Richard Wagner’s Women

Richard Wagner’s Women

Eva Rieger
Translated by Chris Walton

      
 English translation © Chris Walton 

Translated from Eva Rieger Leuchtende Liebe, Lachender Tod

First published in  by Artemis Verlag
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 Contents

List of Illustrations vi

Prelude 

 ‘… the world as yet has no notion of it’: Wagner’s Musical Language 

 From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer 

 ‘The glitter of a high-class brothel’: Tannhäuser 

 ‘Take all that I am!’: Lohengrin 

 Sexual Promise and the Womanly Redeemer: Tristan und Isolde 

 Mathilde, the ‘dear muse’: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

 Der Ring des Nibelungen: Genesis and Prelude – Der Ring I 

 Wotan and the Valkyrie – Der Ring II 

 Siegfried and Women – Der Ring III 

 Götterdämmerung – Der Ring IV 

 Between Eva and Kundry: ‘… no woman at my side!’ 

 ‘… the sufferings of love’s seduction’: Kundry and Parsifal 

Postlude 

Bibliography 

Notes 

Index 
Illustrations
Minna Wagner (Herbert Barth et al., Wagner. Vienna: Universal Edition, ) 

Tannhäuser in the Venusberg, by Joseph Aigner (Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-

Stiftung, Bayreuth) 

Mathilde Wesendonck (Axel Langer and Chris Walton, Minne, Muse und Mäzen: Otto
und Mathilde Wesendonck und ihr Zürcher Künstlerzirkel. Zürich: Museum Rietberg,
) 

Richard Wagner, c.  (Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth) 

Wagner’s composition sketch for Act  of Die Walküre, with one of his secret messages
to Mathilde Wesendonck (‘G.s.m.’ – ‘Gesegnet sei Mathilde!’, ‘Blessed be Mathilde’)
(Axel Langer and Chris Walton, Minne, Muse und Mäzen: Otto und Mathilde
Wesendonck und ihr Zürcher Künstlerzirkel. Zürich: Museum Rietberg, ) 

Siegfried’s sword, by Franz Stassen (Bayreuther Festspielführer, . Bayreuth: Verlag

Georg Niehrenheim, ) 

Brünnhilde and her sister Waltraute – the feminine woman and the warrior Valkyrie
(From the collections of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London) 

Brünnhilde, by Arthur Rackham (Richard Wagner, Siegfried & Götterdämmerung –

ein Bühnenfestspiel für drei Tage und einen Vorabend, illustrated by Arthur Rackham,
vol. . Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, ) 

Photographs of Verena Weidmann’s daughter and grandson reveal a remarkable

similarity to Wagner 

Mathilde Maier (Herbert Barth et al., Wagner. Vienna: Universal Edition, ) 

Cosima Wagner (Rudolph Sabor, Der wahre Wagner. Vienna: Paul Neff, ) 

Judith Gautier (Herbert Barth et al., Wagner. Vienna: Universal Edition, ) 

All reasonable efforts have been undertaken to ascertain the copyright holders
of these images.
Every type of research that focuses on the consciousness of man, his
‘reason’ and his ‘ideas’, but does not at the same time take into account
the nature of human emotions and passions – their urges, their pro-
clivities and their very form – is from the outset bound to be limited in
its effectiveness. – Norbert Elias
Prelude

I     Humoresque of , we see Joan Crawford gazing

at us through a veil of tears as she sits at home, busily drinking herself into
oblivion. Her lover, meanwhile, is in the concert hall, playing an arrangement
for solo violin of themes from Tristan und Isolde. The yearning love theme
gains in intensity, while Crawford’s tears pour out as profusely as she pours
in the alcohol. As the waves of Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’ surge on and upwards,
Crawford runs in desperation to the beach, obviously intent on putting an end
to herself. At the moment of musical climax, the facial close-up blurs, massive
waves drown out the picture, and she goes to her death. During the final bars
the sea calms down and the last notes die away on the concert podium.
It is hardly a matter of chance that innumerable arrangements of Wagner’s
music feature in movie soundtracks; often it’s the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ ,
though sometimes, as here, it’s Tristan und Isolde, which seems well-nigh pre-
destined to underscore romantic emotion. Richard Wagner’s music has long
since left the confines of the opera house. It enchants, comforts and enthuses,
its opulence speaking directly to our senses. But this is not the only reason why
Wagner’s works have become such a musical goldmine for Hollywood. The
musical language that Wagner employed is still valid today, and in it he made
use of the long-established rules of the ‘affects’ as he knew them, which had
been passed down from the music of the Renaissance through the Baroque
and into the Classical period. He refined this tradition in all its parameters,
though remained all the while faithful to tonality. Not until after his death –
and after Bruckner, Mahler and Strauss – was a music devoid of ‘Affekt’
invented by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and others, a music that
overcame tonal relationships, emancipated the dissonance and abjured long-
accepted modes of meaning. This in turn determined the course taken by the
‘New Music’ , which to the present day still struggles for general acceptance.
But there is something else that connects Wagner’s work with our own
times. It is not surprising that the aforementioned film offers us a woman
whose passive role is maintained unto death, while the man is placed in the
public eye to claim fame for himself alone. Wagner played his part in con-
solidating such cultural models. It is these above all that are the subject of this
book. When the feminist movement arose in the s and we all went hunt-
ing enthusiastically for lost women composers, it also became popular to dis-
cuss seemingly misogynistic works of art (such as the disjointed dolls of the
artist Hans Bellmer) or of music (such as Beethoven’s Eroica with its regressive
 Richard Wagner’s Women

act of hero-worship) in order to question how we should approach them today.

At the time, Wagner seemed the worst of them all, not just because of the very
real way in which he subjugated his wife, Cosima (of which we were able to
read much in her recently published diaries), but also because of the manner
in which his female characters were willing to play the victim: Elsa, Elisabeth,
Senta, Brünnhilde and Kundry. It was easy to condemn him. But a sense of
discomfort remained, for his music still lost none of its fascination. How can
we resolve this contradiction – that we can love Wagner’s music, yet reject
the stories it tells on account of their misogyny? It seemed imperative to find
out more about his own views of the sexes, and how these are conveyed in his
music.
It was recognized that Wagner’s œuvre – both his writings and his music –
is suffused with subjective experience, and influenced by it. In methodological
terms, the historical connection between the composer-as-human-being, his
work and the society in which he lived has remained unresolved. We do not
necessarily have to follow James McGlathery, who is convinced that Wagner’s
work deals primarily with erotic passion and is ‘full of incestuous feelings and
needs’ . To give due attention to Wagner’s biography is surely essential for
an understanding of his œuvre, but music research was long dominated by a
musicology influenced by the history of ideas, which restricts itself first and
foremost to an abstract view of the mind and of being. It thus allows itself an
elegant detour around the topic of ‘woman’ , not least because an investiga-
tion of a composer’s private life is swiftly proscribed as being voyeuristic, even
cheap gossip. It is all too rarely acknowledged that the borderline between the
private and the public is drawn arbitrarily, and that the experiences, the suf-
ferings and the joys to which a creative artist is subject all leave their mark on
his or her work. It is precisely Wagner’s own eventful life, in which women
played such a prominent role, that allows one to jump to spectacular conclu-
sions. Many of the interpretations offered hitherto excel themselves in vulgar-
ity and Schadenfreude, and thus help us not one whit to arrive at a deeper
understanding of his psyche. But whenever Wagner scholarship endeavours
to bring the private and the public into equal focus, a sense of unease cannot
be avoided. For how could a composer display such genius in his music, yet be
such a scoundrel in his personal relationships? One feels the same unease with
those who roundly condemn the women in Wagner’s life so as to present their
hero in all the more glowing colours.
The truly great Wagnerian theme is love, the mysteries of erotic and mater-
nal fascination. In short: woman. Joy and sorrow, jealousy and aggression, fear
of loss and jubilant success: these are the affects that determine the course of
his operas, and this despite the composer’s own insistence that his œuvre was
 Prelude 

intended to edify, even to change the world. In the end, he always lands back
in those ‘big’ emotions. When Martin Gregor-Dellin declares, in his large-
scale Wagner biography, that ‘it is doubtful whether Wagner really suffered
from the “curse” of sex; its uncontrollable urges irritated him at best’ , he is
simply wrong. For Wagner, sexuality was a legitimate basic need. The erotic
was a source of life to him; indeed, it even constituted his mental ‘nourish-
ment’ . It was the fundamental requirement of his creativity. ‘Like as the hart
desireth the water brooks, so longeth my soul after thee,’ he said to Cosima,
quoting the psalmist – and this at a time when they had already been together
for more than a decade. Even those unwilling to acknowledge the prominent
role that sexuality plays in his opera texts would at least have to recognize the
fervent, erotic power of his music. It was one of Wagner’s greatest achieve-
ments both that (as early as the mid-th century) he was able to understand
the degree to which sexuality is an elemental human need, and that he was
able to depict it in artistic terms.
It would be simplistic, however, to concentrate solely on relationships
between life and work and to suppress the issues raised by the historical con-
text, for historically conditioned views of man and woman form a fundamen-
tal structural principle in society. They influence not just economic and politi-
cal activity, but also the field of artistic production. As early as Mozart, we
find traits of a bourgeois self-understanding that determines his views of man
and woman – as, for example, in his rejection of feudalism, the way in which
the bourgeois detaches himself from the plebeian classes and societal power
is assigned to the man; this is particularly clear in The Magic Flute. When, in
Così fan tutte, Mozart introduced two female characters who contrast starkly
with the bourgeois wish-fulfilling image of female constancy, he was strongly
rebuked for it. It is noteworthy that Wagner criticized the opera, for he him-
self regarded female infidelity as contrary to nature. It henceforth became
the norm in cultural artefacts to position the sexes according to the notions
of equality posited by the Enlightenment, while at the same time not endan-
gering the dominant position of the man. This all points to the existence of a
self-image that was thoroughly bourgeois. We find this endeavour reflected in
music too, as in the idealized cases when a woman voluntarily sacrifices her-
self for a man. Even Beethoven supported this bourgeois struggle, creating just
such a figure with Leonore in his Fidelio. Leonore was important for Wagner,
inasmuch as she was not just a loving woman, but also a strong, active one – a
combination that would never cease to fascinate him.
Wagner and his contemporaries were convinced that the character of the
sexes was founded in nature. This understanding had a decisive impact on the
composer’s work. But if we were to hunt out the misogynistic aspects of his
 Richard Wagner’s Women

œuvre simply in order to put them in the dock for all to see, then we would
only underline once more the role of the woman as outsider, even perhaps –
fatally – to the point of reinforcing it. Instead of continually reaffirming the
hierarchy inherent in relations between the sexes, it makes more sense to ask
how those relations are woven into the artistic process itself. This allows us to
observe that the concept of gender in Wagner is in fact not confined strictly
to the biology of the sexes. For example, Erik in Der Fliegender Holländer
is depicted as a weak man and undergoes a process of feminine semantici-
zation; and Siegfried’s adventure of discovery in the music drama that bears
his name also leads him into a space where semantics are feminized. If we
take this into consideration when returning to the concept of gender, then
we begin to move away from the standard pattern according to which the
man is the aggressor and the woman the victim, and thereby acquire an epis-
temological framework that considerably expands our perception. And it is
at such moments in Wagner that his musical language plays a decisive role.
Does Brünnhilde, though dishonoured by rape, regain her dignity through
jubilant song? Does Wagner use instrumentation as a vehicle for gender
politics?
Those Wagner commentators who have hitherto taken gender roles into
consideration have often been led to inaccurate conclusions because the tradi-
tional questions were themselves gender-neutral only in superficial terms. In
truth, they were rooted in environments and experiences that were patriar-
chal in origin. As early as  Silvia Bovenschen proved the extent to which
depictions of the feminine in literature, philosophy and aesthetics were sub-
ject to male norms, and we can easily add music to this list. The semblance
of neutrality is further perpetuated if one carries out analysis not with a view
to achieving the greatest possible understanding, but instead (as is sometimes
popular in literary theory) regarding it as something fragmentary – a subjec-
tive construction. Despite the polyvalence of Wagner’s work, this is surely
something of which he would never have approved. He wanted to be under-
stood. There is simply no other way of explaining why he published and pro-
moted his libretti, why he wrote all those articles elucidating his œuvre, why he
spent his life endeavouring to achieve proper performances that corresponded
to his expectations, and why he offered such innumerable oral commentaries
on it all. He did not set myths to music for the sake of the myths themselves,
but insisted on their relevance to his own time. The creation of Bayreuth was
a result of his innermost wish to have his operas performed so that their sense
could be understood. Understanding that sense also means understanding
Wagner’s approach to gender roles. I do not intend to consider here the dif-
ferent interpretations that can be extrapolated from Wagner’s works (for these
 Prelude 

can always alter according to the musicological fashion of the day), but rather
what Wagner himself wanted to express with them.
Analysing the music offers an important handle on this, not least because
it can give concrete form to the subtlest of nuances and degrees of differentia-
tion. There are innumerable studies that deal with Wagner without discussing
his music. Everyone is entitled to an opinion on the matter, whatever it may
be, or however personal: Sabine Zurmühl, for example, in a moving article
connects Wotan with the post-War predicament of her own disappointed, dis-
illusioned father. Such subjective confession has its place. And yet the music
is inalienably interconnected with Wagner’s message and thus cannot in any
way be ‘blended out’ . Music speaks a language that we have to decipher – not
in the sense of secret messages or emotive, subjective supposition, but pay-
ing due consideration to the tradition that assigns specific meanings to spe-
cific musical means. This tradition is in many ways as valid today as when the
music was written. It is particularly fascinating to observe how Wagner was
able to depict physical and mental phenomena in music.
One’s enjoyment of a cubist painting by Pablo Picasso or an early wood-
cut or linocut by Gabriele Münter is not diminished if one knows when
they created them, from whom the artists learnt and whom, in turn, they
influenced. Indeed, such knowledge can further stimulate one’s sense of
aesthetic pleasure. In the same way, one’s experience of a piece of music can
be enhanced by knowledge of its historical background and of its composer’s
intentions. While it is perfectly legitimate that operatic productions should
distance themselves from historical models, it is nevertheless odd if producers
ignore the messages inherent in the musical language and instead endeavour
to express on stage their very opposite. For example, when Jürgen Flimm, in
his Bayreuth production, intended Brünnhilde to be dressed as a Valkyrie for
her final monologue, he ignored the fact that Wagner, by excising the Valkyrie
motif and introducing another, makes quite clear in musical terms that his
protagonist has changed over the course of the opera; Wagner even referred
to this in his writings.
For long stretches, Wagner’s music possesses a drug-like quality, paired with
a tendency to dimensional exaggeration and the bombastic. The multifarious
motifs that, in all manner of variations and transformations, are enmeshed in
his works, especially those of his later years, make of his œuvre a well-nigh
bottomless treasure trove for eager commentators. It is clear that in order
to do justice to the subject of this book I had to set priorities in a clear and
manageable way. I thus, largely, avoid issues of symbolism, but I pay particular
attention to the ideologies to which Wagner subscribed. Similarly, I investi-
gate his texts because they shed so much light on his way of thinking. Operatic
 Richard Wagner’s Women

music in general – including the singspiel, which was consciously regarded as

a pedagogical medium – also serves as an instrument for determining societal
differentiation and location. Here it becomes clear how different the messages
were that were intended for men and for women, and how meaningful it can
be for us today to decipher them and to bring them into general awareness.
How did Wagner ‘experience’ (in the broader sense, of course) the women of
his day? To what extent did these women find their way into his art? Does
not art transcend all historically conditioned norms? How did Wagner, who
throughout his life was dependent upon women, succeed in his art in creating
such strong-willed female characters? In order to answer such questions, and
in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of his gender roles, I shall draw
together into a discursive network his philosophical and musico-aesthetic
convictions, his music, contemporary theories of gender, and not least his
own experiences with women as portrayed in his letters and diaries and in
his private remarks as recorded by Cosima. This will help us to avoid using
him as a mere object of projection (though this pitfall can naturally never
be excluded completely) and enable to us position him in his own historical
context.
But the question is just as engaging when asked the other way round. How
did women experience Wagner? From the very beginning, women were
among the most enthusiastic admirers but also the most passionate critics of
his work. His admirers no doubt sensed that some of his female roles carried
within them the potential to burst out of the straitjacket of bourgeois conven-
tion, while his puritanical opponents among the opposite sex feared a disso-
lution of moral ideals that would be to the detriment of woman. The writer
Luise Büchner (–) belonged to the latter camp. For her, Der Ring des
Nibelungen was a sacrilegious attempt to present the sexual drive as an over-
arching moral law:

But fie, such things as would make every decent person blush and turn
away were instead portrayed on that stage and sung! Such coarseness,
such an utter lack of decency was surely not to be found anywhere
except here, in the nineteenth century and on a German stage, before
an elite audience of German men and women!

On the other hand, the music commentator Marie Lipsius (–), who
always worked under the pseudonym ‘La Mara’ , wrote after a performance of
Tannhäuser that ‘The new spirit of this at once passionate and yet transcend-
ent poetry in music, in which I heard the future flutter its wings, overpowered
me.’ Wagner himself took note of the deep impression that the Tannhäuser
Overture made on women, saying that ‘They had to resort to sobbing and
 Prelude 

crying […] only after this sorrow had given vent to itself in tears came the
comfort of the greatest, most exuberant joy.’
‘The exemplary ability of Wagner’s work to draw attention precisely to the
ruptures in our own thought may not be allowed to give way to a self-satisfied
sense of arbitrariness,’ writes Ulrich Drüner with good reason. Theodor W.
Adorno’s sometime words in praise of Walter Benjamin are equally valid for
all interpretations of the Wagner phenomenon: ‘To think means to reject all
the superficial security of mental organization, all deductions and conclusions,
submitting oneself wholly to the joy and risk of using experience in order to
attain what is fundamental.’ The musical experience itself sets forces free
within us, and motivates us time and again to try to understand the work in
question. This study aims to encourage others to embark upon that adven-
turous act of interpretation, and to engage in description and extrapolation.
Critical remarks here on the work of other colleagues naturally presuppose an
inherent respect for their achievements. Wagner’s work can only protect itself
from incrustation if it is subjected to lively debate.
Chapter 
‘… the world as yet has no notion of it’:
Wagner’s Musical Language

R  ’ artistic approach to expressing aspects of

‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ extends over many interrelated areas. It
begins with linguistic metaphor, progresses via the semantic power of his
musical style, and closes with gendered references within certain ideologies
(such as nationalism). To Wagner, it was an incontrovertible fact that music
can speak. In his dramatic œuvre he assigned to music a greater significance
even than the text: ‘Only through the music [does my poetic intent] become
clear. This has become apparent to me once again; I cannot even look at the
poem again without the music,’ he wrote, after beginning to set his Ring des
Nibelungen. The music has to express the plot. Every bar of dramatic music
was justified only insofar as it expressed something relevant to the plot or the
character in question, he wrote to Franz Liszt, who was one of the first to rec-
ognize how Wagner translated his characters’ personality into music by assign-
ing them corresponding rhythms and melodies. And Nietzsche found that
Wagner had ‘augmented immeasurably the linguistic capabilities of music’ .
If a composer wanted to venture to the boundaries of the ‘new’ , as Wagner
did, he had to take his cue from the conventions established by tradition if he
was to be understood. And for Wagner, absolute comprehensibility was one of
the most important commandments. It is at this point that the text comes to
the fore again. If the public was to feel at home in what was foreign to them,
then they had to be able to understand the words. For this reason, Wagner
endeavoured during the act of composition – particularly when writing his
Valkyrie – to draw the music from the nature of the text itself. The melodic
line is derived from the intonation of the text in order to make the words easy
to grasp for the listener. But comprehensibility did not just apply to the text:
since, when we speak, we form phrases, Wagner did the same with his music.
Wagner often put pen to paper to elucidate his compositional method – as
for example in his essays ‘Opera and drama’ and ‘On the application of music
in drama’ . According to him, music is able to express everything that would
overwhelm language, and thus one must try to fuse them together. But eve-
rything should be guided by what is happening on the stage. Wagner wrote
that he created his themes ‘always within a greater context and in a malleable
manner’ , and he honed this art in one work after another. Wagner works with
small particles, called motifs, which he varies and modulates according to the
 ‘… the world as yet has no notion of it’: Wagner’s Musical Language 

situation at hand. Periodic cadences are no longer his sole structural criterion,
but rather the musico-dramatic events determine proceedings.
Wagner was well grounded in the music of Weber, he knew his Mozart as
well as his Beethoven and the Italian opera composers, and he took this knowl-
edge and used it in his own musical language – just as later composers such
as Richard Strauss did in their turn. While for Wagner the music was a par-
ticipant in the plot and in the expressive content of his works, in the broader
context of music history we are less sure as to whether music can truly ‘speak’ .
From the Baroque Affektenlehre (the theory of the ‘affects’ or ‘emotions’) via
the expressive principles of the era of sensibility (Empfindsamkeit) to the
Romantic aesthetics of the emotions, and from there in turn to film music –
thus from Monteverdi via Richard Strauss to Max Steiner – music possesses
an expressive ability that we can never ‘decode’ without continually arguing
over it. We are united in the belief that music expresses something, but cannot
agree about how this musical language functions. Those commentators who
have researched musical signification, such as Rolf Dammann, Constantin
Floros, Vladimir Karbusicky, Hartmut Krones and Georg Knepler, have often
found that their work has been met with intense criticism.
One of the commonest arguments against theories of meaning in music is
that those meanings alter over time, leaving a work without any firm, static
core of meaning. Of course, even if the musical language itself remains unal-
tered, the semantic content can still shift, and only specialists will be able to
recognize the original meanings. Yet there are also certain musical features
that have a ‘universal’ character that everyone can understand. Just as thrust-
ing one’s arms into the air is recognized as an act of jubilation, while a person
slumped in on himself is assumed to be sad, so in music too sounds have a
positive connotation when they strive upwards, and a negative one when they
descend. Whoever moves quickly signals activity and a sense of setting out, so
positive emotions in music are largely expressed in a rapid tempo. Whoever
walks slowly is generally sad, weak or in solemn mood – and these feelings
are also depicted in music that is measured in tempo. Such musical depictions
founded on anthropological constants do not experience any shift in meaning
and have the same emotional impact on the listener today as they had in the
past. The musical depiction of physical movement such as flying or running,
or of sounds of nature such as thunder and birdsong, are the simplest to rec-
ognize. Haydn’s oratorio The Creation is full of such musical mimicry, and one
comprehends it at a first hearing.
Besides onomatopoeia, the mimicking of movement and the imitation of
speech inflexions, the depiction of emotions was particularly important in
Baroque opera. It was this that was the starting point for Wagner’s musical
 Richard Wagner’s Women

language. In the Baroque period it was assumed that every emotional state
of man or woman was characterized by a specific emotion or mixture of
emotions. These expressions of emotion were termed the ‘affects’ and were
assigned to different categories. The Baroque composers built on this tradi-
tion. Thus the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach are treasure trove when it
comes to the interpretation of words and the development of a tonal language.
Handel remained long unrecognized in this regard, and only in recent decades
has there been a more intensive study of the semantics of his operas. In the
course of the th and th centuries, the lyrical–emotional language of the
affects acquired fundamental significance. Many musical theorists and prac-
titioners of the time endeavoured to systematize these affects in composition
manuals, treatises and pedagogical works. All the same, there is no standard
musico-aesthetic work that offers a classification or a unified system of the
musical implementation of the affects, any more than there is a precise defini-
tion of the concept itself. In his book Der vollkommene Kapellmeister, Johann
Mattheson offered a highly coherent system of the affects, but observed aptly
that ‘sounds in themselves are neither good nor evil, rather do they become
so according to how one uses them’ . How one judges the affects depends on
numerous factors, and they rarely appear either isolated or in their pure form.
There will never be a means of translating the meaning of affects in music that
has general validity, though this is not to say that we cannot understand their
musical import intuitively.
Bruno Flögel has listed the affects that one finds in literature and that can
be applied to music. These refer back principally to the system drawn up
by Christian Wolff in his Psychologia empirica of . Among the affects
with positive emotive meaning (affecti jucundi) are love, hate, joyful calm,
Schadenfreude, joy in fame, joy in the absurd, hopeful joy, pluckiness, happi-
ness; those with negative emotive meaning (affecti molesti) include pity, envy,
regret, shame, fear, despair, pettiness, grief, boredom and anger.
An emotional state is expressed in musical terms primarily by tonal-
ity, rhythm, instrumentation, tempo, inner movement and harmony, and by
certain intervals. But the declamatory expression of the voice also plays its
part. When interpreting an affect, one should always pay attention to the
overall musical gesture, though individual affects that are clearly audible are
also occasionally deployed. A closer look at them is well worth the effort if
one wants to understand the rich spectrum of emotional states that Wagner’s
music is able to express.
In the general depiction of affects and character states, intervals have a
meaningful function because they are the constituent parts of the melody
and can give us many clues. When Wagner says of Parsifal that he could not
 ‘… the world as yet has no notion of it’: Wagner’s Musical Language 

