Richard Wagner: Die Walkure

“Weimar charms the conductor and the entire orchestra with standing ovations.” Süddeutsche Zeitung

“A free man is the creator of his own destiny.” Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung reflects the composer’s own life story as well as the political turmoil of his time. As the work progresses, another character rises to equal importance with the hero Siegfried: the god Wotan, the mouthpiece of Wagner’s ideas.

“He is exactly like us: he is the sum of our current intellectual consciousness, while Siegfried is what we hope the human being of the future will be, but whom we cannot shape, who must create himself.” “He is exactly like us: he is the sum of today’s intellectual consciousness, while Siegfried is what we hope the human being of the future will be, but whom we cannot shape, and who must create himself through our destruction!” Our own destruction as the foundation for a happier future?

Wagner clothed this Herculean task in a musically expansive, sparkling network of leitmotifs (there are about 20 separate motifs in Die Walküre). Dramaturgically, the conversational style of Das Rheingold

gives way to the tone of bourgeois tragedy: incestuous passion, more than one deeply rooted marital enmity, and a lot of talk, a lot of self-justification in the form of repetition. This first day of the tetralogy (Das Rheingold is the “preliminary evening”) was undoubtedly “the most moving, the most tragic” of all Wagner’s works, according to his wife Cosima, who expressed this in her diary on August 31, 1873.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)