Wagner’s Ring

On 11 July 2023 Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, was chosen by the Anthropocene Working Group as the official site of a “golden spike” (technically, a “Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point” or GSSP), a geological marker of the recently proposed and still much debated epoch in Earth’s history: the Anthropocene. This most recent geological epoch, now reckoned at a mere 75 years old, would be defined by the indelible traces of human impact on the geological record. (By ill-omened coincidence, the same month of July saw wildfires of unprecedented scope sweep across central Canada, severely impacting air quality across much of North America.) The great depth and narrow diameter of Crawford Lake preserve sediment layers or “varves” that document environmental conditions over centuries, like the rings of a tree, with unusual clarity. Atop the long-accumulated layers of organic sediment lie traces of modern humanity: plutonium isotopes, chemical fertilizers, ash from coal-fired power plants.

Interpretations of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung in recent decades have increasingly tended to see in the cycle a warning against the potentially apocalyptic consequences of phenomena such as nuclear arms and nuclear power, the fossil fuel industry, deforestation, and an ever-expanding range of global technologies for the future of the planet. By current consensus, our Anthropocene epoch only began in earnest about one hundred years after Wagner first conceived of the Ring. Yet key antecedents of the new epoch were well underway: the European Industrial Revolution and the modern capitalist economy fueled by it. Their imprint on the conception of the Ring cycle is very apparent, indeed. Questions we debate today about the relation of humans to the natural world – do human culture and technology exist within or outside of “Nature,” for example? – are rooted in the philosophy and literature of the early Romantics, with whom Wagner grew up. And Wagner’s work, the Ring cycle above all, has always demonstrated an uncanny relevance to future generations. As director Peter Sellars put it, “Wagner is always ahead.”

Although there are no human characters, strictly speaking, in Das Rheingold, the prologue-style first installment of Wagner’s tetralogy of “music dramas,” the future of humanity is embedded throughout. As with virtually all world mythologies, fundamental human character traits are starkly projected on gods and other supernatural, supra-human beings. From the primordial depths of the Rhine river in scene 1 to the mine-shafts of Nibelheim in scene 3 and the mountaintop vistas of Valhalla in scenes 3 and 4, the future history of mankind’s betrayal of the natural environment and abuse of fellow humans is prefigured at every level. Scene 1 of Das Rheingold presents the foundational gesture of the entire Ring cycle, the “golden spike,” as it were, demarcating the beginning of the epoch that will witness “the twilight of the gods.” This Rhine Gold is initially the talisman of a “golden age,” a natural order untouched by gods or men. Or dwarves: it is the Nibelung dwarf Alberich who steals (or “rapes,” in some renditions) the Gold from the care of the Rhine Maidens the moment he hears of the infinite wealth and power that can be produced by the Gold in exchange for renouncing “the power of love.” In the second scene, we learn that Wotan, the chief of the gods, has pledged the life-giving fertility goddess Freia to the giants Fasolt and Fafner as payment for building the fortress of Valhalla, intended to guarantee the gods’ enduring dominion. Wotan, in other words, has already replicated Alberich’s corrupt bargain, trading beauty and love for wealth and power. Fafner and Wotan both suppose that Alberich’s Ring and the amassed wealth it has generated are the answer to any present and future troubles. In the third scene, the regime of Alberich’s Ring is laid bare as we, with Wotan, witness how it is wielded to exploit the ceaseless, unrewarded labor of his fellow Nibelung dwarves. The fourth and final scene enacts yet another proto-human original sin: Fafner slays his brother Fasolt (who yearns only for a regime of domestic peace and happiness with Freia) in order to take Alberich’s Ring and horde for himself.

A key element of Wagner’s genius was his ability to develop strikingly modern social and psychological implications from his mythic or legendary materials. There can be no question, for example, that Alberich’s brutal regime in Nibelheim, as depicted in scene 3 of Das Rheingold, embodied for Wagner the modern industrial-capitalist regime denounced in the writings of revolutionary socialist thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, or Karl Marx, or in the novels of Charles Dickens. Whether or not Wagner was able to predict accurately “the artwork of the future,” he imbued the mythological epic of the Ring with a range of momentous present and future implications. The prehistory he developed for the tragic betrayal of Siegfried and Brünnhilde at the hands of Hagen and the Gibichung clan (the story of Götterdämmerung as derived from the medieval Nibelungenlied), back through Siegfried’s early upbringing in the forest by Alberich’s brother Mime (the story of Siegfried) and the doomed coupling of Siegfried’s parents, the Volsung twins Siegmund and Sieglinde (the story of Die Walküre), to Alberich’s theft of the Rhine Gold, his forging of the Ring, and his subsequent curse upon it (the story of Das Rheingold) – this mythic backstory virtually demands interpretation in terms of modern human society, that of Wagner’s day and/or our own.