employ the minor seventh in it because the ‘sensitive affect’ would not suit
the work, he had in mind a quite specific emotive quality. It is precisely this
seventh that depicts the love of women in Der Ring des Nibelungen, and this
has no place in his last music drama. The meaning of an interval, of course, is
dependent not just on its span, but also on whether it rises or falls, leaps, is
played slowly or quickly, and on how it is used in the melodic context. This is
like a parlour game: one rule is valid as long as no other, higher-ranking rule
negates it. Thus, for example, a quick tempo can impress itself more on one’s
consciousness than the structure of an individual interval.
If the tempo is swift and the note in question subject to repetition, then the
smallest interval, the unison, can convey violence, anger, decisiveness, victori-
ous joy or a general state of highest excitement. However, when in slow arias
emotions such as yearning or suffering are to be expressed, then such mono-
tone repetitions can convey a sense of powerlessness and inaction.
The second, a small interval, tends to be used for affects of fainthearted-
ness and grief. Successive descending chromatic steps depict despair, pain or a
state of fear – in any case, certainly one of the affecti molesti. When ascending,
they connote supplication or entreaty. A melody that proceeds in small steps
and sinks back within its own compass depicts a depressed emotional state. If
the function of the leading note is stressed, then often the affect depicted is a
milder one such as yearning or a gentle lament. Major seconds tend to con-
note more joyful affects.
Thirds and sixths are the intervals most often employed. Minor thirds gen-
erally convey unease or elegiac effects, while major thirds convey a sense of
comfortableness. Generally speaking, large, consonant intervallic steps have a
noble, magnanimous impact, especially when ascending. A descending leap of
a sixth points to resignation or despair. In this connection Henning Ferdinand
speaks of the ‘musicalization of the speech-tone of a person collapsing in dis-
appointment’ . But sung sixths, ascending quickly, signalize anger or another
heightened state of excitement.
The fourth is used for exclamations. If it ascends and is placed at the begin-
ning of a theme or a melody, then the elemental strength that resides within
it allows it to convey heroic, decisive affects. Indeed, ascending melodies in
general come across as powerful and energetic. The augmented fourth (enhar-
monically identical with the diminished fifth), the quinta deficiens or tri-
tone, is used for painful affects, for despondency or lamentation. Affects of
malevolence and unreason, such as madness, are often depicted by the tritone.
The passus duriusculus (literally the ‘harsh passage’) is a chromatic line that
usually descends within the compass of a fourth. Such a stepwise descend-
ing motion in the lowest voice is also called a basso lamento and is always
 Richard Wagner’s Women

in the minor mode, which is itself traditionally coupled with suffering and
unhappiness.
The seventh achieves maximum impact in its diminished form and depicts
feelings of despair and deep agitation, especially when accompanying an
exclamation or a single word. By its nature, the interval is closely related to
the diminished-seventh chord, which has a similarly intense impact in con-
veying suffering and agitation. The descending seventh is employed for pain-
ful feelings. The octave, on the other hand, emphasizes grandiosity or depicts
strength.
The minor mode in general is used to depict a darkening of mood, but also
emotional complexity. The major denotes positive, often simple or naïve emo-
tions. The relationship between the chromatic and the diatonic is just as polar-
ized. Whereas the diatonic can mean brightness, affirmation, or strength and
power – positive characteristics – chromaticism since the th century has
been used to depict weeping, lamenting, suffering and the enduring of pain,
and can also denote malevolence, sin and misfortune.
In the case of rhythm, generalizations are almost impossible to make, and
an all-too-academic interpretation would not do justice to the complexity of
the music. Yet here, too, certain tendencies can be perceived: the trochee is
used for lullabies and cradle songs, denoting innocence, whereas the molossus
is used for serious or gloomy states of mind. Processions often use this rhythm.
Whereas the anapaest is suitable for cheerful affects, the dactyl is appropriate
to more serious matters. Often, triple time is chosen for depictions of nature,
the naïve quadruple time, on the other hand, for music with male connota-
tions such as marches.
Individual instruments are time and again used for specific moods. The
strings are often the basis of the instrumental sound and are, for that reason,
mostly neutral in terms of the affects. Muted or pizzicato violins are an excep-
tion, used to depict tender or melancholic affects (mostly in the context of
love). The easiest to interpret is the flute: it is utilized for mood painting and in
general encompasses the pastoral, the idyllic, the naïve, the joyful, the tenderly
lyrical and the wistful (and in almost every case, the context is again that of
love). The horn symbolizes hunting, or is used to underscore stately, digni-
fied passages, while the trumpet – the signalling instrument of war – is used
to create imposing scenes such as elaborate parades. This refers back to the
traditions of the th and early th centuries when the trumpeters enjoyed a
privileged position that left its mark on their sense of self-awareness.
The particular use of harmony can also give expression to moods and ten-
sions. Basically, harmonic dissonances create a dramatic tension of a largely
negative kind; a subsequent return to consonance means a transition to a state
 ‘… the world as yet has no notion of it’: Wagner’s Musical Language 

of release. ‘From Beethoven to the High Romantics, the values of harmonic

expression are fixed: dissonance stands for the negative and for suffering,
while consonance stands for positivity and fulfilment,’ writes Adorno.
In situations of heroic emotion or stately ceremonial, common or garden
triads are often heard. Untroubled emotions are also conceived in simple har-
monies. When conflict enters a love relationship, dissonant elements are heard,
such as diminished triads and suspensions. The following musical means are
examples of the translation into music of ‘happy’ , positive affects: ascending
melodies and leaps, motifs using triads, diatonicism, the major mode, dotted
rhythms, and the use of the full orchestra. When depicting ‘unhappy’ , nega-
tive affects, we often find the following: a slow tempo, dissonances, the minor
mode, a stepwise descending bass, soft passages, few dynamics, descending
intervals (often small in steps), sospirando motifs, suspensions of a fourth,
long rests and chromaticism.
Wagner uses all these associations in his music. The treatment of his
musical material is one of infinitely subtle variation, its aim being to con-
vey similarly subtle gradations of emotional utterance. This is why his music
today remains so comprehensible to everyone; he continued the tradition
of the affects and thus built on the foundations of what his listeners already
knew. An excerpt from the first act of Tannhäuser can serve as an example.
Tannhäuser complains that he yearns for the world of man. Venus asks what
troubles him, to which he replies that he thinks he can hear the happy peal-
ing of bells. Appropriately enough we hear bells, and calm chords signalize a
healthy world above ground. When Venus answers, abrupt semiquavers depict
her emotional turmoil. Tannhäuser sings: ‘The time that I spend here, I can-
not measure it,’ and the infiniteness of time is conveyed in sound by means of
long, held chords in the accompaniment. He laments that he sees nothing of
nature, at which the melody runs downwards, reflecting his discontent. Every
new phrase begins on an upper note and ends on lower-lying notes – a well-
tried representation of sadness.
A passage from Tristan und Isolde can also show us Wagner’s precision. ‘It
was I who secretly brought about my dishonour,’ sings the self-critical Isolde.
The melody moves downwards by a tenth, signalizing Isolde’s suffering. At
‘instead of swinging the avenging sword’ , the melody rises in order to denote
the sword. ‘I let it fall, powerless’ is dislocated by rests to convey her indeci-
sion. ‘Now I serve the vassal’ moves downwards in order to express Isolde’s
displeasure. The many rests, also in the accompaniment, clarify her state of
speechlessness regarding her dishonour. Physical movement, together with an
emotion, is thus drawn in music within the smallest possible space. But it can
also happen that a single passage conveys two emotions: the opening theme of
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Tristan und Isolde, with its downward sloping chromaticism in the lower voice
and its ascending melody, expresses both desire and suffering.
Wagner’s motifs play a quite specific role in his musical language. The man-
ner in which he combines them is unique. After he once played and sang
to Cosima from his Götterdämmerung, she was (rightly) convinced that ‘by
means of the great web of themes that is woven across the four works, a new
language is created, and the world as yet has no notion of it’ .
Some of Wagner’s motifs describe physical movement, such as the cum-
bersome, ungainliness of the giants or the ascending motif of Erda that rises
up from under ground. When forming motifs to express sadness and con-
flict, Wagner utilizes the means that had been already used for centuries to
depict negative emotions. Thus the woe motif employs descending chromati-
cism, the infidelity motif has a descending melody with a leap downwards of
a seventh, and the contract motif also descends because it displeases Wotan
to have to keep his contracts. The curse motif ascends, but it is in the minor
mode with a tritone in the melody. When investigating these motifs, one must
remember that Wagner himself was against giving them concrete names. For
a while it was even regarded as old-fashioned to use them to help interpret his
work. This was partly because of the lists Hans von Wolzogen made, which
were understood as assigning fixed meanings to them. For those approaching
Wagner’s work for the first time, these lists can certainly be useful. But von
Wolzogen ignored the multiplicity of changes that the motifs undergo in the
course of the drama. Since every appearance of a motif is geared to the situa-
tion at hand, to the nature of a character or the depiction of an idea, a cornu-
copia of variants is presented, almost all of which have semantic meaning. By
describing the motifs in too fixed a manner, these variants may – wrongly – be
ignored.
Wagner’s following remark is a sign of just how seriously he took his motivic
work:

After Siegfried’s death, during the scene change, we shall hear the
Siegmund theme as if the chorus were saying, ‘This was his father.’ Then
comes the sword motif, then finally his own theme; then the curtain
rises and Gutrune enters, believing that she has heard his horn. How
could words ever convey the impression that is conveyed by these seri-
ous themes, structured anew, and yet with the music always expressing
the immediate present?

Egon Voss has made a considerable contribution to the study of Wagner’s

motivic technique, and shares the view that the motifs should not be fixed by
assigning them to narrow concepts. He believes that Wagner’s motifs do not
 ‘… the world as yet has no notion of it’: Wagner’s Musical Language 

figure primarily as bearers of meaning: ‘What they have to say is the result not
of any fixed semantics that they always carry with them, but of the character
and affective content of the scene or of the situation in which they are at any
one time employed.’
But how can it be that a motif that ascends can signify death, as is the case
with the announcement of Siegmund’s death in the Ring (Example )? The
minor mode darkens the music and suits the topic of death. And yet the motif
does not just depict dying, but sounds at a solemn moment: Brünnhilde tells
Siegmund that he is doomed to die. The combination of ascending motion,
the minor mode and calm note values, is intended to depict in solemn, digni-
fied manner this declaration of the worst possible fate – one that Siegmund
bears resolutely. This example also shows how Wagner intertwines his motifs.
The last three notes are identical with the fate motif (Example ). And the woe
motif, which comprises a descending second, could also have been taken from
the first motif (Example ). An announcement of death, then fate and woe – by
associating these three motifs with one another, Wagner restores the negative
connotations.

œ ˙™ œ ˙ ™ #œ w ˙ ™ #œ w
### Ex. 1
j
Ex. 2 Ex. 3
˙ #œ
& Ϫ
˙
Let us give one more example. The reason why the sibling motif descends is
obvious: the fate of the lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde is tragic. They will find
no happiness. Why, then, is Siegmund given a descending motif but Sieglinde
an ascending one? Would it not correspond to the traditional gender roles if
the opposite were the case? The reason lies in the broader perspective. Wagner
identifies with Siegmund; he is an unlucky man, his life is a failure, and when
he gets to know Sieglinde she gives him hope and envelops him with her love.
So her connotations are positive, his are negative.
The motif that signifies Brünnhilde’s release from her identity as a Valkyrie
and her transformation into a loving woman is an example of Wagner’s great
skill in creating his motifs (Example ). The ascending sixth traditionally
expresses a pleasant emotion, often love – one only has to think of Beethoven’s
song ‘Ich liebe dich’ , which begins with just such a sixth. The graceful mordent
serves to underline the connotation. But then at the end there is the descend-
ing interval of a minor seventh: a clear sign of suffering, but also – as its use
in the Ring makes evident – of the love of woman, a love that is doomed to
fail. The unhappy fate of Brünnhilde is thus presaged in her motif. This is
no semantic oscillation, but a superimposition of one emotional level upon
another, yet without either getting in the way of the other.
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Ex. 

Just as there have been disputes about whether any meaning at all can be
assigned to music, so commentators disagree about the possibility of discern-
ing gender-specific meanings in music – a question that arose during the
s, in the wake of the establishment of women’s studies. Like many other
researchers, Helmut Rösing maintains that music cannot be interpreted in any
way as being either masculine or feminine. ‘The forensic hunt for masculine
symbols in the musical material itself hardly brings any concrete results.’ On
the other hand, gender-specific concepts have been used unashamedly for
decades. Kurt Overhoff, for example, could still write of the ‘masculine major’
and ‘feminine minor’ as late as . Thus the notion of a naturally occur-
ring polarity of the sexes was transferred into music. The fact that Overhoff
assigned the positive affects to the male, the affecti molesti to the female, was
accepted as a matter of course. The history of music offers us numerous exam-
ples of how the depiction of the masculine is given positive connotations,
while the feminine is shown as negative.
In  the question as to how a hero could be described in music was
answered as follows by Friedrich August Kanne:

To be sure, not his legs but his steps; not his arms but their furious
strength as he desires to shatter the world around him; not his mouth,
but the curses of a giant that stream forth from it, or the words of bless-
ing of a Christ as Haydn depicts them in his Seven Words […] to be
sure, not his broad, uplifted breast but the bold, noble decisions that
are made within it; not his eyes but the delight seen in them when he
observes what is dearest to him; not his sitting on the throne, but his
heroic fall under the lightning flashes of fate.

This shows implicitly how the image of a ‘strong man’ might be created in
music, and Wagner’s Siegfried emerges from precisely this tradition.
We find gender-specific attributions as early as the th century. The music
theoretician Heinrich Glarean, in his Dodekachordon of , describes the
Phrygian mode as wild and warlike, whereas the Lydian mode, he says, is femi-
nine and weak. But the images of masculinity and femininity became most
polarized at the time of the Enlightenment and the emergence of bourgeois
society. The genders were depicted as inescapably male or female, devoid of
any hazy, intermediate regions.
Homosexuality was stigmatized as evil and degenerate, while lesbianism
was more or less unknown, since women were disqualified from any notion of
 ‘… the world as yet has no notion of it’: Wagner’s Musical Language 

independent sexuality. Man was destined for public life, woman for a private,
inner life. This division meant that negative attributes were largely assigned
to woman. Superiority was something masculine, inferiority feminine. Thus
it was that the feminine was often associated with a propensity to sacrifice,
pain and negation; it was restricted to matters of love and sexuality, and per-
meated with negative associations. Certain musical figures that had earlier
been employed for conflict-laden affects or moods such as sadness, sighs, sick-
ness, indecision and doubt were now assigned to women in their supposed
‘purity’ , and served to depict a pre-formed image that corresponded to female
‘nature’ . Its male counterpart was assigned musical correlations of emotions or
attributes such as vivacity, decisiveness, impatience, bursts of anger and high
spirits. ‘Evil’ women were traditionally given ‘male’ attributes, which meant
that they smacked of deviance and abnormality. Thus stereotypes were created
that were used as late as the th century in music for films and advertising.
(Male) desire for the feminine was permissible, but woman had to remain
subservient to man. Woman was thus an object of fascination, but primarily
passive. From the late th century until well into the th there were numer-
ous writings that condemned intellectual pursuits among women as patho-
logical, and furthermore denounced woman’s emergence from her subser-
vient role as a step whose consequences could be as radical as the collapse of
civilized society.
Composers took up this fundamental dichotomy of the sexes – albeit to
differing degrees – not least because this was highly convenient in bourgeois
society. Goethe’s Faust offered both Liszt and Wagner an opportunity to
depict in music one of the most famous characters in German literature as
well as his female counterpart. A comparison of their two works is a worth-
while undertaking, since their differences can afford insights into Wagner’s
method of composing and his means of characterization.
In Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony, the composer organizes his movements
according to the principal characters in Goethe’s play. The first movement is
assigned to Faust, and the whole of it displays rousing drama and a respect
for the character’s grandeur. Liszt allots five themes to Faust and it is not by
chance that the first of these contains all twelve notes of the chromatic scale.
This movement depicts Faust’s intellectual background: he is a complex figure
and the surging gestures in the music are intended to portray him at the peak
of his strength and creative power. Gretchen, on the other hand, is represented
by a smaller orchestra, using instruments considered ‘feminine’ , namely the
flute, the oboe and the harp. Her main theme is periodic in construction, self-
contained and narrow in scope. The contrast could not be greater; and the
pathetic final chorus of the last movement, ‘The eternal feminine draws us on’ ,
 Richard Wagner’s Women

is merely an ornamental accessory, for in his first two movements, Liszt has
already demonstrated that men are the ones who count.
Wagner, on the other hand, found the character of Faust suspicious. Thus,
in his Faust Overture, he did not choose typically ‘male’ means as Liszt had
done, but rather those that were traditionally used to suggest conflict, menace
or even sickness – namely, chromaticism and augmented or diminished inter-
vals and chords. The tritone can be heard twice at the beginning. ‘Diminished
triads and the diminished-seventh chord are constituent elements of the
work’ , writes Egon Voss . Hans Joachim Kreutzer has said of the effect of
these musical means: ‘What could we infer from [them], except that science
makes you joyless? That is how Wagner’s overture sounds.’ Gretchen is not
depicted in a separate movement, as in Liszt’s symphony; in fact, she does not
appear in person at all –in her stead we hear ‘Faust’s yearning for the femi-
nine’ . This is depicted by a simple, diatonic melody and an ascending triad.
Wagner thereby excludes woman as a ‘real’ being, and allows her to exist only
in Faust’s imagination.
Why does Wagner’s characterization of Faust reject the usual heroic/
grandiose depiction reserved for significant men? The reason can be found
in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck. During a discussion, he had had to listen
as she voiced the opinion that Faust was the ‘most important’ type of man yet
created by a poet. This angered him, and he replied in writing: ‘Faust is only a
fantastic scholar, and he has not felt his way at all through the real world […]
it would have been better for him to learn properly what one has to learn, and
he should have done this at his first, lovely opportunity, namely through the
love of Gretchen.’ He thus does not draw his characters as male or female in
the traditional, schematic manner, but takes as his starting point the feelings
or actions that move them or emerge from them. Yet neither did he avoid the
dichotomies usual at the time. The result was not particularly successful and
it is hardly by chance that the overture is played so rarely today, in contrast to
Liszt’s popular work.
In masses and oratorios, gender-specific music can be clearly heard. From
Bach to Beethoven and Bruckner, trombones, trumpets and horns repre-
sented male authority, and their signification has been transferred effortlessly
onto heroes in the secular realm. On the other hand, the flute, filigree strings,
the harp and the woodwind were used to depict the Virgin Mary or other vir-
tuous, passive female protagonists. At the close of the th century bourgeois
man took on God’s mantle, as it were, as Haydn demonstrated in exemplary
fashion with The Creation and The Seasons. Wagner uses this tradition in Das
Rheingold when he allows the Valhalla theme – the theme that, according to
the canonical reading, depicts the recently completed castle – to sound several
 ‘… the world as yet has no notion of it’: Wagner’s Musical Language 

times to a grandiose brass accompaniment (four tubas, two contrabass tubas,

three trombones and three trumpets). This motif is later used in Die Walküre,
when Wotan is mentioned. Thus its grandiosity acquires a plasticity in its con-
tours and Wotan retains the positive characteristics of the highest masculine
god, despite all criticism of his conduct.
Strongly accentuated crotchets striding evenly on; triplets; often a march-
like character; and a powerful use of brass instruments – all these belong to
the more obvious means of depicting the heroic. Siegfried’s motifs, with their
clear ascending tendency, their triads and their octave leaps, leave no expecta-
tions unfulfilled in this regard. This depiction makes Siegfried into a hero and
eclipses the picture often conjured up of him as a naïve boy. The Nothung
motif depicting Siegfried’s sword (which originally belonged to Wotan) and
thus signifying strength and power, comprises an interval of an octave. By
means of this leap it expresses the greatest possible intensity. In mass com-
positions, octave leaps were often used to praise God. Wotan, known as ‘the
Wanderer’ in the first act of Siegfried, displays his superiority over Mime with
an octave leap, which, together with the ascent of a fourth, the dotted rhythm
and the syllabic diction, is a signifier of power and superiority (Example ).
‘That’s how it is when the music is finished for my works: melodic phrases
begin and alternate with each other, they thrill and enchant; one follows this
theme, another follows that one; they hear and intuit and if they are able, then
they finally grasp the whole thing, the idea itself,’ wrote Wagner. In the opera
analyses below, we shall investigate how he moulds the respective spheres
of action of men and women. Since these observations have no pretence to
completeness, there are certain jumps in the chosen chronology of the works.
Those passages are thrown into relief that disclose fundamental issues relating
to male/female issues above and beyond mere matters of plot. These analyses
can best be followed if one listens to Wagner’s works themselves, which will

œ œ™
also enable listeners to reach their own conclusions.
œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙
? bb b J J œ Œ J J
Ex.  b
Mit sein - er Spit - ze sperrt Wo - tan die Welt

(‘with the point of his spear, Wotan rules the world’)

Minna Wagner
Chapter 
From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer

F    , Wagner was given to much enthusiasm,

especially when concerned with music and the other performing arts. He
was particularly impressed by the higher status accorded to male roles on
stage. It was probably for this reason that he took a great interest in Carl Maria
von Weber and as a boy attempted to put on a performance of Der Freischütz,
with costumes and masks that he had made himself. The hunting chorus
that really appealed to him. This has thoroughly male connotations: a large
orchestra, loud brass, the rising fourth at the opening, and dotted rhythms.
The difference between this and the young girls’ chorus, another highly popu-
lar number from the same opera, is obvious. Here, a playful suspension first
lets the music rise up, only for it to descend again in a manner devoid of
tension. These ‘virginal’ girls, who are accorded a certain naïvety, sit in a nar-
row room and embroider for the bride. Their purpose in the world is to serve
their future husbands, and they sing in praise of marriage as the goal of life.
Weber often differentiated between the worlds of man and of woman. The
works by him that belong to the traditional, male realm include the cantata
Kampf und Sieg (‘Battle and victory’), Das Turnierbankett (‘The tournament
banquet’), Lützows wilde Jagd (‘Lützow’s wild hunt’), Schwertlied (‘Song of the
sword’), Trinklied vor der Schlacht (‘Drinking song before battle’), Gebet vor
der Schlacht (‘Prayer before battle’) and Husarenlied (‘Song of the Hussars’).
Women appear when nature or love is the topic, as in ‘Mein Schatzerl ist hüb-
sch’ (‘My lover is pretty’) and ‘Ein Mädchen ging die Wies’ entlang’ (‘A girl
went down the meadow’), though they also appear in a negative context as
‘old wives’ – ‘’s ist nichts mit den alten Weibern’ (‘There’s nothing to be done
about old wives’). Even if Wagner later, on occasion, adopted a critical stance
towards his predecessor, he always retained Weber’s elements of musical
meaning in his repertoire.
In  Wagner wrote the Romantic opera Die Feen (‘The fairies’) to a text of
his own, based on a fairytale by Carlo, Count Gozzi, that had greatly appealed
to him (La donna serpente). The topic is a love that will stop at nothing. Thus
we already find encapsulated here the basic theme of his later œuvre. When
he was still a student Wagner had read Wilhelm Heinse’s Ardinghello, a novel
that promoted freedom in love. He had also become familiar with the writings
of Heine and other contemporaries. ‘For me, woman had begun to make her
presence felt,’ he wrote. This led to ‘violent excess: the impact of these impres-
sions thus garnered expressed themselves in my real life as nature only can
 Richard Wagner’s Women

under the pressure of our morally bigoted society’ . In other words, sexuality
had entered his life and was obsessing him. It was in this emotional state that,
in the same year, he started to write Das Liebesverbot, oder Die Novize von
Palermo (‘The ban on love, or The novice of Palermo’), in which he drew on
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.
At this time, the composer had fallen in love with Minna Planer – later to
become his first wife – but their relationship had not yet been put on a per-
manent footing. He had got to know her in Lauchstädt while the theatrical
troupe of the Magdeburg City Theatre, of which he was the music director,
was giving guest performances there. Minna had already acquired a reputa-
tion as an actress: among her roles was that of the ‘love fairy’ Amorosa in
Johann Nepomuk Nestroy’s recently published magical comedy Der böse Geist
Lumpazivagabundus (‘The evil spirit Lumpazivagabundus’). A blunt offer that
Wagner made in September  to his friend Theodor Apel shows us how
easy-going was his early love for Minna. ‘You should have Planer too,’ he wrote,
‘she’s given me a proper sensual thrill a few times now, and it was really splen-
did.’ Wagner had a simultaneous relationship with another woman by the name
of Toni, so offering up Minna seems not to have been too difficult for him.
All the same, it was lucky for the men’s friendship that Apel turned the offer
down. Several contemporary writers had already argued in favour of free love
(including adherents of the Young Germany movement), and for a brief time
Wagner, too, was in favour of the idea. But just one month later, in another
letter to Apel, Wagner was already describing Minna as his ‘central point’:

[she] gives me consistency and warmth; I can’t let her go. I only know
this much, dear Theodor, that you do not know the sweetness of such
a relationship. There is nothing vulgar, unworthy or weak about it. Our
Epicureanism is pure and strong, it’s not like the usual wretched love
affairs – we love each other and believe in each other and leave the rest
to fate. You don’t know that now, and you can only live like this with an
actress; this casting aside of the bourgeois is something you can’t find
anywhere else except here, where the whole earth is fantastic caprice
and poetic licence.

