incapable of actualizing the crime he allegedly committed, and second, because Siegfried, rather than Gunther, is still wearing the ring. This puts Siegfried in a situation where he lies and tells the truth simultaneously, because he doesn’t remember that he and Brünnhilde were lovers up until, well, yesterday, and so he also doesn’t remember that the ring was originally given to her even though everyone else does. The Gibichungs immediately turn on Siegfried: half because Gunther is revealed to be the biggest cuckold in literature to the tune of massively injured pride, and half because they already hate Siegfried (especially Hagen, for generational reasons) and his potential demise is convenient.

In the wake of this nasty confrontation, Brünnhilde, egged on by Hagen in the heat of the moment, demands Siegfried be killed for his act of betrayal. After the abduction, this is the second most dreadful moment in the opera because, despite all her agency and all that she knows, Brünnhilde, too, chooses violence. However, in this case, one must ask, is she entirely wrong to do so? Despite the misery of the moment, the wretchedness of the trap she’s ensnared in, is there not a political distinction to be made between Brünnhilde’s violence and the violence of Siegfried or that of her father? After all, Siegfried has destroyed the life Brünnhilde has built both for herself and for him. He has destabilized conviction. He has undermined what life is for. But worst of all, he has enabled his lover’s violation in every possible way. And so, rather than comparing her to the men in her life, is Brünnhilde really so different from Sieglinde, who, in drugging the husband who rapes her says: I refuse to be subjugated?

Justified or not, the decision—and the duress it’s made under—is ugly; it forecloses any possibility of happiness. Even though she immediately regrets her decision to kill the man she loves, Brünnhilde is unable to walk it back. The rapidity of this sequence reveals what’s frustrating about the Valkyrie: Wagner really can’t imagine what a strong woman should be like, and so his creation is both groundbreaking heroine and misogynistic trope, a collaborator with and an adversary of male power. She is noble and defiant, vain and wrathful.

It is at this point in the cycle—the end—where the synthesis of fatalism and conviction comes to pass. Siegfried goes off on his hunting trip with Gunther and Hagen from which he will return with a pike in his back. The gods have quietly stocked Valhalla with tinder, hoping for it to catch fire. Brünnhilde is certain by now that they, including her father, have abandoned her not so differently than they abandoned the Wälsungs. When upon the earlier sight of “Gunther,” Brünnhilde laments, “Wotan, ferocious, barbaric god! Alas! Now I see the point of my punishment! To hunt me down until I’m derided and disgraced!,” one can still find in her the long echoes of both twins, the derided man and the disgraced woman. But it is when she waits for the inevitable return of Siegfried’s body that the end of the world and her role in ending it soon become clear. In this moment, there is commonality, perhaps even an empathy, between her and her father, because she, too, has been persuaded into condemning someone she loves to an early death. As the funeral pyre is stacked high, she sings rhetorically to the gods:

“Do you know, how it came about? O you, immortal keepers of oaths! Cast your eyes on my unfurling grief; witness your guilt without end! Hear my grievance, you noblest of gods! With his bravest deed — which you so rightly wanted — you doomed him, once he’d done it, to the curse that doomed you, — the purest of men had to betray me, that a woman might become wise! Now, do I know what you want? All, all, I know all things, — all freedom has now become mine. Also I hear your ravens’ whispers; this instant I send them both home with their news, awaited in fear. Rest, rest, you go! I take possession of my heritage now.” (emphasis mine.)

Brünnhilde could be an entirely different kind of savior of humanity. She does not have to die. But by this point, there is a tacit recognition of her own complicity in the way things have turned out. She is a part of the same bad infinity, as Adorno put it, that has harmed her. And yet, her errant behavior all this time is testimony to a different tyranny: of choices, of agency, of the possibilities embodied within every decision. Self-immolation may fulfill the desires of her father; this much is true. The end still comes for the gods, as intended, but not in the way they intended. Certainty is only one element of the dialectical relationship. It would be entirely unfair to say Brünnhilde’s suicide is one of relinquishment, a mere concession to the bleak inevitability of things as they were made and things as they are meant to be. If anything, the opposite is true: imbued with this knowledge of all things, all freedom has now become hers.

Like Siegmund’s before her, Brünnhilde’s death is ultimately a revolutionary act, even if its characteristics and sentiments are mixed. It is still a choice, and one made for love. It is Siegfried—and the idea of Siegfried—she dies for. It is Siegfried she calls out for as the flames grow higher and higher, Siegfried with whom she wants to be in a better world that wasn’t. Death is the final leap into that same unknown the Valkyrie once found so intolerable. But she makes this leap for the same reason as her brother: because what is known is worse.

Undeniably, this is a bourgeois fantasy of sentimental martyrdom, and the helpless chorus of Hagen’s onlooking vassals shows an equally bourgeois disregard for the many, rather than the few, that make up the true throngs of humanity. Yet within the logic of the “Ring,” despite—or because of—all its contradictions, this is the only way things could have ended: in a burning contortion of man and god, myth and history. Fate may have fanned the flames, but Brünnhilde’s sacrifice, while devastating, has no basis in her father’s nihilism because it is firmly rooted in her own anguish. She chooses death because that is where love is and love is all there is. She dies, not because the world as it was has been lost forever, but because that world—which created her and Siegmund and Sieglinde and Siegfried and just as quickly snatched them away—is unbearable.

To die is the completion of the Wälsung project, which is, at its simplest, to clear a path forward for loving and being loved, to actualize the possibility of a life freed from the heavens. The flames at the end of “Götterdämmerung” will rid the world of both the ring and Valhalla. They will destroy all that oppresses, all that could be salvaged to oppress again, all that stands as an impediment to human flourishing, even though what will happen after the fire dies down remains unknown. Unknown, but open.

It is precisely this openness that makes the “Ring” a more powerful work than if it had a triumphant ending. This final contradiction between intent and actuality, between the world we aspire to and how our aspirations are fulfilled is inherent in how history comes to pass, the way reality differs from stories. The protagonists of the “Ring” show us that the unknown, far from being a pessimistic void, gives our choices and actions meaning. It’s why we, personified in the onlookers, should watch it all go up in flames and think: May we all meet our moment as bravely, despite our flaws.