The face-value parable of the Gold and the Ring is fairly straightforward. Sometime near the beginning of human civilization, a pure, lustrous elemental material was discovered to be extractable and assigned an arbitrary exchange value. The control of this non-productive wealth source becomes the basis of an equally arbitrary, unequal distribution of power. The Ring represents the transformation, or corruption, of a natural element (gold) into wealth and power, including power to control “the means of production,” in Marxian terms. The plea of the Rhine Maidens, echoing throughout the cycle, that the Ring be returned to the depths of the river suggests a wish to unmake the Ring, restoring that engine of wealth and power to its “pure and bright” elemental state. But if we hear those Rhine Maidens as the voice of nature, in some sense, why should “nature” care about the socio-economic injustices wrought by the human institutions of wealth and power? In the fourth scene of Das Rheingold the goddess Erda suddenly appears, warning Wotan to relinquish the Ring he has just extorted from Alberich. Like Gaia of the ancient Greeks, Erda is a maternal embodiment of the earth as eco-system. But again: why would “the earth” want or need to warn Wotan against modeling the future sins of human greed and corruption? (Wotan himself, it should be noted, has committed his own sin against the natural order: the rune-covered spear that embodies his law-giving authority has been fashioned from a branch broken off the “World Ash Tree” sometime in the past; that symbol of the earth as living, organic network has ever since been in a state of perpetual decay.)

Productions of Wagner’s Ring cycle since the middle of the twentieth century – the new Anthropocene epoch, as currently proposed – have increasingly sought to identify the Ring with one or another human-induced threats to society, or to life on earth altogether. If the first interpretive layer of the Ring’s history, dating to the socialist revolutionary epoch of 1848-49 in Europe when Wagner started to conceive the project, suggests the Gold and the Ring as a parable of the “loveless” exploitation of labor under the modern capitalist regime, is it plausible to project those symbols forward into our own present and impending future? It is the apocalyptic consequences of Alberich’s Ring at the end of Götterdämmerung (“Twilight of the Gods”) that have most contributed to this newer interpretive layer. For Wagner himself the apocalyptic gesture of fire and flood that wipe the stage clean following Brünnhilde’s immolation, presumably restoring the Ring to its natural state of “pure and bright” Gold, was mainly an anarchist fantasy of purgation. In the background we see, or imagine, Valhalla going down in flames: the end of the old, corrupt order of the gods (as well as dwarves and giants). Alberich’s half-brother Hagen is also swallowed up in the cleansing flood, a corrupt link between that old order and the new human world. In Wagner’s utopian mythography, a new Anthropocene epoch is just now dawning: an age of human “heroes” on the pattern of Siegfried and Brünnhilde.

And yet, as we have seen throughout, the original sins of Alberich and Wotan, and indeed all the failings of that pre-human order, are projections of distinctly human traits, especially the failings of modern Western capitalist society. Alberich’s theft of the Gold and his forging of the Ring map effortlessly onto the extraction of resources – whether metals and gemstones, coal and oil, natural uranium or human-synthesized plutonium – transformed into sources of wealth and power and thereby used to subjugate human populations at the expense of “mother earth” (Erda or Gaia) and the wider network of living things. Contemporary politics and socio-economic justice may have been uppermost in Wagner’s mind in conceiving his Ring dramas, but some intuition led him put this warning in the mouth of Erda, mother earth: “Weiche, Wotan, Weiche! Flieh’ des Ringes Fluch! Rettungslos dunklem Verderben weiht dich sein Gewinn” (“Desist, Wotan, desist! Avoid the curse of the Ring! Hopeless dark destruction is all that it shall win you”).

The “cleansing” apocalypse figured at the end of the Ring cycle may betoken a hopeful, utopian Anthropocene, conveyed through the transfiguring uplift of Wagner’s orchestra. Yet the glittering hubris of the gods entering Valhalla at the end of Das Rheingold is just as surely an emblem of human hubris, of Wagner’s time or our own. In the cosmology of the Ring, we resemble the doomed race of gods rather than the human “heroes” of the future. “Ich warnte dich – du weißt genug: Sinn’ in Sorg’ und Furcht!” (“I’ve warned you – you know enough: reflect in care and fear!”) – those are Erda’s last words to Wotan before she disappears back into the ground. Reading Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung as a parable of the threat of environmental catastrophe transposes Erda’s warning, in effect, to the conclusion of the cycle. At present, we remain Wagner’s gods (and dwarves); we are not yet his heroes. Despite the musical promise of the cycle’s ending, Valhalla goes down in flames. Reading the Ring as a myth of the Anthropocene warns us of an imminent “Götterdämmerung,” while also inviting us to imagine, if we can, some way of realizing a sustainable future. Perhaps there is still hope for some version of the “utopian Anthropocene” tentatively promised at the end of Wagner’s Ring cycle.