In Minna, probably for the first time in his young life, Wagner had found
a woman to share sensual pleasure with him. With her he could make fun of
bourgeois constraints. But soon he was plagued by jealousy, for Minna was
not satisfied with free love: she was looking for a lasting relationship, even the
possibility of marriage, and she told him so. He broke off contact with her for
a while. But when she decided to take up a job in Berlin, Richard was seized
by a ‘true sense of fear’ . He was finally able to convince her to return home to
 From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer 

Magdeburg, and from then on their life together become ever closer. Wagner’s
relationship with Minna gave a new twist to his praise of free love in Das
Liebesverbot.
In the five-hour-long opera, the repressive governor Friedrich forbids all cit-
izens of the city from exercising their love (whatever that might mean exactly)
on pain of death. But since he is himself incapable of fending off the seductive
wiles of woman, a trick is played on him that allows Isabella to reveal him as a
hypocrite.

It was Isabella who enthused me; she who walks as a novice out of her
convent in order to beg mercy for her brother from a hard-hearted gov-
ernor, a brother who had committed the crime of forbidden love for a
girl. And although it was blessed by nature, he was condemned to death
… [she is able to present her case] with such thrilling intensity that the
strict guardian of morals is himself gripped by a passionate love for this
wonderful woman.

In the first-act duet of Isabella and Mariana, the delicate world of woman is
adorned, in typical fashion, by muted strings, flutes and oboes. But then a
miraculous change takes place. Isabella wants to save her brother Claudio and
thereby gains an inner strength. She even takes charge of the action: ‘I play
with death as it if were a pleasantry, and cunning and vengeance will win me
the victory!’ While Mariana remains captive in her feminine passivity and is
able to forgive even the meanest of hypocrites, Isabella with her octave leaps
(‘Ihr Heil’gen, welche Schändlichkeit!’ – ‘O ye saints, what a disgrace!’) seems
to prefigure the ecstatic grandeur of a Brünnhilde. A domesticated woman,
who develops strength by standing up for others, is an age-old cultural projec-
tion that has its origins in male interests. But the fact that this woman enjoys
power and does not have to pay for having broken out of her apportioned role
(as Ortrud does later in Lohengrin) makes her unique in the Wagnerian œuvre.
At the close of the opera, Wagner brings a military band on stage, as if he
had himself become shy of this expression of feminine strength and needed to
supply a counterweight to it. This band, large in number, makes its presence
loudly felt, and is accompanied by an orchestra in the pit (including strings)
that is just as powerful. Wagner thereby pays homage to the male, soldierly
principle and makes evident that Isabella is no example of how things should
be. The hierarchical order of the male-dominated cosmos slots back into place.
It is precisely in Das Liebesverbot that we first find fundamental aspects of an
attitude towards man and woman that will appear again and again in Wagner’s
later works. Women are weak and passive but find great strength when they
are standing up for their men. In Isabella we already find presentiments of
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Senta and Brünnhilde. Her love can bring redemption. And, as in this comic
opera, Wagner elsewhere repeatedly rails against ‘the sin of hypocrisy’ and
against taboos in love – he later excuses incestuous love in the Ring, just as
he does the forbidden relationship at the heart of Tristan und Isolde. And one
thing seems to have remained true for him throughout his life: despite all his
sympathy for women, the principle of male predominance must be upheld and
given clear expression in his music.
The disparaging remarks that Wagner made about Das Liebesverbot in his
autobiography make it evident that he later saw this work as something he
had left well behind him. So does the dedication that he wrote when giving
the manuscript to Ludwig II: ‘Once I erred and now I should like to make
amends …’ But at this early stage of his career, the work was an expression of
his urge to make himself known in the world. The same motivation led him
to write the overture Kolumbus, in which he included six trumpets that gave
the public a shock when they blared out. Nor was this enough in itself, for
he followed it with Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory, to which he added gun
and artillery fire, using machines that he had had constructed specially. He
doubled and tripled the drums and signal horns, so that the sound of battle
was deafening. Even the singer Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, always will-
ing to help out, finally fled the scene. ‘Everyone fled, and the celebration of
Wellington’s victory in the end became a cosy outpouring for me and the
orchestra, all on our own.’ The drastic attempt by this young, ambitious con-
ductor to wrest attention to himself with a music that was exclusively male in
connotation suggests – all comedy aside – that he was not as yet possessed of
a firm identity of his own.
While Wagner’s happiness in his love for Minna was still dominant during
the composition of Das Liebesverbot, this had already changed by , when
he was busy with the sketch of Rienzi, his first large-scale tragic opera. He
had in the meantime long become dependent on Minna. In a letter to her, he
describes how he had enjoyed a visit to see Beethoven’s Fidelio with a friend
and had felt compelled to think of her the whole time. Tears had come into
his eyes. ‘Just like this Leonore, I thought, so your Minna would also give up
her life for you – or at least no suffering, no distress would be too great for
her to save you if she knew you were in danger of ruin. And this is the Minna
that some cold people say I should leave?’ He could not live without a woman
who would follow him in all things, who would forgive him his incompe-
tence in money matters, and who would show understanding when he was
jealous.
The problems with Minna remained, however, and he fled into fantasies
about a strong hero in order to suppress the conflict with his partner:
 From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer 

My domestic woes increased; the urge to extract myself from an unwor-

thy position climaxed in an intense desire to begin something, anything
that was great and uplifting, even if this meant ignoring any notions of
immediate practicality. This mood received much nourishment within
me and was confirmed by my reading Bulwer’s Rienzi. Out of the mis-
ery of modern, private life, in which I nowhere saw even the faintest
topic suitable for artistic treatment, I was gripped by the notion of a
great, historical-political event, in the enjoyment of which I was bound
to find an ennobling diversion from my worries and problems, for the
latter seemed to me nothing other than the absolute enemy of my art.

But even more than such outpourings in writing, his behaviour shows him
to have been in the grip of a pathological jealousy that rendered him barely
able to cope with even the slightest gesture of independence on the part of
his wife. In later life, Minna’s illegitimate daughter Natalie recalled the early
years of their marriage, for she had lived with the Wagners and was presented
to the world as Minna’s ‘sister’ . After marrying Wagner, Minna still took on
several acting roles, not least in order to finance Richard’s need for luxury.
He lived beyond his means – in  it came to a court case in Magdeburg
because he had bought kid gloves, silk, atlas, damask, muslin and other items
without being able to pay for them. But Wagner could not bear to see Minna
on the stage, where other men might admire her, and he often raged about it
throughout the night. If Minna suffered symptoms of physical illness because
of his verbal attacks then he was sorry again and would go on his knees before
her. The day after, however, he would begin again with the same unjust accusa-
tions. His behaviour seems highly neurotic, and Wagner himself spoke of:

a fierceness and an injurious bitterness that I let show in both word and
deed. Time and again such scenes led to my wife having cramps of such
an incredibly worrying nature that the only success of such perform-
ances on my part, as one can easily imagine, was when I finally was able
to restore the peace between us. What is certain is that our behaviour
towards each other became ever more unfathomable and unintelligible
to us both.

At least here we must acknowledge Wagner’s honesty and his degree of self-
awareness after the fact.
Minna could think of no other way out except to leave him. So when another
man courted her, she gave in and ran away with him. The loss of Minna and
the knowledge that she had a lover was a double blow to Richard, who jour-
neyed after her in order to win her back. At first, he seemed to have succeeded.
 Richard Wagner’s Women

He brought Minna to a little hotel in Blasewitz, and then left for Berlin in
order to apply for a Kapellmeister’s post in Riga. When Minna surprised him
with the announcement that she was going on a trip, he accompanied her
from Blasewitz to her parents in Dresden, only for her to leave with her lover
once again. ‘During my last, dreadful days together with Minna in Blasewitz I
read Bulwer’s novel,’ he wrote. The topic helped him to get over the insult of it
all. His wish, at this time, to write something ‘great and uplifting’ was thus not
just on account of his endeavour to achieve recognition in his career, but also
arose from his need to fortify his male identity. Only when Minna realized
that her lover had no serious intentions was she overcome by remorse and
travelled on to join her husband in Riga. They were reconciled and lived there
from  to .
In Riga, however, Wagner’s profligacy overtook him again. Fleeing from
their creditors, the couple left the city in secret and escaped to Paris, where
the composer hoped ‘that I might still be triumphant’ . It was there that his
plan grew once more to ‘do something really big […] not just to mimic “grande
opéra", but to outdo all its previous forms with unreserved extravagance – that
was my artistic ambition’ . Thus, as the result of a well-nigh overwhelming
desire to get right to the top, Rienzi was conceived. Two things were presum-
ably important to Wagner in all this. On the one hand he wanted to compose
a grand opera with all its panoply of bombast, while on the other he wanted to
tell the story of Rienzi on the operatic stage. Both points suggest that in these
uncertain years he aimed to use a heroic tale to consolidate his own private
and artistic identities.
In the summer of  Wagner had been deeply impressed by a performance
of Gasparo Spontini’s Fernand Cortez, ou La conquête du Mexique in Berlin.
Much of this opera flowed, in turn, into Rienzi – less in matters of style and
musical texture than in its dramatic construction and its plot. In both operas
there is a leader who emerges from the people and achieves great things. The
imposing scenery of Spontini’s opera, the large-scale choral and ensemble
scenes, the live horses on stage and the military ambience all inspired Wagner.
Fernand Cortez is full of battles, troops, military leaders and burning ships.
The military sounds that determine the action are contrasted with the lyrical
song of Amazily, who figures both as saviour and as willing victim. Woman
is understood as an appendix to man; she serves to define him, to make him
heroic. Unlike Spontini’s Amazily, Irene in Rienzi is cut down to size and is
accorded no particular characterization, yet she shows the same readiness for
self-sacrifice. However, in contrast to Amazily, who survives, Irene perishes in
the flames with her brother.
At this time, Wagner also pondered writing a drama with Emperor Friedrich
 From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer 

Barbarossa as its central figure: ‘The concept of the ruler was here encapsu-
lated in its most powerful, most terrible significance.’ Time and again it was
powerful male figures that fired his imagination. The yearning for strong lead-
ers and for charismatic men was a widespread social phenomenon that fitted
Wagner’s personal situation – as unacknowledged composer and humbled
husband. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose writings contributed to the ideologi-
cal polarization of gender character in the th century, described the ‘law-
giver’ in his Contrat social as ‘a man extraordinary in every way’ , who had to
possess charismatic qualities in order to partake of the wisdom of the gods.
After the French Revolution, there was a great endeavour to prove that men
had to run the nation. From the moment he read it, Wagner remained for ever
impressed by Thomas Carlyle’s book On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic
in History, published in England in  and in German translation in , and
he often remarked on it to Cosima. Carlyle describes five types of hero: the
prophet (Muhammad), the poet (Dante and Shakespeare), the priest (Luther
and Knox), the writer (Johnson, Rousseau, Burns) and the ruler (Cromwell
and Napoleon), and he repeatedly stresses the right of the genius to shape the
world.
This striving for greatness was something that Wagner saw in Rienzi. He
conceived the opera ‘in the form of “five acts” ’ , with five glittering finales,
marked by hymns, processions and a musical depiction of the sound of arms.
It was once again the insignia of masculine pageantry that fascinated him.
‘I  will allow not the slightest reduction in the musical pomp on stage – it is
completely necessary and can be provided very well in Dresden with the help
of the military and other music bands,’ he wrote. Furthermore, he wanted the
trombonists and trumpeters who accompany the military procession in the
first act to be mounted on horseback. The big processions and the fire at the
end, when the Capitol burns down, already prefigure Götterdämmerung.
The stage is populated by men: Rienzi, Stefano, Adriano, Paolo Orsini,
Raimondi, two Roman citizens and a herald. Then there are diplomats
from various cities, priests, monks, Roman mercenaries and nobles, follow-
ers of Colonna and Orsini, papal officers and guards. The fact that Adriano
di Castello is a trouser role, sung by a woman, is of no significance in this.
The women pray in the background that the battle will be won. They have to
spread flowers, sing in praise of peace, cry and lament – these all being typi-
cal female activities since time immemorial. The only female protagonist is
Irene, the sister of the hero Rienzi. She is a love object, but her character is
by no means clear-cut. In the first act she is accompanied by instruments that
have female connotations – strings and woodwind. Wagner was to orchestrate
Brünnhilde’s second, womanly motif in just the same manner, three decades
 Richard Wagner’s Women

later. ‘Indeed, I have conceived a truly moving, noble woman in this sister of
Rienzi,’ he wrote of her. As an embodiment of holy innocence, she sacrifices
her love for Adriano and stands by her hero brother, even as the walls of the
Capitol are toppling down on them. This theme of the woman ready and will-
ing to die for her man permeates all of Wagner’s later œuvre.
Rienzi is the noble ruler before whom all fall silent when he enters. His first
entry is accompanied by the sound of ceremonial brass; the chorus sings in
praise of him, and the people are submissive. Despite his flaws he is a char-
ismatic figure, a model character with a great aura – and as such he is a fore-
runner of Wotan, who also has his faults, but as a god nevertheless exudes
nobility. Rienzi is also a precursor of the male hero of modern films, who suc-
ceeds in everything. Wagner depicts the heroism of his title character with all
the musical means at his disposal. Right at the beginning we hear a long note
on the trumpet that reminds us of the moment in Fidelio when Florestan is
saved. The hero is characterized in part by the many fanfares associated with
him. Fanfares have always been used as a sound symbol of power. They sig-
nify pageantry, the festive aspect of the public sphere and thus, by implica-
tion, the male ruler himself. They also instil feelings of solemn nobility. The
fanfare is an example of a gender-specific use of motifs, for women are almost
never ‘ennobled’ by them. Even though Wagner took a critical stance towards
the political and representative powers of his day, he will have understood the
impact of the musical panoply that they employed. It remains positive in con-
notation and allows the protagonists to come across as magnificent and noble.
The on-stage orchestra of Rienzi includes six valve trumpets, six natural
trumpets, six trombones, four ophicleides, six military drums, two side drums,
bells, organ and tamtam – a large, loud and truly overwhelming ensemble.
Minna, an experienced actress, was enthusiastic when she realized the stage
potential of all this: rousing marches, big choruses, much movement on stage,
the timpani, the brass, catchy tunes, then the horses, the armour, the mili-
tary processions, the sound of the drums, the fires, not to mention crowds of
people on the stage. This is a male world. Irene does not have a single solo aria,
but is heard instead only in duets and in a trio.
It is not a matter of chance that the entry and song of the Messengers of
Peace is given female connotations, both musically and dramatically. The
chorus for this scene comprises only women. They have a folk-like song, with
a well-defined periodic structure, and are accompanied by three flutes, to
which later a bassoon and clarinets are added. This is the Classical woodwind
ensemble, whose task is to accompany ‘women’s work’ . Towards the end of
the second act, there occurs a prototypical example of gender differentiation.
After the ‘Gladiators’ battle’ , we hear and see the ‘Entrance of the virgins’ . The
 From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer 

gladiators are announced by triplets in the trumpets. In the main orchestra in

the pit, the instrumental groups alternate – first we hear the brass, then the
strings; the broad cadences that close the music boast large chords that are
dotted after the manner of march music. The virgins, however, connote peace.
They sing to the sounds of flute and clarinet, later to violins, both dolce and
pianissimo.
Rienzi was a phenomenal success in Dresden, where Wagner was soon
given a high-ranking post as Kapellmeister. His future at last seemed secure.
For Minna, the revolution that reached Dresden in  and in which Richard
played a passionate role, was simply a nightmare. She guessed that he was
putting his job on the line, and she was right. After Wagner fled from Dresden
as a wanted man, things did not go well for him. It was not just that he had to
come to terms with the loss of his job and his home: his behaviour had dam-
aged his relationship with Minna so severely that she did not follow him when
he left. He truly yearned for her: ‘Often I bleat like a calf who wants to return
to the cowshed and to the udder of his nourishing mother,’ he wrote in dismay
to Liszt in . ‘Let me soon have good news of my wife!’ She did not write
to him for three months – a form of punishment founded in despair. She had
been married for twelve years, during which she had known hunger and pov-
erty in Paris, continual money problems, and innumerable moves from one
place to another. She no longer possessed the physical or emotional strength
to embark on further wanderings. So their estrangement was now more or
less inevitable.
Shortly after settling in Switzerland, Richard fell in love again, for this was
the only way that he could bear his inner alienation from Minna. He had
become acquainted with the young Jessie Laussot in Bordeaux in March ;
she had invited him to southern France and her family had promised him an
annual allowance. Within a short space of time, the two of them – both already
married – had fallen in love and decided to flee together to Greece. Wagner’s
farewell letter to Minna so shocked her that she immediately borrowed money
and travelled to France to talk him out of his plans – a courageous under-
taking for a woman at that time. Despite all their conflicts, there was still no
question for her that their marriage should be abandoned altogether. Richard
learnt that she was coming and hid from her. In his letter of separation he
had written this about their time together in Paris when things had been so
difficult:

If you had truly loved me in your heart, then you would not praise your-
self now for having borne those sufferings, but rather in your firm belief
in me and in what I am you would have recognized in those sufferings a
 Richard Wagner’s Women

necessity to which one submits oneself for the sake of something higher.
And in thinking only of this higher thing, in one’s awareness of it, one
forgets about petty sufferings.

That was a hard cross to bear for a woman who had just lost her livelihood and
stood on the brink of the abyss. But Jessie’s husband had been active too, and
successfully so. Jessie gave up her plan of escape. So Richard, heavy at heart,
had to return to Minna in July . But the fracture in their relationship was
never to heal again.
In his autobiography, Wagner plays down the affair with Jessie, though it
presumably left a much deeper wound than he was ready to admit. The sud-
den volte-face on Jessie’s part left him, in the eyes of his wife and his friends,
as a man who had ruined two marriages. In order to make his return easier
(and probably also to gather his thoughts and to ease the emotional pain of
these events), he went on a walking tour through western Switzerland with
his former pupil Karl Ritter. A few months later, between the beginning of 
and the following March, he wrote his Communication to my Friends, which
tells us much about him, his thoughts and his feelings, and offers a fascinat-
ing analysis of his artistic development. This book also affords us insights into
what had led him to write Der fliegende Holländer ten years before, when he
was still living in Paris with Minna.
Wagner criticizes those who engage with his work by means of their ‘criti-
cal faculties’ , and demands that those who love his art should also love him as
their fellow man. He accuses critics of his music of being personally opposed
to him. No scholar would ever tolerate such a subjective coupling as Wagner
demands for himself as an artist. He argues in favour of the ‘artwork that is to
be felt with warmth’ and that draws on real life. Real, sensual life should be
reflected in his art, and he is not concerned with mere historical depiction.
‘For as the prerequisite of the work of art I place life itself uppermost. Not life
as it is wilfully reflected in the thoughts of philosophers and historians, but
the most real, the most sensual life, the freest source of instinctive spontaneity.’
Wagner sees the connection between his art and real life at its most evident in
his libretti. Can we have any doubt, then, that in his art he also drew from his
own life and his own experiences?
Wagner writes about the subject matter of Der fliegende Holländer, which
he finished in  – nine years before the Laussot episode – in a cheap sum-
mer flat in Meudon near Paris. It was given its first performance two years
later in Dresden. He says that this topic burrowed ‘deep into his heart’ and
‘instigated a decisive mood in my life’ . And it was this that moved him to set it
to music. The story of the Dutchman who yearns for rest from the ‘storms of
 From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer 

life’ was one that was close to him, and he understood the Dutchman as a mix-
ture of the Wandering Jew and Odysseus. ‘At the end of his sorrows he yearns
for death, just like Ahasverus. This salvation, denied to the wandering Jew, can
be won by the Dutchman only through a woman who sacrifices herself out of
love for him.’
Although first of all he composed Senta’s Ballad and assigned it prime
importance, he also gave the male protagonist particular weight. The man
yearns for peace, for a homeland and for a wife. A reversal of the genders
would be impossible here, for no one would have taken seriously a woman
who, after ‘storms’ in her life, sought out a man in order for him to redeem her.
The Dutchman is connoted in a thoroughly male fashion and bears traits that
are clearly also those of his musical creator. He finds redemption only through
a partner who gives herself out of love.
‘My dear south wind, blow again! I yearn for my Minna!’ wrote Wagner
to his wife in July , thus comparing her to Senta, the principal female
character in the Dutchman, whose ballad he had finished two years before.
But Minna already saw no future for them together – their time in Paris had
been too full of privations. For her, it had been a bitter experience to see her
husband give up a steady job in Riga. In Paris, apart from a few examples of
commissioned work (such as piano arrangements), Wagner had been unable
to find any regular source of income. Minna’s own difficult experiences dur-
ing her childhood and youth meant that she found such poverty difficult to
bear. At times, the two were even close to starving. In the summer of  they
moved to Meudon on the outskirts of Paris, where they both went hunting for
mushrooms in the woods and plucked nuts from the overhanging branches
of trees in other people’s gardens. When Minna finally took ill, Richard was
in despair because he could not afford any medicine – he had already pawned
their wedding rings. Minna had had her fill of living with money worries and
no longer believed her husband’s empty promises. So the conflict in their
marriage may have been responsible for his yearning not just for a homeland
but for a female partner, a yearning that found expression in Der fliegende
Holländer. As Wagner explained in his Communication to my Friends, this
yearning was:

a desire for something new and hitherto unsuspected, something

unknown, something that still had to be won – and of this I knew
only that I would certainly not find it in Paris. It was the yearning of
my Flying Dutchman for a woman – but not, as I have said, for a wife
as in the case of Odysseus, but for a redeeming woman. Her character
appeared to me in no specific form, but existed in my imaginings as the
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Feminine in itself. And she also became an expression of a ‘Homeland’ ,

in other words the feeling of being enveloped by something intimately
familiar.

