“Bayreuth is in Thuringia!” Mitteldeutsche Zeitung
A bleak wind chord of E fl at minor opens Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.
It establishes the dominant atmosphere of the piece from its fi rst bar:
twilight, a deceptive half-light, prevails. Shadowy fi gures stumble towards
the abyss. The last evening of the Ring is one of plotting and betrayal, of
ominous oaths, a chilling lust for power, abuse and humiliation – and, also,
of a superbly staged apocalypse, when the beings and things destined for
destruction shine brightly for one last time. The leitmotivs and thematic
ideas from throughout the whole tetralogy recur in Götterdämmerung, intensifi ed and woven into a musical web from which there can be no escape.
Everything appears to fi t together fatally with everything else. There is nothing more to be done. The net of catastrophe is knotted too fatefully for that,
both musically and dramatically.
When Wagner sat down to write a prose outline of what turned out as the last part of the Ring, he called it Siegfried’s Death. That was in the year
of revolutions, 1848. The new title, usually translated as Twilight of the Gods, came later (Bernard Shaw called it Night Falls on the Gods but that
never caught on). All the threads of the drama run now towards the hero’s fall. The death of Siegfried precipitates the fi nal dissolution of the gods’
world, set in train by Wotan when he impiously tore a branch from the World Ash-Tree, and to which the god was already resigned long ago, before
he knew of Siegfried’s conception. The natural order has been diverted from its proper course, and the last hope of righting it rests with Siegfried
– the human being of the future. He knows no constraints, no fear of violence moderates his thirst for action, he is naïve and spontaneous. To
Wagner he represented Utopia, Thomas Mann described him as “harlequin, god of light and anarchistic social revolutionary”, Shaw as “a totally
unmoral person, a born anarchist, the ideal of Bakunin, an anticipation of the ‘overman’ of Nietzsche”. Yet he is unfree, nevertheless: he must
run on the rails laid by Wotan and thus he is the instrument (one might say, war machine) of the failing power of the old gods as they wait
for annihilation. The truly new, however, as Wagner saw it, can only rise from the ashes of the old. So Siegfried too must die, and Brünnhilde,
magnanimous in forgiveness, assumes the roles of tragic heroine and redeemer by her self-sacrifice.