The woman he yearned for and his notions of ‘home’ melted one into the other.
He wanted to be enveloped by woman, supported, protected, loved and rec-
ognized uncritically in every aspect. Just as ‘home’ allows a sense of identifi-
cation and belonging, so Wagner’s ideal woman had to be constantly present,
always protecting, supporting and rejuvenating him.
Even after their return to Dresden in  the Wagners suffered from
money worries. Minna urgently needed to recuperate, so she took the waters
in Teplitz and wrote to Richard to suggest that they separate for a while. After
everything that she had hitherto experienced with her husband, she now told
him ever more often of her doubts about their future. As on earlier occasions,
she probably pondered seriously the possibility of earning money herself by
returning to her career on the stage. And because such work would inevitably
lead to new jealous episodes on the part of her husband, she wanted them
to separate. One thing was quite clear to her: she was in no way prepared to
accept a repetition of their Parisian poverty.
The idea of a separation must have shocked Richard deeply at the time. The
relationship with a woman was, for him, an elemental physical necessity, for
he was unable to exist on his own, either in a material or in a creative sense.
He tried passionately to convince her not to leave him, ending his reply with
the above line from the Dutchman. His inner estrangement from Minna was a
heavy burden to him during the composition of the work, a fact confirmed by
a later remark of Cosima’s: ‘In Lübeck, when Richard thought of Minna’s awful
nature, I said to him, if only I had always been with you! I imagined how happy
the composition of the Dutchman would have made me, how the realization
and awareness of its greatness would have borne me above all hardship’ . He
had, it seems, told her in graphic terms of his difficult times with Minna.
At this period, Wagner was busy creating a new type of woman, one intended
less to encapsulate the ‘homely, caring’ wife than the ‘eternally female woman’ .
At first glance this seems to contradict the yearning he described above. For
wasn’t the ‘homely caring wife’ the ideal woman from his point of view? He
wanted a partner who would provide him with food and clothing, who would
organize their many moves from one apartment to another (as Minna did),
who would procure new furniture, sew his dressing gowns, curtains, and cush-
ions for the piano stool, and who would see to it that everyday matters pro-
ceeded without a hitch. For Minna, a perfectly functioning household was her
basic task and an expression of her affection for him. In Paris, despite their
 From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer 

money problems, she had developed this into an art, as her illegitimate daugh-
ter Natalie remembered:

She understood how to make the little household so homely, nice and
clean by displaying the height of order and cleanliness … she worked
calmly and noiselessly like a housemaid. She swept, washed, cooked,
cleaned his clothes and boots for him because they had no money to
leave these lowly tasks to servants. And yet she always looked so rosy,
fresh, so nice and extremely clean that one could not suspect she did all
these lowly maid’s tasks. She would go to a market that lay hours away
because it was cheaper to buy the necessary foodstuffs there, and how
happy she was when that meant she could surprise her beloved Richard
with a few good cigars and a pinch of snuff. And how happy Richard
always was with this welcome gift of love, happy as a child, and he did
not know how to thank his caring little Minna with enough kisses.

But in truth it was not so idyllic. Both of them wanted more. Minna ulti-
mately wanted a functioning, bourgeois household, run on a solid economic
basis – something that Richard could never give her. She liked to listen to his
imaginings and visions of the future, but her bitter experiences made her deny
him uncritical allegiance when he developed new, reckless plans, in which she
could not believe. Nor did she spare him her critical complaints. Her fears
for the future must have touched him to the core of his being, and led him –
already in Riga – to engage with the notion of a new type of woman. If Richard
wished for himself an ‘eternally female woman’ , he did not understand this
merely as a partner who ran the household. Above and beyond those respon-
sibilities, her task was to understand her husband in everything, to follow his
wishes and be unquestioningly obedient to him. A sacrifice, in other words,
that Wagner subsumed under the notion of ‘love’ between a woman and a
man. Here he takes his desire for a loving woman as a symbol for his yearn-
ing for the ‘new’ . But he also sought the ‘new’ in his ‘Kunstwerk der Zukunft’
(‘Artwork of the future’). His comments lead us to the conclusion that he
wanted both together: the new work of art was to annul the alienation of the
composer from society, while the new type of woman was to secure the artist’s
private environment to enable him to be creative. We often read that Der
fliegende Holländer is only about the figure of the seafarer, in whom Wagner
saw a symbol of the modern existence of the artist. But in the plot itself, the
prime concern is a man who wants to be redeemed by a woman. This was, in
fact, a central theme in Wagner’s life. It would be no less accurate to suggest
that Wagner wrote his works to inform bourgeois women of their allotted role
in life, to instruct them as to where they really belonged.
 Richard Wagner’s Women

At first, the overture seems to confirm that the Dutchman will be at the
centre of the action, for his motif is used as the first subject in a Classical
sonata form, with Senta’s redemption motif then heard in the relative major.
Despite the importance of her role in the overall scheme of things, on a musi-
cal level it is the woman who accompanies the man. The overture begins with
stormy runs in the strings, accompanied by timpani and a large array of brass.
Whether the music describes the Dutchman, the stormy sea, his sea journey
itself or the seamen fighting the rigours of the elements, this whole world of
adventure and activity belongs in the masculine domain. But then the mood
changes, the tempo decelerates, the full orchestral sound gives way to the
sound of wind instruments alone, and we hear part of the melody of Senta’s
Ballad: ‘But the pale man can gain redemption only if he finds the woman who
will be faithful to him unto death here on earth.’ Minor turns to major, long
sustained notes bring a great sense of calm where before there was turmoil,
and the sound of the cor anglais dominates, with oboe and clarinet repeating
its phrase. After the storm has returned, the redemption theme sounds again,
and again is dominated by the sound of the woodwind. A few bars later, we
hear it for a third time, and now all the wind instruments unite. This motif is
constructed in periods and is demonstratively simple, with an almost religious
aura. In the th century, women were regarded as the bearers of humanity
and of religion, and Wagner here depicts the capacity for love that was one
aspect of woman’s lot. The overture’s connotations are thus stereotypically
gender-specific, and very clearly so.
In order to create his Senta, Wagner removed Heinrich Heine’s original fig-
ure and remodelled her according to his own notions. Whereas Heine offers an
ironic perspective on female infidelity, it is the lifelong fidelity of woman that
is at the heart of Wagner’s work. In Wagner’s first, brief prose sketch, written
in French in , ‘Le hollandais volant’ , the idea of faithfulness unto death
(‘être fidèle jusqu’à la mort’) is stressed no fewer than six times. Heine hardly
has anything to say about his female protagonist except that she is ‘pretty’ .
Wagner, however, makes her the prime mover in his dramatic narrative, with
her readiness to sacrifice herself and her capacity to love. Senta’s decision to
follow the Dutchman without question, even to death, and her view of this as
a task set by God, makes of her a figure as important as the Dutchman himself.
It is thus odd that ‘real’ love, the kind that arises from empathy, intense com-
munication and affection, does not play any role in Der fliegende Holländer.
The Dutchman himself declares, ‘Should I, unhappy as I am, call [my feelings]
love? Oh no! My yearning is for redemption!’ And Senta falls in love not with
the Dutchman himself but with his picture. According to her, it is ‘the holy
duty of woman’ that moves her to give herself to the man. Thus the impression
 From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer 

is created that Wagner wanted to rise above and beyond love itself, to weave
another, invisible, thread that binds woman to man for all eternity – even if he
is not overly concerned for her.
Senta wants to redeem the Dutchman by her love, and she loves him even
before she meets him. We find a similar pattern in Der Ring des Nibelungen,
where Brünnhilde already loves Siegfried while he is still an embryo. This is a
typically Wagnerian fantasy – to be loved eternally, without interruption, by a
woman. With regard to the figure of Senta, he wanted her dreamy nature not
to be ‘misunderstood as a modern, sick sentimentality’ . For she is ‘a wholly
down-to-earth Nordic girl’ , who always remains credible, despite the effusive-
ness of her emotions being unintelligible to the world around her. This image
of woman makes clear the reason why he left out the framing narrative that
Heine uses. Heine tells it from the perspective of a man in a theatre audience,
watching the play of the Flying Dutchman. Suddenly, he hears someone laugh-
ing behind him. When he turns round, a girl with seductive eyes throws orange
peel at his head. The girl is neither good nor bad, but she is no virgin any more;
she is ‘knowing’ . The narrator feels a desire to kiss her, and the ‘Dutch blonde
girl’ gives her assent ‘with melodious sounds of the heart’ . There follows an
erotic adventure on a black sofa: ‘The shell is iron, but there lurks within it
the hottest essence. There is nothing spicier than the contrast between that
exterior coldness and the inner passion that blazes up in a bacchanal and
envelops the happy reveller in irresistible ecstasy.’ Heine uses this episode
to enliven the tale of the sombre Dutchman with sensuality and irony. But
Wagner expunged it. He found repellent the contrast between a young, adven-
turous woman in the everyday world and his ideal of altruistic readiness for
self-sacrifice, as demonstrated by Senta. Such a ‘beautiful Eve’ , sexually avail-
able and on the hunt for adventure, would not have suited his story. Wagner
also rejected Heine’s ironic final sentence: ‘For women, the moral of this piece
is that they should take care not to marry any flying Dutchman; while we
men can see from this how even in the best of cases women bring about our
downfall.’
Wagner took pleasure in creating contrasting worlds. Daland, Erik and the
spinning girls belong to everyday, bourgeois reality, and are strongly con-
trasted with the mysterious world of the Dutchman, just as are the songs
of the Norwegian sailors and the spinning girls. These contrasts have their
origins in Weber’s Freischütz. In the case of Weber’s hunters and Wagner’s
chorus of sailors, it is a matter of mastering nature: whether they are satisfied
with the animals they have hunted and killed, or face up fearlessly to the wind
and storms; whether they sing ‘Jo ho tralala’ as in Weber, or ‘Hussassa, he!
Jollohohe!’ as in Wagner; whether they drink wine as the hunters do, or smoke
 Richard Wagner’s Women

tobacco and drink brandy on board ship – in each case, the basic message is
the same. These are men who work outdoors and demonstrate an effervescent
joy in life. And the whole orchestra accompanies them with varied rhythms
and upward-striving, powerful melodies (besides the woodwind and strings,
we find here horns, trumpets, trombones, tuba and percussion).
The pleasant songs of Weber’s bridesmaids and of Wagner’s spinning
women, on the other hand, barely leave the realm of folksy simplicity. The
spinning wheel is characterized by a monotonous, essentially static turning
motif in the accompaniment. The oboe intones a merry, dotted accompani-
ment, with many suspensions, thereby stressing the dainty, mischievous char-
acter of the busy spinning bees. As Wagner later admitted to his second wife,
Cosima, the romance of Margarethe – ‘Spinne, arme Margarethe’ (‘Spin, poor
Margarethe’) – from Boieldieu’s La dame blanche had impressed him as a boy.
Diatonicism, a monotonous accompaniment and a periodic melodic struc-
ture are all to be found both there and here. The wheels that we hear whirring
are an expression of a typical ‘female’ activity, expressing ‘turning for turn-
ing’s sake’ , such as we find repeated a dozen times in household chores. Their
movement, being circular, is neither dynamic nor forward-moving.
For many centuries, spinning was regarded as a locus for social commu-
nication among women, but was an act of abasement, even disgrace, when
carried out by men. When Gottfried Kinkel, a professor from Bonn, was
arrested after taking part in the revolt of  in Baden, he was made to spin
wool in prison as a means of shaming him. A similar disdain also shimmers
through the busy, monotonous music of Wagner’s spinners. Just once, how-
ever, the women abandon their staid role. Senta has become overwrought dur-
ing the singing of her Ballad; she breaks off and sinks into a chair. The spinning
women have become infected by her excitement and end her Ballad by inton-
ing a four-part a cappella song that is directed at the Dutchman: ‘Oh! Where is
she, whom God’s angel one day might show you? Where will you meet her, she
who would remain faithfully yours unto death?’ Even if the spinning women
break out of their role in musical terms, their well-tried pattern of behaviour
is not altered in content. The Dutchman’s desire for a female ‘victim’ is here
portrayed in music as a just demand, sanctioned from on high.
But how does Senta’s grandiose Ballad fit into this simple world of the spin-
ning women? Is she, too, not just a simple girl, who knows little more than the
spinning room? Daland praises his daughter by stressing that she ‘is devoted’
to him ‘with a child’s fidelity’ , and he continues: ‘She is my pride, my com-
fort in adversity, my happiness in joy.’ So Senta is certainly meant to convey a
childlike quality, possessed of virginal purity and naivety, and untroubled by
any contemplation. But the actual character of Senta comes across as different
 From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer 

from this: her vocal line includes extreme melodic leaps of more than an
octave and clearly goes beyond the boundaries of feminine grace. The great
seriousness with which she describes the Dutchman’s appearance marks her
as someone who is very determined, and completely convinced of what she
does. And this makes her quite different from the traditional female roles of
her fellow women. Although Wagner presumably did not conceive her as a
mighty proto-Valkyrie, Senta nevertheless exercises opposition to the whole
bourgeois world as represented by Mary, her father and the sensitive Erik. But
Wagner here risks catching himself in his own trap: for does he really want a
woman who is only there for her husband, and who thus sacrifices all inde-
pendent feeling? When Senta stands up to her environment, she acts with a
high degree of independence. It seems almost perverse that such a woman
could subjugate herself to such an extent to a man she does not really know,
even to the point of offering up her life for him. In order to solve this dilemma,
Wagner invents ‘female intuition’ as her guiding principle. It is this that leads
Senta to the ‘right’ man. In this way he is able to allay any fears that an inde-
pendent woman could turn destructive and ‘devour’ her man.
Senta’s Ballad displays a clear musical distinction between the description
of the desperate seafarer – who finds expression in the stormy beginning
of the Ballad – and her inner desire to redeem him. The redemption motif,
appropriately known as ‘Senta’s motif ’ , appears in the second section. An inti-
mate melody in a simple major mode, already heard in the overture, it twice
dissolves into the consolidating tonic, accompanied by the tender sounds of
oboe and cor anglais (woodwind are naturally always at hand for a depiction
of the domesticated, caring woman). Calm, chorale-like chords in the major
indicate Senta’s heavenly purity and a life after death. Thus Wagner underlines
in superb fashion the double image of woman, at once ready to oppose her
environment and yet by nature angelic and virginal.
It is nevertheless inevitable that Senta’s character remains contradictory.
She cannot at one and the same time be the child her father sees in her and the
Dutchman’s courageous saviour. In musical terms we get our first impression
of her when her father praises her to the unknown man, describing her in few
words as pretty, faithful and obedient. She is thus a virtuous, good girl from
a bourgeois home. The strings move into dotted quavers that are intended to
be charming in character, and the oboe adds arabesques to them. For Wagner,
the oboe was the instrument of purity and naturalness, and thus also of wom-
anliness. ‘The music does not refer to the exterior beauty of Senta with which
Daland tries to ensnare the Dutchman, but to her innocence, her chastity and
above all to her … naïvety’ , writes Egon Voss.
On the other hand, Senta’s Ballad is full of passionate drama. Here there is
 Richard Wagner’s Women

no hint of any modest self-subjugation. Even though the first section describes
the Dutchman, Senta breaks out of her role as the ‘good daughter’ with her
leaps of a fourth, fifth and octave, and with her cries of ‘Jo-ho-hoe! Jo-jo-
ho-hoe!’ Here, Wagner undoubtedly had the dramatic soprano Wilhelmine
Schröder-Devrient in mind, who had fascinated and captivated him as
Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio when he was just . She was ‘youthful, beauti-
ful and warm, as no woman since has appeared to me on stage’ . He saw her
again and again in the theatre; she enthralled him and filled him ‘each time
anew with burning fire’ . But such ‘wildness’ is here subsumed into the desire
for redemption. Senta promptly abandons her passionate mode and we hear
a phrase from the woodwind and horns alone, accompanying her calmly syl-
labic melodic line. The solemn sense of apotheosis that this redemptive pas-
sage exudes has led opera directors and Wagner commentators to assume that
Senta must be a somnambulist, hysterical or simply divorced from reality.
Even the notion that she might be an intermediary between the sinful and the
sacred worlds remains unconvincing, since she is concerned only with the
Dutchman and nothing else. Wagner surrounds her redemptive song with a
quasi-religious aura not to make any kind of religious statement but in order
to underline the seriousness of her desire.
But does not Senta commit a serious sin when she leaves her fiancé, Erik,
after having earlier sworn fidelity to him? Wagner resolves this problem
by depicting Erik as a sensitive, easily wounded man, who remains trapped
within bourgeois normality and appears pale in comparison with the impres-
sive figure of the Dutchman. Erik’s pleading aria ‘My heart full of faithfulness’
is constructed periodically, with an even-keeled, harmless accompaniment.
He is introduced by the solo clarinet (the instrument of love) and his melodies
are often embellished prominently with mordents, proving him a man of weak
character. He describes his heartache with the words ‘Qualen’ (‘sufferings’),
‘Verderben’ (‘ruin’), ‘Jammer’ (‘misery’) and ‘Kränkung’ (‘wounding’), and he
demonstrates his uncertainty and his anxiety by asking Senta no fewer than
sixteen questions in all. Erik is the defeated, suffering party and is thus given
feminine connotations. According to Wagner, however, his singing should in
no wise express any exaggerated self-pity, but rather sadness and melancholy.
The ‘feminine’ ingredients in his music suffice to characterize him. Wagner’s
genius for dramatization always made him refuse to have musical expression
doubled by a similar interpretation on the part of the singer, as this, in his eyes,
would have amounted to over-accentuation.
Senta simply follows her unerring emotion, which leads her to the
Dutchman. She is unaware of any guilt in relation to Erik, and thus does not
find herself in any real conflict. There are numerous references to the fact that,
 From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer 

despite the ruthlessness of her fidelity towards the Dutchman, she has never-
theless retained her traditionally female qualities. At her promise to be faithful
in the second act – ‘I well know the holy duties of woman’ , she sings – the flute
doubles the vocal melody high above it. The woodwind accompaniment thus
adds a particular brilliance to the words. When the Dutchman sings ‘Welch
holder Klang’ (‘What lovely sound’), meaning Senta’s pity for him, and con-
tinues with the words ‘You are an angel’ , the woodwind are to be heard again,
referring to her.
In the opera’s final apotheosis, the musical texture is dominated entirely
by the redemption motif and the Dutchman’s motif. This act of redemption
lifts the Dutchman victoriously out of his deepest misery, which is why his
motif is heard in broad and mighty form in a brilliant major mode. The further
he and Senta soar up, the more their joy is transfigured, and the redemption
motif is embellished by harps. We shall hear something similar at the close of
Götterdämmerung.
Two entries in Cosima’s diary make clear just how closely Wagner identified
himself with the Dutchman. Three years before his death, the couple attended
a performance of the work in Munich, one that so enraptured Wagner that
he several times broke down in tears. He was presumably overwhelmed by
memories of his earlier life, of the time when he no longer enjoyed Minna’s
confidence and yearned for a new lover. When Cosima’s father, Franz Liszt,
visited Bayreuth in , Richard and a local soprano sang the scene from
the finale of the second act that includes the meeting between Senta and the
Dutchman. Cosima recounted it thus:

In the evening, music. R. sings with Miss v. St. the scene from the
Fliegende Holländer, making the deepest impression and enrapturing
all. He himself is shaken, especially by singing this scene in front of my
father, for in it he recognizes again our whole situation. After all have
left, we remain together for a long time in thought, deeply moved – we
will never hear the Dutchman’s words like that again.

Franz Liszt had long vainly opposed Cosima’s marriage to Richard, so it was
for Wagner a late cause of satisfaction that Liszt had to hear how fate deter-
mines that two people must be with each other. Wagner assumed that he
would interpret the message of the scene in a personal fashion, for Liszt had
conducted the opera twenty years before in Weimar and had written of Senta:

The lament of [the Dutchman], immersed in bitterness, awakens

our pity and teaches us how a woman can feel called to sacrifice her
life in order to achieve his salvation. In the same manner, the higher
 Richard Wagner’s Women

intentions and the noble manner of Lohengrin let us feel that there is
nothing left for a woman to do but to die when she has lost this brilliant
hero of light. […] Who could doubt a Senta, a womanly being, who sac-
rifices her own life in order to redeem a great soul from the hardest of
punishments?

And he goes on to describe Senta as ‘one of the most brilliant female charac-
ters who have ever been created in art or depicted in poetry’ . Liszt under-
stood Senta’s actions as an indication to women of what their position is in
life. His own daughter had now taken Minna’s place – something he could not
then have foreseen, of course. And yet with time he accepted her marriage
and even managed to compare his daughter to Senta: ‘She dedicates herself to
Wagner with ruthless enthusiasm as does Senta in Der Fliegende Holländer –
and she will be his salvation, for he listens to her and is clear-sighted enough
to follow her’ he wrote, after visiting them. And so the circle from Minna to
Cosima closes. The woman whom Wagner desired was the woman he finally
found in Cosima von Bülow. She left her husband to be Wagner’s ‘redeem-
ing angel’ , accepted the resulting scandal, and after his death lived only for
his work.
The theme of redemption is continued in Wagner’s following works in an
almost obsessive manner. We find it in all its possible forms, yet with one
constant: it is always the woman who gives up herself for the man. Wagner
does, however, defend women against unjust treatment. Thus in Der fliegende
Holländer there is criticism of Senta’s father, who wants to ‘sell her off ’ to an
older man because he thinks only of money. Here we find a direct parallel to
Wotan in Das Rheingold, who is at first unscrupulous in his willingness to sell
Freia to the giants. At least, here, Wagner is willing to defend the opposite sex
by reflecting the commercial commodification of female sexuality.
The composer said of himself that he had glorified women more than any
other poet or artist before him. Liszt agreed unreservedly, stating that no one
else had understood the significance of woman’s mission of self-denial and
devotion better than Wagner in his libretti. To depict self-denial as a ‘mission’ ,
however, is not something that even Wagner himself would have suggested.
Liszt’s analysis is too shallow and conventional. For as we have seen, Wagner
projected a number of overlapping discourses onto the character of Senta,
which make her at one and the same time deeply ‘feminine’ yet also a strong,
self-assured woman.
It was Friedrich Nietzsche who showed just how far the notion of a ‘natu-
ral’ , self-sacrificing woman can lead, when he mocked the plot of Der fliegende
Holländer as follows:
 From Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer 

Der fliegende Holländer preaches the noble precept that woman can
even fasten down the most wilful of men: in Wagnerian terms, ‘redeem’
him. Here we allow ourselves to ask: if this were true, would it be desir-
able? […] in many cases of womanly love, and perhaps in the most
famous cases, love is just a more subtle form of parasitism, a nesting
within another’s soul, even in foreign flesh – oh! and always at the cost
of its ‘host’!’

Heinrich Heine wrote with mild irony that ‘we men can see from this how
even in the best of cases women bring about our downfall’ . But Nietzsche
here seriously posits the obverse of Wagner’s concept of redemption. Many
women did not understand this, to be sure, and took pleasure in the character
of Senta: ‘Der fliegende Holländer has had an incredible impact here […] I have
made a mighty impression on all the women,’ wrote Wagner after a perform-
ance of the opera in Zürich.
Wagner loved to get inside his different operatic characters – Cosima’s
diaries are full of such comparisons. In , twelve years after he wrote the
opera, the composer had no hope left of disseminating his operas and spoke to
Liszt of a ‘terrible joylessness’ . In this situation, he identified himself with his
unhappy seafarer: ‘I always hear: “Oh, pale seafarer, if only you could find her!”
and then “but the pale man can yet be redeemed”.’ But besides the reference
to his professional problems, there is another subtext in the correspondence
between the two composers. Liszt knew that his friend had fallen in love again.
Already, a year earlier, Wagner had written to him of a ‘very lovely woman’ ,
who had persuaded him to put on his Fliegende Holländer in Zürich. This
woman was Mathilde, the wife of Otto Wesendonck, the man who was sup-
porting Wagner financially. She understood his art – more than did Wagner’s
wife – and she became his ‘muse’ . A close friendship developed between the
two of them. The opera was performed four times in Zürich, each time to a
sell-out house. A year afterwards he held another festival of his music and
he wrote: ‘I laid the whole festival at the feet of one lovely woman!’ When he
quoted his unhappy seafarer, then, his love for her was in full bloom: ‘O, I’m
in love! – and I am infused by such a heavenly faith that I do not even need –
hope!’ , he wrote to his friend Uhlig.
Five years later he took up the metaphor of the Dutchman once more. His
wife Minna had taken umbrage at his close relationship to Mathilde and had
provoked a scandal. Richard wrote to Mathilde that he could hear a voice in
himself ‘which, yearning, calls for calm – the same calm for which I had my
Dutchman yearn, all those years ago’ . He took his leave of her with the words:
‘Fare well my dear, holy angel!’
Chapter 
‘The glitter of a high-class brothel’: Tannhäuser

‘T   cast their frigidity into the ears of all men with their top Cs,
while the men dream themselves out of everyday marital boredom into
a seven-year holiday of boundless pleasure at the Venusberg – even if a hang-
over is lurking just round the corner. How sultry it all is, what a potage of over-
cooked, pulverized lust!’ Carl von Ossietzky’s sharp criticism of Tannhäuser
was matched by Thomas Mann on hearing the Venusberg music on the radio:
‘A thoroughly sexual product at the close, with moist glances oozing through
the hypocritical yearnings of the Pilgrim’s Chorus. Romanticism is an unclean
world. I don’t want to hear of it any more.’ And Ernst Bloch wrote of the work’s
‘glitter of a high-class brothel, with a rose of hell’ .
Tannhäuser prompted critics to salacious comments right from the very
start, and during his lifetime Wagner himself experienced extreme reactions
to the work. At one rehearsal, even his patron Otto Wesendonck found fault
with its ‘lascivious tones’ , and Wagner joked that Otto was probably scared
he might have dangled them in front of his wife Mathilde. But there were also
contrary voices, who criticized Tannhäuser’s love of Elisabeth as unworldly.
Wagner found this ludicrous: ‘How absurd these critics must seem to me, who
in their modern wantonness have become so ingenious. They want to inter-
pret my Tannhäuser as specifically Christian and impute to him a tendency to
impotent glorification!’ Wagner had to defend himself on all sides, whether
against accusations of sexual excess or chastity.
Upon first approaching the work, one might assume that it was written in
the traditions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. As Hans Mayer has
remarked, the contrast between bourgeois virginal dignity and the liber-
tine tendencies of female nobility was a characteristic feature of the bour-
geois Enlightenment. We see it over and over again in the novels and plays of
Gellert, Richardson, Lessing and others. At first glance, it seems as if Elisabeth
is the typically strait-laced, pious, domestic woman, who remains subject to
her man throughout her life. Venus on the other hand is, in this interpreta-
tion, the evil femme fatale, feared by men because she enchants them only to
enslave them. But it is all rather more complex than this. Wagner was probably
inspired in part by the discussions of sexuality that were popular at the time
of the Young Germany movement, and that will have led him to ponder the
hypocrisy prevalent in all matters erotic.
Before composing Tannhäuser, Wagner had conceived the plot of an opera
entitled Die Sarazenin (‘The Saracen woman’). He was inspired by a drawing
 ‘The glitter of a high-class brothel’: Tannhäuser 

that depicted Friedrich II, ‘surrounded by his court, almost all of them Arabs,
in which singing and dancing oriental women transfixed my imagination in
lively fashion’ . This scene later came to his mind when he created his Flower
Maidens in Parsifal. The plot of Die Sarazenin hinges on Manfred, the son
of Friedrich II von Hohenstaufen, who conquered Apulia and Sicily and was
then crowned Holy Roman Emperor. Alongside these historical facts, Wagner
concocted a young Saracen woman as a leading role ‘of the highest Romantic
significance’ . She appears at the court as a prophetess, urges Manfred on to
victory under her protection, and finally has him ascend the throne. When
an attempt is made on his life, she ‘takes the deadly blow in her own breast
and in dying confesses her identity as that of Manfred’s sister. She thus lets
him know the fullness of her love for him’ , he wrote in his Communication
to my Friends. The fate of this ‘Saracen woman’ resembles that of Senta and
Elisabeth, though in her character she is closest to Brünnhilde. At the same
time, she refers back to Irene, Rienzi’s sister. These thematic layerings show us
how intensely Wagner was concerned with the topic of the redeeming woman
and how he sought her artistic realization in ever new ways.
But he soon found that this plot did not offer him sufficient scope, so he
replaced the idea of Manfred with that of Tannhäuser. Tannhäuser was, for
Wagner, ‘the man of today, the man at the very heart of the artist hungry for
life’ , as he described him further in his Communication. He had discussed
the characterization of the Saracen woman with the leading dramatic singer
Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who had already sung his Senta to his full-
est satisfaction. He was not only impressed by her artistic accomplishments,
for they both felt touched by the political matters of the day and saw their
art as something that extended above and beyond mere matters of the stage.
‘She felt urged to feel things as a whole, to merge everything into one greater
entity, and this wholeness in life and art was our very life in society itself and
our theatrical art,’ he wrote admiringly. The role of the Saracen woman, how-
ever, was not one that Wilhelmine could accept as Wagner conceived it. He
had determined that the prophetess ‘could not become a woman again’ – in
other words, she could not be a prophetess and a feminine woman at one and
the same time. Wilhelmine disagreed with him, as she was perfectly well able
to imagine such a combination. It was not just this argument, but above all
the unsettled life she led that destroyed the image Wagner had constructed
of Wilhelmine as an ideal, devoted woman. We know from her authorized
biography that she never succeeded in finding a partner worthy to match her,
and that she – like Wagner – tried to dampen her yearnings by indulging in
superficial pleasure. Her biographer, Claire Glümer, writes as follows of her
loneliness:
 Richard Wagner’s Women

In order to escape her unhappiness at being alone, Wilhelmine sought

feverishly for a man to whom she could give her passionate heart. But it
was not her talent to be lucky in love. With some men she would soon
become convinced that they were insufficiently devoted to her; with
others she would have to recognize that she had misjudged their quali-
ties. Then she would turn away in pain and anger.

Richard’s contact with Wilhelmine put him ‘out of kilter, in a highly discon-
certing manner’ . He saw how she plunged into one inept relationship after
another and was himself torn between his emotional desires and his need for
superficial physical enjoyment. He was unsuccessful in finding any equilib-
rium between the domestic care provided by Minna and the passionate desire
in which he indulged from time to time without ever being properly satisfied.
It was at this time of inner turmoil that he wrote Tannhäuser. He said that he
was in a mood

in which the figure of Tannhäuser returned to admonish me and urged

me on to finish my libretto. I was in a state of gnawing, sensuous agita-
tion that excited continually both blood and nerves when I sketched out
the music for Tannhäuser and brought it to completion. My true nature,
which had returned to me in my disgust at the modern world and in
my urge to find something more and more noble, subsumed the most
extreme aspects of my being in a powerful, passionate embrace, merg-
ing to find a climax in a single sweep that was the most intense desire
for love.

This desire for love, which he was unable to fulfil in the ideal manner that he
imagined, led him to give in time and again to ‘the urge for more or less swift
enjoyment’ . Later, he recalled this time thus: ‘until then my being had main-
tained itself by an equilibrium of two warring elements of desire within me,
one of which I sought to pacify through my art, whereas I would from time to
time still the other by erotic, fantastic, sensual indulgences’ . His ‘being’ was
thus diverted from its ‘true nature’ , he said. These confessions make it sound
as if he was visiting prostitutes in Dresden. The th century saw an increase
in population in the big cities that resulted in a corresponding increase in
the number of prostitutes. It was particularly common for women with a low
income, such as serving girls, shop assistants, flower girls and washerwomen
to dabble in occasional prostitution. The sale of female flesh was especially
common in the theatrical world, where voluntary prostitution on the part of
the female staff – actresses, singers and dancers – was even taken into account
by theatre directors when calculating their salaries. Wagner thus had plenty
 ‘The glitter of a high-class brothel’: Tannhäuser 

of opportunity to gather experience elsewhere, not least because he had irreg-

ular working hours and Minna could not keep a check on him. Several years
later, when Richard wanted to flee to Greece with Jessie Laussot, Minna wrote
angrily that ‘He gets itchy feet every few years, but this time is the worst.’ So
she was used to bearing a good deal from him.
Without any help from Minna, Wagner’s ‘urge’ disgusted him after a certain
time, as we may infer from his Communication to my Friends. His yearning for
a pure, ideal love finds expression in Tannhäuser:

In Tannhäuser I yearned to set myself free from the frivolous sensuous-

ness that itself repelled me – it was the only expression of sensuousness
that our modern times know. My urge was towards what was unknown
to me and what was pure, chaste, virginal, all of which I hoped might
provide fulfilment for a more noble, yet at the same time still essen-
tially sensual desire – but a desire such as the frivolity of the present day
could not satisfy.

This desire to turn away from superficial eroticism is combined with his
criticism of the entertainment that was offered to audiences in the theatres
and concert halls of the big towns. Speculators, capital and the striving for
profit dominated the cities, he said; plays of lesser quality were performed in
order to provide a good income. Wagner criticized the stance of many a thea-
tre director, who ‘today offers vulgar jokes, tomorrow a piece for Philistines
and on the third day a spicy delicacy for gourmets’ . This condemnation
of commercialized art led in the long run to the creation of the Bayreuth
Festspielhaus.
However much Wagner kept his eye open for possibilities of ‘erotic adven-
ture’ , he remained in many respects dependent on his wife Minna. He needed
his ‘very best Minel’ as a crutch in everyday life and as the protector of his
creative work. In May , when he was working on Tannhäuser, she went
on a trip and Richard was overcome by a great feeling of restlessness. He
wrote to her: ‘I have to avoid distractions as much as possible and go walking
a lot on my own […] It has to continue like this if I am to bear your absence.’
He obviously tried to lessen her suspicions (no doubt well founded) that he
was being unfaithful by assuring her that he stayed at home in the evenings.
Furthermore, he wrote, people had told him he was getting fat. ‘You see, that
comes from my serious attitude to life, the avoidance of pleasure, going to bed
at , sometimes even at . – and anyway, you know that capons get fat!!?’ It
is undeniable that he nevertheless gave in to his erotic fantasies time and again,
though they always led him into that ‘terrible empty desert’ , as he called it,
resulting in the end in an irreconcilable conflict. It was in the fictitious world
 Richard Wagner’s Women

of his operas that Wagner worked through this conflict. As so often with him,
life and art are intertwined.
It is thus unlikely that Tannhäuser was inspired only by Wagner’s musings
on the role of the artist or the work of art of the future, as is often claimed. It is
also – indeed, primarily – about woman. Even if many commentators have dif-
ficulty in accepting the powerful influence that women have on the lives of art-
ists and thus on their artistic production, it remains a fact: Wagner’s longing
for ‘the trusted shade of a loving human embrace’ occupied him throughout
his life and is thus also of central importance in his works.

From this summit my yearning glance saw – woman; the woman for
whom the flying Dutchman yearned from the sea-depths of his misery,
the woman who became the star of heaven that showed Tannhäuser the
way to salvation from out of the lustful pleasure caves of the Venusberg,
and the same woman who drew Lohengrin from his sunlit heights
down to the comforting, warming breast of earth.

In the ‘Legend of the Knight Tannhäuser’ in the collection of legends that

Ludwig Bechstein published in , on which Wagner drew, the erotic is
largely sidelined. Besides sources by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck and
others, Wagner was also influenced by Heinrich Heine’s great poem Der
Tannhäuser, though as in the case of Der fliegende Holländer he excised eve-
rything that was ironic or banal. Heine could do nothing with the topics of
sin and redemption – addressing these themes, his verses descend into the
trivially comic. He says of Venus, for example, ‘She gave him soup, she gave
him bread, she washed his wounded feet, she combed his straggly hair, and all
the while laughed so sweet.’ Such episodes were of no use to Wagner. In the
first edition of his Tannhäuser libretto, he describes Venus and underlines in
particular the fascination that she exuded in the Germanic legend in which
she figured. She united ‘all notions of a being magical but unhappy, and who
entices one to indulge in sinful, sensual pleasure’ . He did not want to make
Venus too negative, for Tannhäuser was obviously very much at home with her.
All the same, the sinfulness of what she does had to be made clear. In any case,
there was no room for irony.
When he was in Paris in –, several years after finishing the opera,
Wagner refined the music of the Venusberg. His experience of life in the mean-
time had expanded his vision, as he wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck: ‘I have
worked somewhat on the music for my new scene. It is strange: everything
interior, passionate, I could almost say: feminine and ecstatic, I was unable to
realize at the time I wrote Tannhäuser. I have had to cast everything overboard
and sketch it anew. Truly, I am horrified by my cardboard-cut-out Venus of
 ‘The glitter of a high-class brothel’: Tannhäuser 

back then!’ He presumably wanted Mathilde to know that only she was able
to awaken the emotional and the sensual within him that in turn made possi-
ble a higher level of compositional maturity. In his correspondence with Otto
Wesendonck, on the other hand, we read: ‘I have not yet been able to finish the
orchestration of the new scene between Tannhäuser and Venus. The first – the
dance scene – isn’t written at all, and I have as yet no idea how I want to do it.’
Whereas Mathilde learns that he is only now experienced enough in life to be
able to compose erotic music, he tells Otto tactfully that he is devoid of ideas
for it.
The impact of eroticism on the world of man – at once enticing yet danger-
ous – is clearly audible in the music. The overture comprises the melody of the
Pilgrims’ Chorus, Tannhäuser’s hymn to Venus and a description of Venus. At
first, calm chords are heard in the wind, intoning the Pilgrims’ Chorus. The
major mode, the triad at the beginning of the melody, the periodic construc-
tion and the chorale-like chords make for a dignified, ceremonial atmosphere.
This becomes ever more highly charged until the trombones repeat the melody
emphatically, accompanied by rapid ornaments in the violins. This is a ‘man’s
world’ to a tee, into which, however, the world of the erotic suddenly enters:
the slippery, descending chromaticism, the trills and the lack of a bass line
deprive the music of its firm foundations, and this effect is strengthened by
the diminished-seventh chords announced in the violas. In European music,
the bass usually forms the backbone upon which everything else is built.
Whereas the music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which grew out
of Gregorian chant, is based on a cantus firmus – a melody played through-
out that is embellished by instruments and/or voices – the tendency became
ever clearer after  to build up harmonies from a supporting bass line.
The decisive novelty in musical Classicism (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) was
cadence-based composition, which enabled major/minor tonality to achieve
its final breakthrough. Chords were now built upon a bass line that utilized
dissonance to create tension that is then resolved by ending in the tonic. Any
lack of bass support thus has a destabilizing impact. This is the case here, and
its disconcerting effect is heightened in Wagner’s depiction of Venus, in which
he employs unusual harmonic combinations. The aria with which Venus
intends to seduce Tannhäuser contains two tritones that convey the danger
she signifies (Example ).

Ex. 
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Wagner gives stage directions for Venus’s realm whose boldness is surpris-
ing, for he here makes evident his knowledge of female anatomy. In a grotto
that extends as far as the eye can see, there is a lake with a greenish waterfall,
under which the waves billow. Tropical foliage grows everywhere, and every-
thing is bathed in a gentle rosy light. On the stage lie young men entwined
with nymphs.
It is noteworthy that Minna did not like the musical expansion of the
Bacchanale that Wagner undertook in Paris, calling it ‘Venus shenanigans’ .
Baudelaire, on the other hand, spoke appropriately of ‘ever new onslaughts
of pleasure’ . Wagner also added an obviously exotic element to the music.
In the scene he sketched afterwards, he imposed no limits on his imagina-
tion. The depiction of the sexual act, which was at the time never spoken of
in public and was at best a source of smut in the male boudoir, is here lav-
ishly embellished. Triangle, castanets, timpani, cymbals and tambourine all
evoke an exotic sound-world. Everything turns upon the satisfaction of sexual
desire, and the sirens sing: ‘Approach the land where blessed warmth in the
arms of glowing love will still your urges!’ These unfettered, sensuous, entic-
ing sounds are furnished with extensive stage directions by Wagner. A proces-
sion of Bacchantes approaches, and their ‘gestures of enthusiastic inebriation’
urge the lovers to indulge in ‘wild pleasure’ . They throw themselves into ‘erotic
loving embraces’ . Satyrs and fauns dance in between the couples, and the
‘chaos increases to a point of the greatest intensity’ . In the midst of the ‘high-
est frenzy’ , three graces emerge, who endeavour to dampen the excitement.

Tannhäuser in the Venusberg, by Joseph Aigner

 ‘The glitter of a high-class brothel’: Tannhäuser 

They shake the sleeping Amorettes, who flutter up and from above shoot
arrows into the hurly-burly. In contrast to the pious pilgrims’ music at the
beginning, here it is women who determine the course of events.
In his first ideas for the scene, as Wagner described them to the
Wesendoncks, which were later omitted from his stage directions, this utopian
vision was mixed with scenes of fear. The wild tumult was to have seen appear-
ances by tigers, panthers and imaginary creatures, including giant birds with
human torsos, or animals that were half lion, half eagle. The graces were
to have been ‘overpowered’ by the centaurs and carried off (in other words,
raped). Here we see that Wagner’s conception of the scene was at first contra-
dictory: he wanted the charms that Venus exuded, but also the terrible fear of
the vagina dentata. When Baudelaire speaks in admiration of the ‘true, ter-
rible’ Venus, ‘dominant everywhere’ , he stresses that aspect of her being that
tends to possession. Despite the unending pleasure that she is ready to give,
she provokes fear at the same time because she threatens to ensnare men. But
Wagner did not want to see Venus damned, and Tannhäuser was not to criti-
cize her expressly. This ambivalence can also be observed in Wagner’s essay
‘On performing Tannhäuser’ , in which we learn that the singer of the Venus
in Weimar was so successful because she was unselfconscious and played her
role with warmth.
Wagner’s characterization of Venus makes her a precursor of those fan-
tasies of ineffably enticing yet repellent women developed by artists, writ-
ers and musicians particularly towards the end of the th century. In 
Lovis Corinth painted a Bacchanale that conveys both lust and fear, in which
a woman has pushed a man to the ground and places her foot on his body in a
gesture of triumph. In  Paul Cézanne had also painted a wild Bacchanale,
while Alfred-Philippe Roll painted Festival of Silen, in which the activity of the
entwined naked couples is obvious to all. Arnold Böcklin, Maximilian Lenz,
Franz von Stuck, William-Adolphe Bouguereau – the list of painters goes on
and on. The erotically enticing woman who stands outside bourgeois norms
was also a theme of numerous operas in the late th century and into the
th. From Richard Strauss’s Elektra and Salome via Samson and Delilah by
Camille Saint-Saëns down to Alban Berg’s Lulu, these characters reflect the
fears conjured up at the time by the notion of a strong, independent, sexually
potent woman.
It is not simply sexuality itself that is condemned in Tannhäuser when
Venus is rejected, but the act of being ‘swallowed up’ by one’s lover. To be
captured is, in the end, unbearable, even if it promises endless erotic fulfil-
ment. It is not that Tannhäuser has simply had his fill of the love of Venus, but
rather that he feels himself a prisoner in her realm, for she possesses ‘excessive
 Richard Wagner’s Women

enchantment’ from which he wishes to flee. For a man it is impossible to bear

being trapped in woman’s territory for a long period of time. He would prefer
to measure himself against his own kind – at the hunt, making music, fighting.
‘My yearning is for the fight, I do not seek pleasure and lust,’ cries Tannhäuser
in despair, using a typically gender-specific cliché. His song is simple and in
lied form. Venus’s part, on the other hand, has an extremely high tessitura. Her
palette of sounds creates an impression of flimmering will o’ the wisps that
ascend higher and higher. Venus tries to seduce Tannhäuser once more with
the words ‘Come, beloved, see the grotto there’ , and we hear the fascinating
sound of eight-part divisi violins and a chromatically winding melody. But she
does not succeed. Tannhäuser’s final refuge lies in religion, which he conjures
up in the form of another woman: ‘I will not find peace and calm in you! My
salvation lies in Mary!’ As Venus sinks away with a shriek, a further contrast
between Christian faith and the sinful underworld is drawn: only a saint such
as the Holy Virgin can help resist the influence of Venus.
Tannhäuser then finds himself in a lovely valley under blue skies. Cowbells
tinkle in the distance. A shepherd plays a folk-like tune on the cor anglais, its
lack of any accompaniment contrasting starkly with the sultry, passionate
sounds of the Venusberg; then he sings a naïve song in praise of the love god-
dess, Frau Holda. Here in the upper world, the sensual magic of love is gone
and the pastoral is dominant – the countryside was regarded in the th cen-
tury as the bearer of all that was healthy and genuine. A procession of pilgrims
passes by, singing. Clarinets, bassoons and horns are heard, and their deep
sonority is intensified by the entry of violas and cellos, until finally the whole
orchestra joins in, with the trombones predominant. Ceremonial chords
underline the music’s religious, ecclesiastical context, and serve to ‘ennoble’
the sound of the chorus of pious men. The Landgrave now appears, with men
in hunting outfits. There is an onstage hunting horn, plus a further nine off
stage – a large complement for such a small scene. The sounds of the hunt
are employed intentionally to underline the contrast between the two worlds.
Tannhäuser has freed himself from the sultriness of the Venusberg and has
arrived in the natural world, where a typically male activity awaits him – one
that can guarantee joy in life. The happy freedom of nature thus has masculine
connotations, whereas the suffocating underground caverns are female.
The second act opens in the Hall of Song in the Wartburg. Elisabeth enters,
excited and joyful, singing the aria ‘I greet thee again, beloved hall’ . Although
Tannhäuser is the reason for these emotions, he is not named – she projects
her happiness onto the four walls of the hall, and this in itself alerts us to
how pure and innocent she is in matters of the heart. Yet her emotions over-
come her: ‘But what a strange, new life your song has awakened in my breast!
 ‘The glitter of a high-class brothel’: Tannhäuser 

It seemed at first to be a pain that surged through me, then it pierced me like
a sudden joy. Emotions that I have never felt! A longing that I never knew!’ As
a loving woman who has erotic feelings, she is now no longer innocent, but
‘knowing’ .
The Landgrave makes a stately entrance and talks with her. His part is
mostly diatonic and conveys a sense of lordly authority. Three trumpets on the
stage announce the imminent festival, and they are followed by the ceremonial
entry of the guests in honour of the singing contest. The procession moves
along to a brilliant diatonicism, with dotted rhythms and sonorous chords, the
full sound of the strings complemented by the gentleness of the horns. ‘We
joyfully greet this noble hall’ sings the chorus of knights, and this joy is com-
municated in the music. The noble women continue the song, which provides
a certain equilibrium, given the dominance in the ensemble of the (male) sing-
ers, counts and knights.
Elisabeth is characterized by a mixture of virginal innocence and experience.
In E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella Der Kampf der Sänger (‘The battle of the sing-
ers’), which influenced Wagner, the countess Mathilde is married; but Wagner
needed a virgin. He required that the singer in the role of Elisabeth should in
performance ‘give the impression of the most youthful, most virginal inno-
cence, without any suspicion of how subtly those feminine emotions, born of
much experience, could make her able to solve the task appointed her’ . This
combination of contradictory, almost mutually exclusive characteristics – vir-
ginal and yet mature – points us towards Wagner’s ideal picture of the loving
woman, strong in love, and yet at the same time subordinate to her male part-
ner. Time and again the oboe is heard in scenes with Elisabeth, as for exam-
ple in her conversation with the Landgrave. When Wolfram describes her to
Tannhäuser as the ‘most virtuous maid’ , the oboe underlines her virtue. The
composer thereby conveys a double message: Elisabeth has deep feelings, even
sexual longings, but she retains her virtue.
Towards the end of the opera, Elisabeth’s transformation into an ‘angel’ is
praised, and she dies as an ideal Mary-type. In the final act – above all after
her suicidal prayer – she is nothing more than a chimera, a figure without any
life of her own. She serves merely to personify Tannhäuser’s ‘highest longing
for love’ . But it has been a long journey for Elisabeth to get this far – the pas-
sion she displays in her opening aria, ‘Dich, teure Halle’ , stands in contradic-
tion to her later angelic self. She understands Tannhäuser’s conflict, not just
through feelings of solidarity, but because she too knows desire. Sensual pas-
sion was at that time a taboo topic for women. A woman in the th century
was not allowed to experience lust, because this threatened to make her inde-
pendent and would in turn endanger male dominance. The fact that Elisabeth
 Richard Wagner’s Women

admits to her desire is thus a breaking of taboos, even if that desire is watered
down by being centred on one man alone. Wagner thus accepts the sexual
origins of Elisabeth’s passion and understands that it is a component part of
her being – albeit only when channelled and fixed on a single lover. When
Elisabeth learns that this man has given himself to unlicensed sexual pleasure,
she is as shocked as are the knights, but her love is so strong that she over-
comes her feelings of revulsion. She saves her lover from the threat of murder
by the knights and hopes for a pardon from the church, so that she may yet be
united with him. When the news of his rejection arrives from Rome, life has
no more purpose for her and she begs the ‘almighty virgin’ Mary to hear her
prayer. At this point, we see and hear Elisabeth’s pious side. Her earlier pas-
sion has receded into the background, and she is transformed into an ‘angelic’
being:

Let me enter into thy blessed realm, pure and angel-like,

If ever, ensnared by foolish fancies, my heart did stray from thee,
if ever a sinful longing or a worldly yearning sprang up within me,
I wrestled it amidst a thousand torments to kill it in my heart!

Her prayer is influenced by the French/Italian preghiera tradition. Wagner had

written a similar prayer in the third act of Rienzi (‘Allmächt’ger Vater, blick’
herab’ – ‘Almighty Father, look down’), though there the singer is a man. The
content of the two prayers is indebted to the usual gender-specific models:
whereas Rienzi begs to be saved and is anchored firmly in the here and now
(‘Do not yet take away the power that your miracle gave me’), Elisabeth has
given up all hope and yearns for death. Her prayer is accompanied in the
orchestra only by woodwind, and its individual lines are organized largely
symmetrically, conveying an impression of naïvety. Despite occasional chro-
maticism in the melody, which accords the character a certain individuality,
the tradition of simplicity and modesty prevails. The clarinet, bass clarinet
and bassoon accompany her lament. The first four lines all lead downwards –
a clear sign of sadness. Only in the middle section is there any movement –
when she speaks of her guilt (though there is no hint of what this could possi-
bly be). The melodic line is enriched and chromaticized by diminished-seventh
chords, the words ‘thousand pains’ are stressed by a descending octave leap,
the harmony loses its sense of stasis and the woodwind instruments flute and
oboe (both of which carry feminine connotations) join in. But this confession
of guilt sinks away in the recapitulation of the first section, so that the prayer
ends as it began: at a slow, regular tempo, clearly periodic in construction and
with transparent, tender orchestration. After Elisabeth has fallen silent, the
woodwind – instruments from the ‘feminine’ realm – play during her long exit
 ‘The glitter of a high-class brothel’: Tannhäuser 

( bars). Wolfram offers to accompany her, but she rejects his offer. According
to the stage directions, she is to make clear to him by her gestures that ‘her
path is leading her to heaven, where she has a high office to perform’ . Three
flutes ascend to a high, bright note that signifies her spiritual ascent. Oboes
and clarinets join them, then the bassoon. The long-held, organ-like chords
create a feeling of devoutness and solemnity. The slinking descent of the mel-
ody, the reduced accompaniment, the dark, strange sound of the bass clarinet,
the simple rhythm, devoid of tension, the emphatic accentuation of pain and
suffering by means of high notes – all these depict a woman who, here on
earth, thinks of nothing but her lover and is ready to die for him. Here we
find another example of how Wagner unfolds his musical material in conjunc-
tion with his dramatic and character-specific ideas.
Elisabeth’s contradictory aspects cannot be resolved by the juxtapositions
in her musical characterization – namely, the fact that she is supposed to be
a woman with sensual experience and yet at the same time a pure, angelic girl,
who is by nature devoid of any such experience. We find a similar ambivalence
in Wagner’s reaction to the Madonna by Carlo Dolci (–), of which he
saw a copy in the city church of Aussig, while working on the prose sketch
of Tannhäuser. It had a decisive impact on his image of Elisabeth. The pic-
ture delighted him, and ‘if Tannhäuser had seen it, I could fully understand
how it came about that he turned away from Venus to Mary, despite not being
particularly enamoured of piety. In any case, now the holy Elisabeth stands
clearly before me.’ The Madonna, with her slightly bowed head and down-
ward glance, comes across as modest, but not devoid of sensuality. Wagner
imagined his Elisabeth as an incarnation of religious love, yet she could not
be a saint, for Tannhäuser could hardly fall in love with someone who was
untouchable. In contrast to the sexually active, experienced Venus, however,
she remains unawakened, inexperienced and childlike. That could hardly
result in a satisfying character portrait of a woman, let alone a realistic one.
In the Wagner literature, we find time and again the claim that Elisabeth’s
is not a ‘fractured’ character. Compared with Tannhäuser’s own vacillations
between two different women, that may well be true. But a woman who is
supposed to be transformed into a ‘pure angel’ would hardly be allowed an
element of sexual desire if she possessed a unified character. If one takes
Elisabeth’s undivided concern for Tannhäuser alone as proof of the consist-
ency of her character, then one merely views the plot unquestioningly from
Tannhäuser’s perspective. But if one takes Elisabeth’s point of view, then
Wagner’s idealization of her suicidal wishes cannot be convincing. She
thereby loses what actually makes her alive. She becomes unreal, an artificially
created male fantasy. The fact that she turns to Mary is no mere happenstance.
 Richard Wagner’s Women

As Ida Magli has realized, the figure of Mary ‘is not enclosed in the psychotic
circle of theological historicity and so gives the artist room to play with
creations of pure imagination’ .
Although the character of Elisabeth remains ambivalent, the well-known
dichotomies of the time also dominate her music, namely spirit/body, mind/
feeling, culture/nature, and thus also man/woman. When Wolfram sings to
the evening star, his song’s solemn, sad momentum is directed towards the
good, untouched woman. Although Wagner commentators like to remind us
that the evening star is Venus, his expansive, descending, chromatic melody
signifies sadness rather than sensuousness. Above it all there hovers an impres-
sion of ‘decency’: regardless of his love, Wolfram keeps a certain distance; he
refrains from slipping into dangerous waters and remains noble and dignified.
While it is often assumed that the knights are bound by a brittle dogmatism,
this does not correspond to the music we hear, which is positive in its con-
notations and depicts the knights of the Wartburg as an honourable band. The
contrast of hunting party and pilgrim band presents us with two sides of male
activity, namely physical exertion and spiritual contemplation. Everything that
is actively feminine is confined to the sinful, fear-inducing underworld, while
feminine passivity comes across as pure and noble. Whereas Tannhäuser is
depicted as an active figure, who takes the necessary steps to achieve matu-
rity, Elisabeth remains static and seems almost unalive: she is characterized
by emotions that she does not live out, by an uncompromising submission to
fate and by a yearning for death. What can Tannhäuser expect from such a
woman? Many interpretations of the opera completely ignore the role of the
women in it. In an otherwise excellent article, Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich deals
only with Elisabeth’s death: ‘What the loving woman could not give him …
the dead woman can: heavenly peace, redemption.’ But what would Wagner
want to convey to the audience if that were his message? No bourgeois man
could seriously wish for the death of his wife. Nor would a dead lover afford
any prospect of fulfilment of desire to the creative artist. Death is rather to
be understood here (as also in the case of Senta) in a more symbolic fashion –
as the ultimate sign of unshakeable fidelity. That is why Wagner was keen to
stress the importance of Elisabeth’s role; in his revised version of the opera he
even decided to show her coffin on stage. The dead woman was to be visible
to the audience so that the sacrifice she has made will be even more evident. It
was not her death that was the central point for him, but the ability of woman
to love her lover more than herself. And it is her sacrifice that brings about
Tannhäuser’s redemption: ‘It was precisely this that I wanted to stress clearly
with the new ending, namely that Tannhäuser is redeemed not by a church
that declares itself impotent, but by the boundless love of a woman (despite
 ‘The glitter of a high-class brothel’: Tannhäuser 

the church). The staff that grows green leaves comes only from the sacrifi-
cial death of Elisabeth: it disavows the church.’ So Tannhäuser is moved to
repentance not by the knights’ disgust, but solely through the pain of Elisabeth.
Her fidelity to him, beyond death itself, is able to free him from his inner tur-
moil and to redeem him – just as we have seen in Der fliegende Holländer.
Wagner reshaped the end of the plot and discarded the usual configura-
tion, in which Tannhäuser chooses Venus. Instead, Elisabeth’s sacrifice for
Tannhäuser’s redemption is placed at the centre of things. The goddess of love
is Venus; the God of love leads Tannhäuser to Elisabeth – here the world of the
spirit reigns. The women once again draw the short straw within the cultural–
moral order. But before her transformation into an angelic being, Elisabeth is
indeed a woman of flesh and blood who is able to desire a man. That, at least,
offers a ray of hope that Wagner was not wholly dependent on culturally fixed
images, but was able to break through them, if only hesitantly. This is the good
news. The bad news is that this breakthrough is not borne along by Wagner’s
music: by remaining fixed on specific gender aspects in the musical depiction
of his characters, Wagner thwarts the possibility of a new evaluation of this
work.
Chapter 
‘Take all that I am!’: Lohengrin

‘I ’   enough here, for sketches to a new opera are
constantly buzzing around in my head, to the extent that I need all my
strength to wrest myself from them.’ It was  July ; Richard was spending
a few weeks in Marienbad with Minna, but their recuperation was constantly
interrupted by his ideas for a new opera. Just nine days later he was able to
announce the completion of the prose sketch of Lohengrin. Between May and
June  he worked on the first sketch for the music, followed by the second
draft; the score was finished in early . He comes across as a man driven, as
someone with a personal need, even a compulsion, to deal with this topic and
to complete the work.
According to Wagner, it would be a mistake to believe that this opera is
about a god who shies away from earthly conflict and returns to his godly
splendour. Lohengrin’s problem is ‘the expression of his necessary inner being,
of the man in superb loneliness, yearning for understanding through love’ .
He is thus cast as a man who makes strong demands on his lover. Wagner
wrote to his friend August Röckel that Lohengrin ‘depicts the most tragic situ-
ation of our present day, namely the yearning to leave the spiritual heights for
the depths of love, the yearning to be filled by emotion, a yearning that mod-
ern reality cannot yet fulfil’ . He stresses that he sees himself in the figure of
Lohengrin and thus sketches his own needs in the character of his protagonist.
Once again, the autobiographical aspect means that he does not historicize
Lohengrin, but stresses his significance for modern man. Lohengrin ‘could
only arise from the mood and attitude of an artistic man in our time and no
other, and with no other relationship to art and life than was the case in my
own individual, characteristic circumstances. And [Lohengrin] developed to
that point where this topic seemed compelling for my characters.’ On the other
hand, he wrote to his brother (whose daughter Johanna was supposed to sing
Elsa) that Elsa was ‘very significant and really the main role’ . This empha-
sis on her importance shows once again how concerned he was not just with
achieving general recognition for his art but also with the question of finding
an ideal partner.
In , when he was busy with the theme of Lohengrin, Wagner was still
living in Dresden, where he had enjoyed a spectacular success with Rienzi.
Apart from constant money worries, he was doing rather well, and he wrote
of his ‘extravagantly happy mood’ . His partnership with Minna had suffered in
the hard, hungry period in Paris, but his letters to her nevertheless now exude
 ‘Take all that I am!’: Lohengrin 

much of the affection of their earlier years, especially when he was far off and
lonely. Domestic life à deux meant much to him and was a prerequisite for his
composing. ‘My homesickness is as great as it can be,’ he wrote to her from
Berlin,

but my home is you and our little household; I know nothing in the
world that could compensate for it! … no, my ambition doesn’t stretch
so far; a lovely homeland for the heart is more important to me than
anything! Well, my good child, now we’ve been apart longer than we
ever have before? Thanks be to God it’s at an end!

But beneath the surface, conflict brewed. Minna was not prepared to suffer
anything like that Parisian misery again; she could not. She had neither the
physical nor the mental strength for it any longer. Her husband still begged
his close family and friends for money, and she found this oppressive. She pre-
sumably made him repeatedly aware of her worries. Minna was always con-
cerned to be a good wife and housewife. Whenever they moved apartment,
she sold old furniture and procured new. She had become a master of coping
in the household: she cooked well, and made her husband’s clothes to meas-
ure, according to his taste. And she liked to listen when he spoke of his new
projects. But the thing he yearned for was the thing she could not give: pas-
sionate advocacy for him and his work, such as he later found in Mathilde
Wesendonck, Cosima von Bülow and Judith Gautier. His feminine ideal strad-
dled the sinful and the pure woman. Wagner imagined a lover who would
satisfy his needs for sympathy, for motherly care and for eroticism, and who
would stand by him unquestioningly despite all his whims and crises. Above
all, she would have to understand herself as a complement to his masculine
existence, not as an independent subject.
It is not a matter of chance that it was in the s, when he was struggling
with the burden of his uncongenial career as an opera Kapellmeister and at the
same time coping with marital conflict, that Wagner sketched the scenarios
for all the operas that would follow Tannhäuser. Elsa, Elisabeth, Eva and later
Brünnhilde – in all these characters there shines through the ideal image of a
woman who exists only for man, be he her husband, brother or father. In the
contrasting female characters of Venus and Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, Wagner
had covered the whole spectrum of love, from the erotic and sensual to that
determined by the spiritual. In his imagination, the sensual realm of love
existed primarily in the dark; the untouched and pure, on the other hand, was
situated in bright, airy heights.
Wagner’s starting point was the static notion of a biologically determined
difference between the sexes. Since this image of woman meant so much to
 Richard Wagner’s Women

him, he tried to place himself in Elsa’s shoes. In this way, he succeeded, amid
much personal emotion, in understanding ‘the purely human nature of love’ ,
as he wrote in his Communication to my Friends. He goes on:

This woman … this wonderful woman … now I had discovered her, and
the lost arrow that I shot towards this noble booty – a booty vaguely
perceived but not yet understood – was my Lohengrin, whom I had to
give up for lost in order to find the truly feminine that would bring me
and all the world redemption. This would be after male egoism, albeit in
its most noble form, had broken before it in an act of self-destruction.

Wagner sees man as a failure, for his egoism has ruined him. That is why he
needs a woman who is ready to give up her whole life for her man. And then
comes a sentence that one can only interpret as conscious mystification: ‘Elsa,
woman – this woman whom I had hitherto misunderstood but now hence-
forth could indeed, for she was a necessary expression of the purest sensual
instinct – she made me into a complete revolutionary. She was the spirit of the
people that I, also as an artist, yearned for to redeem me’ .
We must suppose that Wagner’s mention of ‘sensuous instinct’ refers to
Elsa’s natural intuition, to her ability to love completely, to unite with her part-
ner quite naturally because it is, indeed, her ‘nature’ to do so; and it is her
nature because she does not think, but relies on her emotions. When Wagner
wrote this in  he had just put his affair with Jessie Laussot in Bordeaux
behind him. It is a description of how Jessie had acted at first, until her hus-
band and her mother hindered her elopement with Wagner: impulsively, act-
ing upon the immediate sentiments of her heart, ready to accompany this
important yet penniless artist to a foreign land and to accept any scandal for
his sake. The ‘natural’ and the ‘people’ unite in the figure of Elsa: she is ready to
give up her ducal power to her lover, just as the people voluntarily and uncon-
ditionally subordinate themselves to a ‘good’ leader.
The composer himself wrote programme notes to Lohengrin for a concert of
excerpts from his operas, organized by the Zürich Music Society in  with
much financial help from the Wesendoncks. They offer a remarkable inter-
pretation of the prelude to Lohengrin. According to Wagner, this music – in
which the violins are divided into eight parts – depicts the Holy Grail descend-
ing to earth, accompanied by a band of angels. However, Wagner’s descrip-
tion is not objective, but uses a language that is irritatingly sensuous. Words
and phrases such as ‘verzückt’ (‘ecstatic’), ‘berauschend’ (‘intoxicating’), ‘süsse
Düfte’ (‘sweet scents’), ‘bebendes Herz’ (‘throbbing heart’), ‘wonniger Schmerz’
(‘lovely pain’) and ‘Hingebungsdrang’ (‘the urge to give oneself ’) belong to the
vocabulary of the sensuous, as do the phallically charged ‘schwellen’ , ‘zucken’
 ‘Take all that I am!’: Lohengrin 

and ‘erbeben’ (‘to swell’ , ‘to twitch’ , ‘to shudder’). Was Wagner aware of the
associations that his text conjures up? We must assume so, for he had often
enough proclaimed language as the bearer of emotion and argued in favour
of its conscious use in his works. These programmatic lines were probably
a kind of safety valve for him, for they contain a hidden message to Mathilde
Wesendonck, with whom he was in love at the time. The prelude is described
in the literature as a manifestation of heavenly, spiritual purity, which is how
Wagner intended it. But this does not explain the double-entendres in his
vocabulary. If one considers that the prelude’s motifs return later – notably in
Elsa’s description of her dream vision of the approaching knight – and, further,
that Lohengrin is supposed to be understood not as godly, but as a ‘warm, feel-
ing man’ , then one can no longer deny the erotic element in the prelude.
These tender passages stand in stark contrast to the ensuing scene of the
army, in which pompous, massive sounds convey an impression of demon-
strative strength and healthy self-consciousness. The entrance of the king and
the herald is celebrated in expansive terms: power and politics reign supreme.
At the same time, these representatives of the society keep watch over the
relationship between the power of authority and those subordinate to it. The
whole reigning, patriarchal order is thus depicted not only as legitimate but
essentially as a natural given.
Four trumpeters of the king blow a festive fanfare, the herald announces the
arrival of King Heinrich, and the male chorus breaks into appropriate jubila-
tion. Tension is built up by means of dotted notes, the use of the major mode
and triplets in the brass; expression markings such as ‘solemn’ and ‘lively’
serve to drive the action onwards. For Egon Voss, the scenes with the king and
the herald ‘offer a secure, formal framework and are the backbone, the scaf-
folding on which the opera is constructed’ . Kurt Overhoff, on the other hand,
finds their music ‘noisy, brassy and as pathetic as it is devoid of content’ . But
it would be doing Wagner a disservice to decry this loud, powerful world as
inwardly hollow. For the demonstratively martial aspect, which we found so
markedly in Rienzi, exerted a strong fascination on him throughout his life.
The sound of fanfares always has a positive connotation in Wagner. Despite
all his revolutionary doings, he remained at heart a royalist, unable to imagine
any society without a male head of state. When he was busy with Lohengrin
he was also occupied with demands to abolish the privileges of the nobility –
without, however, ceasing to support the notion of the King of Saxony as head
of state. ‘Now it is time to maintain the honour of the empire; whether east
or west, the same must be valid for all! Wherever German lands may be, may
they offer armies to fight, and no one will again defame the German Empire!’
cries King Heinrich at the beginning of the first act. The German nationalist
 Richard Wagner’s Women

element that is evident in the song of the soldiers and in the manner of the
king’s appearance is thus affirmed. The male chorus sounds brusque and
powerful, and Wagner leads the melodic line downwards at ‘the rage of the
Hungarians’ and ‘shame’ in order to emphasize their negative connotations.
At ‘threats’ , the king sings a descending tritone. By way of contrast, the words
‘German lands’ and ‘German Empire’ shine out in diatonicism with whole-tone
steps, and the melody leads to a triumphant climax with the crowning phrase
‘Take courage with God for the honour of the German Empire!’ In this com-
prehensive act of homage to the king and his army, its massed wind instru-
ments and military attributes, we find not only political implications but also
an act of homage to masculine power. The people who make up the chorus are
only reactive, never active. They comment and acclaim, but their undisputed
master is the king. Whereas Lohengrin is Elsa’s figure of authority, the king
leads his people. The result is an intact world view, depicted in music.
Elsa never pushes herself into the foreground but remains at the back, even
when the king asks for her. When she finally has to come forward, she does so
– according to the directions in the score – ‘very slowly and greatly ashamed’ ,
though there is nothing for her to be ashamed of. The women who accom-
pany her are also characterized by modesty and reserve. The costumes stipu-
lated by Wagner’s stage directions are of a virginal white, signifying that Elsa
is untouched by any sin. Wagner chose a bright flute sound to emphasize her
tenderness and purity. Carl Maria von Weber, Wagner’s great model, pointed
out that the sound of the flute conveyed ‘clarity and loveliness’ , which ‘can
awaken the feeling … of innocence preserved’ . The flute is supported here by
filigree work in the other woodwind. The contrast between this and the male
world of the counts, nobles and soldiers is portrayed effectively in the music.
The king’s questions are interrupted by many rests, which slow every-
thing down. When he orders Elsa to defend herself before the court, her
expression changes (according to the stage directions) from one of ‘dreamy
absence’ to ‘ecstatic transfiguration’ (surely not an easy thing to achieve), and
we hear arpeggios on the harp. These refer to the knight whom Elsa has seen.
His imminent arrival is also announced by the silvery, glittery sounds of the
violins, divided into four parts. Finally, Elsa speaks and straight away offers
proof that she is a good and godly girl: ‘Lonely, in dark days, I prayed to God …’
Here, the sound colours chosen by the composer are those that commonly
signify a virgin. Elsa’s simple, periodic four-bar phrases are commented upon
winsomely by the woodwind. The world that is revealed to us here is narrow
and easily comprehensible. The second part of Elsa’s monologue begins with
reminiscences from the overture. When she speaks of Lohengrin (‘He shall
be my knight!’) her diction changes, her vocal line is given dotted rhythms
 ‘Take all that I am!’: Lohengrin 

and it suddenly comes alive. She describes how he appeared to her, leaning
on his sword, which is conveyed by an octave leap and an ascending, dotted
note. An enharmonic shift allows her to reach Lohengrin’s tonality of A major,
which signifies that in her thoughts she is as one with him. When Lohengrin
himself appears, his entrance is ennobled by the use of the trumpet (the typi-
cal ‘attribute of leaders and heroes’). These contrasts do not simply depict
fleeting moods, rather they assume the function of portraying character, using
typical musical means to denote the different genders.
Elsa’s part, said Wagner, should be ‘the most charming [reizend] and the
most touching in the world’ . ‘Reizend’ is an attribute generally applied to
young, pretty, innocent, smiling girls. It would rarely be applied to a young
man – for him there are other descriptive words such as ‘gallant’ , ‘decent’ and
so forth. Wagner writes of the soprano Köster, who was intended for the role,
that she had ‘something very virginal, feminine … and a gracious [anmuthig]
magic in her voice’ . When Elsa sings at the beginning of her third-act duet
with Lohengrin, Wagner describes her song as ‘German, without passion, but
intimate [innig] and warm’ . The concepts of ‘innig’ , ‘warm’ , ‘reizend’ and
‘anmuthig’ represent the feminine, as does the notion that a ‘pure’ woman is
devoid of passion and would thus never experience sexual desire. This ideal
feminine is a child of her time – a model woman created in the interest of
bourgeois society, who leaves the harsh world of work to her husband and
creates a warm refuge for him in the home.
Many middle-class women in the th century rebelled against the predeter-
mined notion of being just such ‘charming’ creatures. They protested against
their second-class status before the law and in society, while doctors, natural
scientists and philosophers countered their demands by insisting that there
was a ‘natural’ pecking order of the sexes. Many men felt insecure because
they believed a woman who achieved equal rights might lose her ability to
love and to sacrifice herself. Two years before Richard’s death, he went walk-
ing with Cosima in the Hofgarten in Bayreuth, and the two of them spoke of
a portrait of Louise Michel that they had seen in the Illustrierte Zeitung. This
passionate advocate of the Paris Commune had fought on the barricades in
the name of liberty and equality, had been tried in  and sentenced to life
imprisonment and deportation. She was shipped to New Caledonia in 
and remained there for more than six years. She returned home in  and
in November of that year gave her first public speech: ‘It is the people who
will free us from the men who have corrupted us, and the people will itself
win its freedom’ . The portrait of this woman appeared bitter and unfemi-
nine to both Richard and Cosima, and the former remarked: ‘This is what
women become: when men go under, heroism seeks a refuge in them.’ This
 Richard Wagner’s Women

is hardly a positive image of woman; and he continued: ‘But it’s ghastly; if

she were witty one might expect mercy from her, but not from someone so
humourless.’
What is noteworthy here is the word ‘grauenhaft’ – ‘ghastly’ – which Wagner
also used in connection with Ortrud. He wrote to his friend Franz Liszt about
her thus:

Politics are her essence. A political man is repulsive, but a political

woman is ghastly. This ghastliness is what I had to portray. Her ‘love’
can only express itself as hatred for everything living, everything that
actually exists. In a man, such love would be laughable, but in a woman
it is terrible because she, with her naturally strong need for love, has to
love something. Her pride in her forebears, her tendency to hang on
things past, this all becomes a murderous fanaticism. In the whole of
history we know no one crueller than the political woman […] her pas-
sion grips her with the full weight of a misguided, undeveloped, object-
less feminine need for love, and for this reason she is terribly grand.
Nothing petty at all may appear in her portrayal; she may never appear
malicious or annoyed; her every expression of mockery, of deviousness
has to let us perceive the whole violence of her terrible madness that
can only be stilled by the destruction of others – or even by her own
self-destruction.

If the ‘natural growth’ of the woman’s ‘need for love’ is thwarted or injured,
for whatever reason, then the result is a monster that cannot but be terrifying.
As we know, Wagner was thoroughly attracted to intellectually demanding
women – his second wife, Cosima, belonged to their number, and a few years
before his death he fell in love with the writer Judith Gautier (though one must
add that both these women admired him unreservedly). But a woman who
went her own way could in his opinion no longer love selflessly.
Ortrud is thus more dangerous than Venus. The latter endangers man
because she threatens to drag him down into the swamp of sensuousness. But
Ortrud is a woman whose actions are murderously fanatical. Richard became
furious when his partner acted independently in even the smallest things.
Cosima often mentions bad moods whenever she wanted to do something
without Richard – going shopping, a little journey, even a visit to her father.
Every hint of independence disturbed and worried him. Since he had him-
self created the power-conscious Ortrud – though based on the character of
Matabrune (from the medieval tale The Knight of the Swan), she is otherwise
Wagner’s own, free creation – he formed her according to his own notions of a
 ‘Take all that I am!’: Lohengrin 

mythical figure of evil. It was less her old, heathen, anti-Christian magic arts
that Wagner held against her, than her urge to power.
According to the singer Amalie Materna, who sang the role in Vienna in
, Wagner described Ortrud as a proud woman who becomes a devil only
when she calls upon the gods to help her find revenge. She leads an insidi-
ous fight against Lohengrin, the representative of the good. That is why the
music mobilizes its affects against her. She is characterized by the repeated
use of a descending diminished-seventh chord (which dominates her theme,
both in melody and accompaniment) and by string tremolandi, muted brass
and the lowest instruments (cellos and double basses). The dark colouration
of her music also marks her as an outsider, for Lohengrin’s sphere is portrayed
in the prelude by an ethereal A major that possesses a brilliant brightness.
Ortrud, on the other hand, lives in a world of lies and perfidy. Her evil doings
are marked by large leaps and fragmented rhythms. This malevolent atmos-
pheric effect unites Ortrud with other complete outsiders, possessing similarly
negative attributes, that we find in Wagner’s later operas – Mime, Alberich
and Klingsor. Thus a conscious contrast is created between the godly man and
his opponent, who possesses evil magic powers. We are reminded here of the
witch hunts of the Middle Ages, when women were accused of entering into
pacts with the devil. In the second act, what is striking is the extremely high
pitch of her cry and her laughter (‘God’s power? Ha, ha!’), as well as a sud-
den descent of almost two octaves. The small steps of a second are reduced
still further, resulting in chromaticism. At the words ‘power’ and ‘weak god’ ,
Wagner writes a tritone in the melody. All these means (whose effectiveness
can be traced far back in music history and which reach forwards into the
modern feature film), together with the rhythmic fragmentation of Ortrud’s
line, convey a sense of evil and hectic excitement. She mocks societal hierar-
chies and even God himself; and she thereby lays claim to things to which she
has no right – certainly not as a woman.
Ortrud remains a successor of the evil, raging women found in operas of
the th and th centuries, from Mozart’s Electra and his Queen of Night to
Weber’s Eglantine. The difference between Elsa’s tender nature and the world
of Ortrud, which is dominated by the distant key of F# minor, is portrayed
by the use of chromaticism and the minor mode for Ortrud, then diatoni-
cism and the major for Elsa. But this sense of difference also permeates the
score, right down to the smallest nuances – as, for example, in the second
act, when Elsa appears on the balcony. Whereas a full orchestral sound has
just accompanied the dialogue of Ortrud and Telramund, the song of the pure,
virginal Elsa is set off by gentle woodwind chords. And another example: when
Ortrud cries ‘Elsa!’ , this is characterized by an ornamental, sighing suspension;
 Richard Wagner’s Women

but when Elsa cries ‘Ortrud!’ , a tritone sounds (the ‘devil’s interval’). The
contrast in temperament could not be greater between the two women. Elsa’s
concerns are the heart, love, happiness, faith, joy and fidelity, whereas Ortrud
is concerned with pride, deceit, battles and weapons.
When Ortrud stalks Elsa in order to plant in her mind a seed of doubt
regarding Lohengrin’s purity, Elsa enthuses about the ‘joy of the purest fidelity’ ,
with a tender oboe accompanying her periodic melody, a passage that is one
of the loveliest in the whole opera. ‘This encounter must break hearts’ , said
Wagner of this particular scene. We sense how important this no-holds-
barred, womanly devotion must have been to him, for Elsa’s virtue and purity
inspired him to the most beautiful sounds. Her doubts would thus brand her
all the more negatively. Wagner was twice asked if it was not too horrible to
let Elsa die; and each time he pondered long whether or not he might ‘save’ her.
But he remained firm. ‘The atonement for Elsa’s behaviour can only reside in
her punishment, and such behaviour could rarely bring upon it a more con-
sistent, essential punishment than is expressed here in her separation.’ He
thus affirmed his adherence to the cultural conventions of his time, which
demanded the punishment of a woman who overstepped the boundaries of
passivity set down for her by bourgeois society.
The differences between Elsa and Lohengrin are also well defined. Lohengrin,
a brilliant figure in his glittery armour, is presented to us as a hero in the tra-
ditionally ‘noble’ key of A major. He may be made of flesh and blood – for he
desires Elsa – yet he is at one and the same time a godly being from a better
world. Elsa, on the other hand, may be pure and full of readiness to love, but
she still lets herself be influenced by evil powers. Her ‘female’ weakness leads
to misfortune and in the end to her death. But Wagner’s portrayal of her is
by no means undifferentiated, for Elsa does not trust her shiny hero without
reservation.
Elsa’s gnawing doubts are depicted masterfully. At first they only gradually
take hold of her, but they end in a kind of hysteria. The love duet is marked by
inequality, for here Elsa enters into a union with a man of whom she knows
nothing but who demands her complete trust. He, on the other hand, knows
her situation precisely. She abases herself before him and says that when she
first saw him she wanted to ‘melt’ at his glance, and ‘desired to bow before the
tread of [his] feet’ like a flower. There is no balance of power between a boot
and a flower! When she begins to question him, Lohengrin conjures up the
sweet scents of nature and compares its magic with her own. But this com-
parison functions only in one direction. Elsa, by contrast, gets no closer to
Lohengrin. ‘Oh, if only I could appear worthy of you,’ she sighs. She wants to
break through the distance between them, she wants to be there for him, to
 ‘Take all that I am!’: Lohengrin 

help him and stand by him, and she begs him to grant her the trust that he
cannot give. At this, Lohengrin asserts his authority. Accompanied by triplets
on the trombones and horns, he admonishes her strictly:

You have already to thank me with the highest confidence,

For I gladly believed the oath you made;
If you never falter before this commandment,
I shall value you above all other women!

But he misunderstands her, for her purpose was to prove something to him,
whereas his starting point is always himself. In her ensuing passages we often
find descending minor thirds – a sign of the loss of trust that Elsa feels on
account of her husband’s silence. This negativity remains with her, for she is
the one who brings about disquiet, questioning, and finally the destruction of
their love. And for this she must be depicted musically in a correspondingly
bleak manner.
Thus in Lohengrin, too, it is clear how closely Wagner’s success as an art-
ist was connected to his personal circumstances, which, ideally, he wanted
to be filled with love. He felt alone on his artistic path, and in this opera he
developed a parable of the artist who needs unconditional trust. Hans Mayer
expressed a similar notion. For him, Lohengrin was ‘the miracle of a lonely
artist in a rationalized, sceptical, art-unfriendly environment’ . But with his
concentration on the creative activity of the artist, Mayer downplays the role
of Elsa. He sees only society, and ignores the immediate environment of the
artist, who sits at home in his study and is in need of approval, attention and
motherly concern – as he is of erotic passion. This is the precondition for later
societal recognition. Lohengrin is thus a symbol for the male artist per se, who
places his artistic work above everything and demands of his environment –
and his female partner – what brings life and happiness. Wagner himself
confirmed this, for in Elsa he saw the spirit of the people whom he, the artist,
needed for his redemption, as described above. The people, the environment
and Elsa as lover all merge as a symbol of his desire to be able to complete
his work without money worries and without marital strife, but instead loved
and respected. This desire obsessed him down to the building of Wahnfried in
Bayreuth. There he finally found fulfilment in the bosom of a family, and also
enjoyed public acceptance of his work. When he writes that his protagonist
Lohengrin sees in Elsa ‘the other part of his own being’ , and when he says
that she is ‘that which is unconscious and instinctive with which Lohengrin –
who in his being is conscious and full of intent – yearns to merge’ , he hardly
implies equality of the sexes, but is driven by the notion that the woman must
support her man.
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Elsa is supposed to love Lohengrin for what he is. In his Communication to

my Friends, Wagner several times mentions that Lohengrin seeks not admira-
tion but love. He ‘is searching for the woman that would believe in him, that
would not ask who he is and where he comes from, but would love him as he
is … the woman to whom he would not have to explain anything or justify
anything, but who would love him unreservedly’ . Elsa’s curiosity, which leads
to the destruction of their relationship at the end of the opera, has its origins
for Wagner in the purity of her love for Lohengrin. He thus frees her from
any moral guilt, for she asks her lover insistently about his origins precisely
because she loves him so much and wants to know everything about him.
But how is this to be realized? Does Wagner really expect Lohengrin’s lover
to trust him unreservedly, to follow him everywhere, to understand him
in everything he does, even though she does not know him? Here, Wagner
betrays his one-sided conception of love. The man has to be the object of static,
constant emotions on the part of the woman, without question or caveat. He
does not stop for a moment to consider that she has a right to know the man
to whom she gives her love. Lohengrin is a member of a male order, he is legit-
imized by godly authority and thus has the right to make demands on his wife.
Given this bias, one could go so far as to place all the blame for the outcome
on Lohengrin, as does Gottfried Wagner. For him, Lohengrin ‘is frozen in the
role of the Holy Grail’s dehumanized executor of redemption. He is not capa-
ble of recognizing that both the Grail order and he himself are inhuman, nor
can he free himself from this by the love of Elsa. Lohengrin becomes guilty
of Elsa’s suicide.’ The love duet seems to establish equality in musical terms,
but since the composer sees masculine authority as bound to womanly fidel-
ity, from the outset he determines quite different power relations. As Adorno
writes, the ‘woman’s submission in marriage’ is here ‘clothed as modesty, and
as an achievement of pure love’ . He interprets as female masochism Elsa’s
acquiescence in her husband’s insistence that she should never ask him any
questions: ‘The man, who outside “fights” for the couple’s livelihood, becomes
the hero, just as innumerable women after Wagner wanted to portray their
husband as a Lohengrin.’ But by mocking woman’s submissiveness, Adorno
merely confirms the inadequacy of his otherwise deft powers of analysis.
Elsa sees herself as a part of Lohengrin and thus, when he leaves, her life has
no purpose any longer. Lohengrin returns to his Grail; he may be deeply sad,
but he remains inwardly undamaged. Elsa, however, dies when he leaves her.
Their love scenes are of a moving beauty, which makes all the more tragic the
loss that results from Elsa’s action. ‘The loving, faithful woman Elsa had to die,
because the living Elsa had to ask him questions. And all the scenic majesty
and all the brilliance of the music seems to build itself up in order to place the
 ‘Take all that I am!’: Lohengrin 

spotlight on the only thing of value in that one person’s heart,’ wrote Cosima
Wagner. She thereby places Elsa’s capacity to love in the foreground. This
capacity to love is stronger than all norms and conventions, and turns Elsa
into an idealized figure, which corresponds exactly to Wagner’s intentions.
After Senta and Elisabeth, he here created yet another monument to woman’s
unreserved love. The subtext – that it is an evil thing not to believe in your
man – nevertheless infuses this idealization and appears as a constant warn-
ing in the background.
Chapter 
Sexual Promise and the Womanly Redeemer:
Tristan und Isolde
Child! This Tristan is going to be something terrible!
This last act!!! – –
I fear that the opera will be banned – assuming that a bad perform-
ance doesn’t turn the whole thing into a parody – –: only mediocre
performances can save me! Completely good ones would make the
people crazy, – I can’t think it could be otherwise. That’s how far it’s
had to come with me!! O woe! 

W   Wagner have meant when he sent Mathilde Wesendonck this
note while writing Tristan und Isolde? It is usually assumed that he was
referring to the modernity of the work’s musical language. But if one consid-
ers the reason he gave for composing the opera – ‘my yearning to lose myself
in a sea of love, away from my miserable life’ – then it is wholly possible that
he had in mind the opera’s erotic subtext, and that Mathilde, to whom he con-
fessed these reservations, was party to it. She knew that she was his ‘Isolde’
and that he wanted to recreate his passion for her in his art. Thomas Mann
recognized the explosive power of this letter – he writes of an ‘un-Buddhist
note, full of fantastic, terrified laughter over the crazy loucheness of what he
was doing’ . Cosima, furthermore, records Wagner as having said later that
‘The poor child would be shocked if she knew what lies in Tristan.’ This does
not have to be a contradiction in terms. All the sources seem to confirm
that the relationship between Mathilde and Richard was not consummated,
though the desire for it existed on both sides. They even swore abstinence
towards their spouses, though neither kept to the vow. Mathilde knew that
she was the object of this yearning for love – which in itself was sensational
enough – but Wagner would presumably not have gone so far as to confess to
her that the music of Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’ comes close to a depiction of orgasm.
The reception of the opera makes it evident that the music’s sensual content
and its concomitant break with bourgeois taboos was audible to its first audi-
ences. As early as  the Berner Intelligenzblatt wrote with indignation that
‘the libretto is so immoral that one will hardly be able to allow decent ladies to
open its pages’ . Thomas Mann found the opera ‘thoroughly indecent’ , and
added that ‘Nietzsche uses for it the expression “ecstasy of hell” in his Ecce
homo’ . Filippo Tommaso Marinetti writes: ‘Tristan and Isolde, … delay their
orgasm in order to excite King Marke. Counting the drops of love. A miniature
 Sexual Promise and the Womanly Redeemer: Tristan und Isolde 

of sexual quality. Fears. Winding candy floss of desire. Lust outdoors. Delirium
tremens. Drunken hands and feet. Pretend coitus for the cinematograph. A
masturbating waltz. Bah!’ The composer Franz Schreker wrote of the ‘sweet
poison of Tristan’s chromaticism’ . After one performance of Tristan, the
writer and drama critic Julius Bab ran around the whole night ‘in open shock’
and ‘for weeks, whenever one of these incomparable, misty, poison-sweet mel-
odies went through my brain, I was overcome by a fit of rage that was wholly
irrational, almost physical and yet entered into the deepest, most personal
reaches of my soul’ . He was ‘disgusted by the raw sexuality of this Tristan
opera’ . Paul Bekker was of the opinion that ‘the animalistic urge to nature,
woman, love has here found its goal. Transfiguration becomes an orgy, one’s
imagination is assailed by the demonic freedom of desire unchained.’ Heinrich
Dorn called the whole opera ‘a perfect example of harmonic monstrosities’ , its
harmonic combinations being ‘the cast-offs of what one imagines late at night.
The whole fabric is artificial, not artistic, cleaned and stitched up here and
there,’ while the text was for him ‘blather and blabber’ . Bryan Magee believes
that there is ‘[no] more erotic work in the whole of great art’ .
While some found Tristan obscene, others have described it in vaguer terms
as an attack on bourgeois morality. Perhaps it was her opposition to the New
German School that led Brahms’s confidante Elisabet von Herzogenberg to
write that it was ‘one of the most evil influences of Wagner that he expunged
lovely, fresh, naïve sensuality from the world and in its place brought a sultry,
heavy melancholy of a fatal kind that always smells of death-wish. It always
prompts the audience into a kind of bad conscience, as if they were commit-
ting an indiscretion by being there!’ The English singer and composer Liza
Lehmann expressed her discomfort thus after a visit to the Bayreuth Festival:

I am bound to confess that, notwithstanding the glamour of his dazzling

and dominant genius, much of Wagner’s music affects me in a some-
what peculiar manner. Some quality inherent to it – I am not sure I
should be wrong in describing it as an overwhelming sensuality – leaves
me, however much I may have been carried away at the moment, with
a sense of mental nausea. This is notably the case with his great love-
drama, Tristan and Isolde. It is not that I am such a prude that the illicit
passion of the unhappy lovers upsets my moral equilibrium; indeed, the
strains of Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande, a somewhat kindred sub-
ject, do not affect me in the same way at all. No; I think the composer’s
innermost ego must in some subtle manner have permeated his music;
and perhaps my Psyche – I have been called a ‘natural hypersensitive’ –
unconsciously recognizes and recoils from the character of Richard
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Wagner the man, calculating, selfish, and sensual to the highest degree,
as all the world knows only too well from his biography and memoirs.

Wagner’s plan to turn the story of the tragic lovers into a music theatre
work was conceived in autumn . In a letter to Liszt in that year, Wagner
wishes for ‘a female spirit in which I could completely submerge myself, that
would hold me entire – how little would I then need of this world’ . At the
same time, his emotional and erotic relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck
became more intense. He had met her two years earlier. Unlike Jessie Laussot,
her husband Otto was tolerant, interested in music, and respected his young
wife’s enthusiasm for the work of the composer. They became friends and
Richard introduced Mathilde to his own works and to those of others. She
listened enthusiastically to his music. Affection turned into love and then
into an almost unbearable desire on both sides. Wagner’s suffering was the
more unbearable because he knew that she loved him. In , when Otto
Wesendonck learnt the true intensity of their relationship, Richard had to
leave the home he had made for himself just a year earlier, which stood on
land owned by the Wesendoncks. Otto was no longer prepared to have his
rival live near him. Richard even contemplated fleeing with Mathilde, but was
rejected. For her, leaving her family would have been a ‘sacrilege’ .
The course of the opera’s gestation can be traced in Wagner’s notebooks,
starting in the autumn of . He saw the two protagonists as a traditional
pair of lovers, being prompted to create a mirror image of his own happiness
in love and his knowledge of being loved in return. In the second phase, prob-
ably in the summer of , when he was experiencing more and more acutely
the frustrations of his relationship with Mathilde, Wagner moved away from
a glorification of love, and instead placed love as suffering at the centre of the
work. When Wagner accords Isolde the ability to love above and beyond all
bourgeois norms, he is criticizing Mathilde’s fidelity to her husband. Eros, not
ethics, becomes the measuring rod.
The fact that Mathilde returned his love, despite all the difficulties involved,
nevertheless gave him the self-confidence and the creative strength he so
urgently needed. ‘That you were able to plunge into all the suffering of the
world in order to say to me: ‘I love you!’ – this was my salvation, and gave me
that holy peace from which my life from then on acquired a different signifi-
cance.’ Time and again he described Mathilde as ‘co-creator’ of his opera. ‘Pay
no attention to my art! … with you I can do everything; without you, nothing!
Nothing! … Everything of mine falls apart as soon as I perceive even the slight-
est difference between us. Believe me, you are the only one! You have me in
your hands, and only with you can I – find completion.’
 Sexual Promise and the Womanly Redeemer: Tristan und Isolde 

It has seemed too banal to many a music historian that the creation of this
great work should be prompted by one woman alone. Richard himself offered
implicit support for this interpretation by later playing down the measure of
his love for Mathilde. Cosima learnt from him that their relationship at the
time of the conception of Tristan was ‘amiable and graceful’ . ‘With the comple-
tion of the libretto (during which the main themes of the work were created),
my relationship with her turned into an ecstatic crush.’ But this does not
correspond to the truth. When he wrote the work, he was in the grip of an
intense passion, as his letters to Mathilde make evident. As Peter Wapnewski
has percipiently remarked, ‘Wagner’s Isolde is not Mathilde. But without her,
she would not be what she is.’ Time and again, however, commentators have
attempted, as best they could, to mask this fact. ‘The Wesendonk episode …
was, despite everything, less tragic than tragi-comic,’ writes Hans Mayer. ‘It
was not a transposition of life into art.’ He is convinced that ‘To identify one
with the other won’t work: Mathilde–Isolde, Wagner–Tristan, Wesendonck–
Marke.’ In his endeavour largely to exclude Mathilde, he is quite sure of himself.
Why did Wagner interrupt the composition of the Ring and start on Tristan
und Isolde? Thus Mayer: ‘This does not account for the world of Tristan; it was
in large part already present within Wagner … the plan to write Tristan und
Isolde was made by a man who was abstaining, not by a man in love.’ We can
practically feel his reluctance to allow a woman to participate in the concep-
tion of the work in any form. Mayer’s assertions can be summed up as follows:
the love affair was only a tragicomic episode; Wagner had had the opera in his
head long before; and it has nothing to do with Mathilde. Even Martin Gregor-
Dellin resists the idea that the woman Wagner loved could have had any inspi-
rational impact on the work. ‘Wagner certainly did not write Tristan und
Isolde because of [Mathilde] Wesendonck and did not model [Isolde] on her in
any way. It was all kept within certain bounds. But nor was it the case that he
loved Mathilde because of Isolde: Mathilde was there already.’ By saying that
Wagner did not ‘model’ Isolde on Mathilde, he refers presumably to the fact
that Mathilde for various reasons denied Richard the sexual fulfilment that
he wanted. Married to a rich husband, caught up in a bourgeois lifestyle that
laid responsibilities upon her, Mathilde knew very well what would have hap-
pened, had she given in to Wagner’s sexual desires. It was surely not easy for
her to deny him: Richard’s mighty powers of persuasion had become almost
compulsive, and she must have been barely able to resist him. She suffered in
her situation, but was able to control herself. She remained loyal to Wagner for
the rest of her life, despite his later denial of their passion in his memoirs.
Mathilde herself made no bones about her role in the gestation and comple-
tion of Tristan. She seems to have been unable to suppress her pride when
 Richard Wagner’s Women

she wrote that ‘Richard Wagner loved his “Asyl”, as he called his new home
in the suburb of Enge in Zürich. He left it in pain and sadness – voluntarily!
Why? Pointless to ask! We have his Tristan und Isolde from this time! The rest
is silence, and we must bow our heads in awe!’ Richard, on the other hand,
engaged in obfuscation that left commentators free to follow their subjective
impressions and to indulge in second-guessing. He was less careful in his pri-
vate comments, as he admitted in a letter to his beloved Mathilde: ‘The Flying
Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Nibelungen, Wodan – they were all more
in my head than in my experience. But the wonderful relationship in which
I now exist with my Tristan is something that you will easily understand.’
Another letter, written to Mathilde from Venice in September , is just as
clear. He told her how much his artistic project was helping him to overcome
the pain he had suffered, and how deeply Mathilde was involved in the gesta-
tion of the work:

But what raised me up, what was with me and in me and what has
remained is the happiness of being loved by you! … Yes! I hope to get
well again, for you! To keep you for me means to keep me for my art. To
live with it, as a comfort to you, that is my task, this matches my nature,
my fate, my will, – my love. Thus I am yours! Thus, too, you should
become well again, through me! Here, Tristan will be finished – despite
all the ragings of the world. And with him I may – I shall – return, to
see you, to comfort you, to make you happy!

Franz Liszt knew the situation that Wagner was in, both in love and art.
When he once asked the composer about his current domestic situation,
the latter answered: ‘The most intimate things you’ll learn when you get to
know Tristan.’ Liszt was enthusiastic about the opera when he received a copy
from Breitkopf & Härtel. ‘What delightful magic, what unsuspected richness
of beauty in this fiery love potion! – What were you thinking of when you
created and moulded this wonderful work?’ he asked. He guessed that com-
posing had helped his friend to free himself from the frustrations of a sexu-
ally unfulfilled love, and that it allowed him to send his lover a wholly private
message. Richard wrote in the diary that he intended for Mathilde’s eye: ‘I am
now returning to Tristan, in order to let the deep art of sounding silence speak
from me to you.’ Years later, he called the opera ‘more or less a single love
scene’ .
Mathilde was once described by Felix Draeseke, in a letter to Richard, as ‘a
strange mixture of spirit and emotion, receptiveness and stimulus’ . We know
that she served as Wagner’s model for Sieglinde and Brünnhilde, and also for
Eva and Isolde. However different these four women may be in temperament
 Sexual Promise and the Womanly Redeemer: Tristan und Isolde 

and in their way of life, one thing nevertheless unites them: love bursts in upon
them without their prompting. ‘But now it’s chosen me to suffer unsuspected
misery,’ is how the sweet-natured Eva puts it in Die Meistersinger. Richard
wanted his art to help convince Mathilde that her love was determined by fate,
a fate that she could not escape since it was rooted in her own female nature.
When he put the Ring aside and turned to Tristan und Isolde, he himself
emphasized that one basic topic remained the same in both works: ‘The com-
plete similarity of them resides in the fact that Tristan, like Siegfried, is com-
pelled by a deception (one that takes all notion of freedom from their deeds)
to woo for another man the woman who by all natural laws would be his own;
and the resulting imbalance leads to his downfall.’ The suffering of a man to
whom all natural laws have assigned a woman as partner but who cannot have
her was something that he knew all too well from his own painful experience.
With Tristan und Isolde, he wanted to convince the object of his passion that
her love for him was inevitable and unavoidable. He hoped that she would fol-
low Isolde’s example, accept the resulting scandal, and move in with him. He
wanted to show her the necessity of their union, but had to accept that this
was not (yet) possible. Mathilde was bound to Otto Wesendonck – the one
on whom Wagner’s finances depended. These profane commitments irritated
him, for he did not normally care much for bourgeois notions of morality, con-
tracts, or other such rules and regulations.
In order to bear the conflict in which he found himself caught up, Wagner
obviously sought justification for his emotions. In his correspondence with
Eliza Wille, who observed events from a close distance, he called upon the
higher power of love, which for him was superior even to the gods themselves:

Everything could have gone well between my wife and me! But I had
spoilt her far too much and had given in to her in everything. She did
not understand how a man like me cannot live with his wings clipped!
What did she know of the godly rights of passion, such as I announced
in the fiery death of the Valkyrie girl expelled from the company of the
gods! It is self-sacrifice for love that brings about the twilight of the
gods!

He fantasized about a partner who would be possessed by such a powerful love

that she would sacrifice her life, even if this meant bringing about the downfall
of the gods who ruled the world. Besides this wish-fantasy, he assuaged his
feelings of guilt (above all towards his wife Minna) in the belief that love is a
natural force that leaves those it touches with no choice of their own.
Furthermore, ‘prompted by the notion of the love death’ , Wagner was able
‘to [imagine] an existence beyond the everyday understanding of time and
 Richard Wagner’s Women

space, which means also beyond the offending limits of symbolic codes and
conventions’ . But while he was using all the musical means at his disposal
to conjure up a picture of a love union in a space free from rules, in reality
he was experiencing frustration and despair – both in love and in his lack of
recognition as an artist. It hurt him constantly, deep in his soul, that other
people supposedly wallowed in riches while he was not paid adequately for his
hard work. Another reason for his discontent was the constant friction with
Minna, who became ever more distant from him. The more he realized the
hopelessness of his situation, the more Schopenhauer’s philosophy seemed to
help him. In the space of one year, he read Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung
(‘The world as will and representation’) four times. The former political revo-
lutionary had become an adherent of the philosopher who proclaimed denial
and had turned away from the world.
Bryan Magee and many other commentators are as one in maintaining that
Schopenhauer’s influence on Wagner was great at this time. But he makes a
decisive mistake when he ignores Wagner’s love for Mathilde. The connec-
tion between the two is obvious, for Wagner found in Schopenhauer’s writings
the idea that negation of the will and complete self-denial are the only true
source of redemption in this world. The notion that one could free oneself of
one’s desires by means of this philosophy allowed Wagner and Mathilde to
meet without Otto Wesendonck intervening. Mathilde had agreed to be open
with her husband, and we must assume that she was able to convince him
of this philosophy too. Wagner defended it in numerous evening conversa-
tions, when he still had free run of the Wesendonck villa. All the philosophical
constructions of self-denial in the world could not control such an erotically
charged atmosphere on a permanent basis, but Wagner either did not com-
prehend this or did not want to until he was forced to leave the home that the
Wesendoncks had provided.
Besides the influence of Schopenhauer, there are elements in this work of
Buddhism, Plato (such as the idea of the unity of the sexes), and other concepts
that Wagner had read and digested. He was not concerned about creating
a closed philosophical system, but chose eclectically what suited him. His
operas are comparable to a rock formation in which the different strata make
up the whole. The erotic substance of Tristan und Isolde forms the basis, and
the layers placed upon it allowed Wagner elegantly to disguise the physical
aspects of sexuality that he dared to depict in his music. Whoever wanted to,
however, could hear them clearly. It is fascinating to investigate how Wagner
transposes the erotic into art.
The libretto itself is highly revealing when it praises ‘the miraculous realm
of the night’: the senses ‘tremble delightedly’ , the ‘breast swells’ , there is ‘the
 Sexual Promise and the Womanly Redeemer: Tristan und Isolde 

blessed glow of languishing love’ , ‘rushing blood, exulting courage, measure-

less pleasure, joyful delirium’ . With his glowing, trembling and rushing, he
describes a euphoric state of sexual excitement that offers the greatest feelings
of pleasure. The ‘sweet, noblest, bravest, loveliest, most blessed pleasure’ that
the couple praise is described as follows by researchers who have investigated
the effect of biochemical substances in the body during the sexual act: the
pulse quickens and the limbic system closes off the areas of the brain respon-
sible for sadness and depression; the pleasure centres set free dopamines and
endorphins; an extra dose of adrenalin signifies readiness for action and the
hormonal centres of the brain create a feeling that is similar to a drug rush;
the muscles around the arteries relax, increasing circulation; the heart beats
faster; testicles and Fallopian tubes produce the hormone testosterone, which
serves to increase sensations of pleasure; and the parasympathetic nervous
system causes the erection of penis and clitoris. The whole organism under-
goes a so-called ‘positive stress’ . At the climax, the body sets free opiates and,
in the case of women, especially the hormone oxytocin. The result is a brief
but powerful orgasm that makes one desire repetition.
This euphoric state is described by Wagner with all possible musical sub-
tleties. The means film composers later adopted for depicting love scenes are
found here in their original form. The heady eroticism reminds one of the
Venusberg music in Tannhäuser, though by now Wagner was using incom-
parably more complex compositional means. The desire not to stop, the com-
pulsion to continue and to increase the excitement is expressed musically by
a richness of texture, harmonic alteration and chromatic voice-leading. The
music delays the desperately awaited resolution in the tonic, creates harmonic
shifts, makes enharmonic alterations and modulates with the help of a dis-
sonant, suspension-laden harmony. ‘Sighing’ suspensions begin almost every
bar in the prelude. Diminished-seventh chords, excited string tremolandi, dis-
sonant chords that move almost unnoticed into new harmonic relationships,
syncopations, long legato lines – everything possible is done to maintain the
tension. The chromaticism, together with sequences that are varied, delayed
and interlaced, creates an auditory stimulus that implies the absence of any
tonic foundation and seems to lead us into a limitless space. Although the
musical boldness of the work strikes us, the boundaries of tonality are never
burst apart. Wagner remained committed to the harmonic system, for he
needed it in order to be understood.
The opera is situated in two worlds: that of the day, which depicts the harsh-
ness of the law and is associated with King Marke; and that of the night, which
is the world of feminine magical powers and physical sensibilities. During
the day one wears a coat of armour, which one lays down at night. Isolde
 Richard Wagner’s Women

submits herself wholly to the goddess of love who lives in the darkness, and
she draws Tristan into this world. The two desire a place where they can sub-
mit to boundless, endless pleasure. Everyday reason, represented by Brangäne,
would allow them a path back to normality, but it is ignored, despite Tristan’s
repeated sufferings because of the threat to his identity. Wagner endeavoured
to polarize the two worlds in his language:

The world of the day (masculine)

power
fame
fighting
honour
virtue
fidelity
friendship
greatness
chivalry

The world of the night (feminine)

yearning, longing
insatiable craving
thirsting, entwining
languishing, melting
bliss and suffering
anxious sighing
hoping and hesitating
lamenting and desiring

In explaining the Tristan prelude to Mathilde Wesendonck on  December

, Wagner referred to this contrast: ‘The world, power, fame, honour, chiv-
alry, fidelity, friendship – everything is dispersed as if it were an empty dream.
Only one thing remains alive: yearning, yearning, unfulfilled, eternally new
desire, thirsting and languishing; the only salvation is death, dying, descent,
nevermore waking!’ These polarized concepts are characterized by gender:
the ‘upper’ world is that of man, while the lower world of yearning, lamenta-
tion and apprehension is that of woman. This division calls forth further asso-
ciations, for ‘light’ in the Western cultural tradition means spotlessness and
innocence, while ‘darkness’ means filth and corruption. Sexuality belongs in
this darkness; it was seen as dangerous and beyond all bourgeois morals, but
at the same time attractive and fascinating. In the th century it was regarded
as indissolubly bound to woman. Man should not venture too far into this
 Sexual Promise and the Womanly Redeemer: Tristan und Isolde 

realm for fear he would perish. In the bourgeois everyday world, sexuality
was dealt with in silence. It remained separate, the preserve of the brothel
and the private bedroom, behind closed doors. The profane world of day, the
world of Brangäne and Kurwenal, of the shepherd, the sailors and the hunt-
ers, is depicted by Wagner with a diatonic ‘normality’ , often with a chordal
accompaniment, conveying a sense of security and this-worldliness. Together
with the arpeggios of the horns, the music of the day symbolizes the healthy,
conventional, paternalistic moral law of society, in which reason and intellect
reign supreme.
The work begins with the famous ‘Tristan’ chord, which has offered music
theorists many a puzzle. The first interval, a rising sixth, is followed by a chro-
matic chain that remains as an unresolved dissonance and seems to pose a
question. The resulting tension is increased because one voice strives upwards,
the other downwards. Whereas the chromatic ascent depicts yearning, the
chromatic descent signifies suffering. The motifs are related to each other: the
suffering motif appears as the inversion of the yearning motif. Whether or not
Wagner’s starting point here was A minor or D minor is impossible to deter-
mine – and this was probably his intention. The harmonic conundrum seems
to reflect both the impossibility of fulfilment on the part of the lovers and their
lack of orientation.
At the beginning, however, Isolde does not allow herself simply to be
assigned to the world of yearning and lamentation. As a king’s daughter, she
possesses other characteristics. In the first act, she even issues orders to the
wind – she is a woman used to commanding others. This is also proven by the
hierarchical distance between her and Brangäne. She orders Brangäne to bring
Tristan to her: ‘Have the vainglorious one ordered to fear me, his mistress,’ she
sings, with a double-octave leap in her melody, in a dotted rhythm, and ending
with a leap of a seventh. Above and beyond her command – which conveyed
in this way is unusual for a female character – the music shows her displeasure.
Her lordly tone returns in the fourth scene of the first act, when, angry that
Tristan did not follow her first order, Isolde warns Kurwenal once more: ‘Take
note of this and tell him well!’ This time, the signs of her anger have dissipated,
but what remains is clearly a command: its dotted rhythm, the tension gener-
ated by the rests in the melodic line, and the big leaps are all typical of what
one would normally expect from a male character.
This authoritarian tone disappears in the course of the opera, however.
Disparagingly described as a ‘treasure’ and the ‘pretty Irish girl’ , Isolde feels,
right from the start, how powerless she is against Tristan. She is shamed by
him even before the action begins. Tristan has murdered her fiancé and sent
her the severed head. When she raises a sword in order to avenge her lover’s
 Richard Wagner’s Women

death, he looks her in the eyes, at which she drops the weapon. Instead of
avenging herself, she falls in love with him. While Isolde narrates this episode
to Brangäne, the love motif sounds. This topos of the woman who threatens to
kill a man but cannot do it, falling instead under his spell, can be found down
to modern times and refers to a particular cultural taboo. Tristan there-
upon recommends her as a wife to his king, which means that she is soon to
undergo an enforced marriage to a man she does not know. Her status is that
of an object of barter. From this point on she has to accept that Tristan will
avoid her, thus confirming her as his future queen. Tristan feels duty bound to
his uncle, King Marke; as a woman, she has to take second place. Isolde’s dis-
pleasure is intensified by Kurwenal, whose excessive praise of Tristan merely
serves further to polarize the existing power relationships between the couple.
In order to dishonour Isolde completely, Kurwenal begins a song that cele-
brates the death of Isolde’s former lover, Morold: it is in a foursquare common
time, diatonic, clearly cadencing in B flat major, with a steady background,
and accompanied prominently by the horns. The men sing the chorus, their
line about ‘Tristan the Hero’ establishing their participation as a gesture of
submission.
Why did Wagner include this insult to Isolde? He was faced with the prob-
lem of how to make a pair of lovers out of a lord’s vassal and the lord’s future
wife. It was easy in the case of Lohengrin and Elsa, the knight of the Grail
and the duke’s daughter. And it was easily comprehensible in the case of
Tannhäuser and Elisabeth. But here it was different, for Tristan is a servant
of his king and a murderer to boot. The hierarchical, patriarchal order had
to be maintained. This is why Tristan’s heroic qualities are strongly empha-
sized. He is ‘the marvel of all empires’ , a ‘hero without equal’ and a ‘highly
praised man’ . When Kurwenal bursts into his song of praise, calling him ‘a
lord of the world, Tristan the hero!’ , these two phrases (ascending and thus
having positive connotations) are accompanied by horns and trumpets, the
classic instruments of male dominance. Here there is no ironic detachment;
Wagner is completely serious. He goes even further in order to clarify the
distance between the two soon-to-be lovers. Although Tristan feels drawn to
Isolde, he places a higher value on his duty to the king and people than he
does on his love for her. Isolde, however, cannot escape her love for Tristan.
She hates herself for it, she is embittered, plagued by thoughts of revenge, and
she shows it in dramatic outbursts. It is love that has overpowered her. She
thereby conforms to Wagner’s ideal, for he had time and again insisted on
how fundamental love is to woman, and how intrinsic a component it is of her
nature.
We can trace Wagner’s conception of Isolde in remarks he made to Eduard
 Sexual Promise and the Womanly Redeemer: Tristan und Isolde 

Devrient, a man of the theatre, explaining how the character should be played
on stage:

Only in the last two acts does she show what she truly is, when she
has become a completely loving woman, a woman subsumed by love. In
the first act, she stood merely on the precipice of an incredible tension
caused by her erring emotions. I need youthfulness in this role – the
whole magic of a girl’s first, amazing love must waft through it all …
The charm of youthfulness in a certain sense has to dampen the pre-
emptive tragic tendencies of the first act, and must determine with
certainty the feeling that we have before us a dilemma that must be
solved – but how?

Isolde’s lordly manner in the first act thus seemed to him a false path that was
not part of her nature; he sees her rather as a girl who ‘is subsumed by love’ .
But if Isolde comprises love and has nothing but love in mind, she can
endanger Tristan by drawing him down to her into the ‘night’ and thus bring-
ing about his ruin. In the thematicization of the night, Thomas Mann saw the
influence of Romantic thought and sensibility on Wagner. Romanticism, to
him, was bound up with the night, ‘with all the maternal, lunar-mythical cults
that since the dawn of man have stood in contrast to the worship of the sun,
the religion of the male/paternal light; and Wagner’s Tristan stands under the
general spell of these relations’ . Indeed, Tristan’s problems arise in the night.
It is not by chance that the poet compares the light with the masculine – and
thus implicitly the night with the feminine. The night symbolizes the uncon-
scious, in extreme cases death, but here also signifies the love death, the delv-
ing down into an intimate world of adrenalin-fuelled sensual delights. It bears
within it a salvation from the ‘languishing burning’ and the ‘terrible yearn-
ing’ under which Tristan is suffering so much. Isolde is a symbol of security,
erotic desire and comforting nearness, but also of the dangerous pull exerted
by the yawning chasm that frightened Tannhäuser so much, and from which
Lohengrin extricated himself – as Parsifal will, later. It is fitting that in the first
act, Tristan already recognizes that the fate entwining him is unavoidable; let
us not forget that each of the three acts ends in his attempted suicide.
In the second act, both lovers want to submerge themselves in the dark-
ness as if in the security of a mother’s womb. Isolde waits yearningly for her
lover: ‘When will night fall in the house?’ She begs Brangäne to extinguish the
light: ‘Don’t you know Frau Minne [the Germanic goddess of love]? You don’t
know the power of her magic?’ It is Frau Minne – thus Isolde – who has taken
matters into her hands. Finally, Isolde herself casts the torch to the ground
to extinguish it, thereby making herself one with the goddess of love, who is,
 Richard Wagner’s Women

at the same time, the mistress of life and death. Brangäne’s love potion has
changed her priorities. Now, all that counts is desire, and her senses run riot.
After Isolde drinks the potion, the words ‘night’ and ‘darkness’ are heard over a
hundred times, and in contrast to them we also hear the words ‘Licht’ , ‘Schein’ ,
‘Leuchte’ , Sonne’ and ‘Gleissen’ (‘light’ , ‘appearance’ , ‘lamp’ , ‘sun’ , ‘glistening’).
These contrasts determine the characters’ dialogues to a large degree. Just how
closely the darkness is associated with the feminine principle is evident in that
Tristan goes ‘to the dark, nocturnal land … from which my mother sent me’
– that is, he returns to the maternal womb. Isolde, on the other hand, sings:
‘How could I flee the land that encompasses the whole world?’ It is her female
homeland, the world of magical powers and of the unfettered senses, to which
she belongs.
In the lovers’ extended duet, we hear the same gradual musical climax that
depicts Isolde’s love death in the last act. It culminates appropriately in the
words ‘highest pleasure of love’ and is then abruptly halted by Brangäne’s shrill
cry and the sudden entrance of Marke’s men. This discovery in flagrante post-
pones the completion of the love act until the end of the opera. The composi-
tion of this part of the opera, incidentally, proved emotionally very taxing for
Wagner, as he admitted to Mathilde:

The second act was very difficult for me. The greatest fire of life burned
so bright in it and with such inexpressible fervour that it well-nigh
singed me and drained me. The more the fire dampened down towards
the end of the act and the gentle brightness of the deathly transfigura-
tion emerged out of the flames, the calmer I became.

The harshness of the symbolic law of the ‘normal’ , male-led world demands
that those who leave it enter a realm dominated by a desire for death. For
Tristan, this crossing of the border is far more difficult than it is for Isolde. He
is not just acting against the orders of his lord, but also leaving behind him the
world of paternal law. He steps over into a world ruled by an overpowering
femininity. It is thus logical that he consciously casts himself on Melot’s sword,
for only by dying at Melot’s hands – and by evading the death Isolde will bring
him – can he regain his lost honour. Tristan is punished not only for betraying
Marke, but also for diving into the threatening underworld.
In the last act, Tristan asks confusedly where he is and is told by Kurwenal
that they are in Kareol, the castle of Tristan’s forefathers. Kurwenal sings a
diatonic melody with a dotted leap of a fourth, all in march rhythm. In Kareol,
it seems, law and order dominate. When Kurwenal tells how the house and
court were managed in Tristan’s absence, the bright accompaniment contin-
ues, signifying the ‘normality’ of the male-ordered world, the world that was
 Sexual Promise and the Womanly Redeemer: Tristan und Isolde 

once Tristan’s too. Tristan still does not know what is happening, and asks
where he had travelled to before. ‘Hey! To Cornwall, bravely and gaily. What
glory, good fortune and honour Tristan, my hero, won nobly there,’ answers
Kurwenal. Once more the music breaks out in jubilation, taking up Kurwenal’s
song of praise to Tristan and embellishing it. Trumpets and horns add bril-
liance to the accompaniment. When Kurwenal describes how Tristan was
carried to the castle, the march rhythm is reactivated at the words ‘in your
true country, in your homeland; among your own meadows and delights, in
the light of the old sun’ . His statement that ‘you will attain blessed health and
happiness here, leaving death and your wounds behind’ ends, for once, not
with an interrupted cadence but in the tonic – a sign of security. The contrast
between the male world ‘here’ and the heady, sensual ‘other’ world of woman
could hardly be depicted with greater clarity.
But this security is an illusion, for Tristan understands that he is doomed.
His wound can be understood metaphorically as castration: he has been
robbed of his masculinity because he has bidden farewell to the paternal world.
He now curses the love potion that has befogged his senses and the night in
which the love potion has enveloped him, and he even curses the lover who is
to blame for his downfall:

The wound that she healed and closed she tore open again with the
sword, but then she lowered the sword and gave me the poison draught
to drink. How I hoped to be fully healed, but the most searing magic
was unleashed that I should never die, and instead inherit eternal tor-
ment! […] No healing, no sweet death can ever now free me from the
distress of yearning; nowhere, o nowhere will I find peace; night casts
me out into day.

The work ends with Isolde’s ‘love death’ – one of the most famous moments
in operatic history. Cosima was at one with Richard in believing that German
opera composers ‘know nothing of the fire of love. Love is to them a certain
sentimental convention, its highest expression Ottavio in Don Giovanni.’
She thus admitted that Wagner well knew how to express the ‘fire of love’
in music. He had already depicted it in the Venusberg music in Tannhäuser,
which in the Paris version had gained in erotic intensity. In Tannhäuser he had
described love by means of two women, each incorporating a different aspect
of it, and one of whom – Venus – was a creature who consumes man. But now,
the aspects of sexuality and self-sacrificing love are fused together in the sin-
gle character of Isolde. The danger of downfall still lurks, and thus both lovers
must die, even if there is, in fact, no real reason for Isolde to perish.
Wagner must count as the first-ever composer to succeed in an undisguised
 Richard Wagner’s Women

musical depiction of the sexual act. In Isolde’s love death, three sections can
be clearly discerned after its slow introduction: erection (‘how he glows, lifting
himself high among the stars – how his heart bravely swells, gushing full and
nobly in his breast’), then penetration (‘sounding from within him, penetrating
me’), and finally the climax (‘in the heaving swell, in the resounding echoes, in
the universal stream of the world-breath – to drown, to founder, unconscious
– highest rapture!’). After the words ‘penetrating me’ , the wave-like musical
motion begins that leads to the climax. As the waves follow each other, each
higher than the next, they intensify the sense of excitement. The mighty climax
is reached at ‘in the universal stream of the world-breath’ . Wagner here depicts
the lack of all restraint experienced in the sexual act. The composed-out ebb-
ing of the ‘waves’ allows a sensation of release from tension. Since Tristan has
already died, Wagner cleverly avoided any danger of being attacked for immo-
rality. Thomas Mann knew full well what Wagner was depicting: ‘The ardour
of an immense release and fulfilment irrupted over and over, a stupefying
tumult of measureless satiation, yet insatiable, again and again. It drew back
again in flood, it seemed to want to fade way, it entwined the yearning motif
once more in its harmonies, exhaled, died away, faded out, wafted away.’
It would be a mistake to praise Wagner’s imagined union of two people as a
successful depiction of androgyny, as is often done. He was rather thinking of
a pair of lovers bound to each other for life. Since he was subject to the gen-
der-specific ideology of his time, his Isolde – unlike Tristan – does not know
the stark contrast of day and night, of career duty and love, of daytime identity
and nocturnal love. Her purpose lies solely in her lover. She dies for him and in
doing so gives up herself. Tristan, on the other hand, fails precisely on account
of this contrast. He dies in order to elude the shame of his guilt, a shame that
he has brought upon himself because of his unrestrained enjoyment of love.
He is broken because his identity and that of his lover are rooted in different
places. Isolde follows him because, without Tristan, she has no purpose on
the earth any more. Thus the humble act of female submission is depicted as
a result of her love and in addition is idealized – Wagner’s old, well-known
theme here repeats itself once more.
As a woman who openly displays the fire of her passion, Isolde represented
a provocation for certain sections of contemporary bourgeois society. The
singer of her role has to master extreme leaps and must offer an intensity of
expression that is pushed to the limits. The fact that she has such a power-
ful role was in itself quite contrary to bourgeois expectations in the th cen-
tury, which insisted on one’s maintaining a cultivated control over one’s body.
Such bans were at their strictest for women, for it was regarded as improper
for them to show too much flesh. Thus women wore dresses that were closed
 Sexual Promise and the Womanly Redeemer: Tristan und Isolde 

up to the neck. When they moved they did so in a measured fashion, and
when they laughed they had to ensure that they did not open their mouths
too widely. When one considers these social mores, Wagner’s treatment of
Isolde as a woman who openly desires was all but revolutionary. Many women
were shocked by it. Even Wagner’s own wife, who observed at close proximity
his increasing passion for Mathilde, described the text as ‘disgusting, almost
immorally open in its fiery passion’ . Wagner himself remarked upon the
bourgeois opposition to the erotic component in his works, when he said of
a certain Frau von Seebach: ‘She could not see how anyone could mistake
the incredible passion in my conception, and thought it unfitting to take her
young daughter to see Tannhäuser.’ How much more this lady would have
been shocked by Tristan!
‘In order to be able to feel in himself, a man has to have been loved,’ cried
Richard a year before his death. In Tristan und Isolde, he worked through his
own unfulfilled desires but at the same time wanted to convince his beloved
Mathilde that the sexual union he had long desired had been determined
by fate, just like the love between his protagonists. The topic of ‘death’ per
se does not play any particular role in his own biography, and it was pre-
sumably given prominence in Tristan simply in order to counter any possi-
ble accusations of obscenity. Death is a perfect symbol of the idealized love
between two people – without a partner, life loses its meaning. Later, when
he was happy together with Cosima, the death of the couple no longer suited
his world view. ‘I shall write a new work,’ he cried out to her; ‘it begins with
the second act of Tristan and ends with Hans Sachs’s wedding.’ He wanted
Cosima to know both that he loved her as Tristan did his Isolde, and that love
does not have to lead to death. It can, instead, reach a happy end. This state-
ment also signals that Wagner was not quite so serious as might appear about
that ‘desire for death’ on the part of his lovers. Society despised the desire
that leads both Tannhäuser and Tristan to their deaths. But by celebrating it
in triumphant musical fashion, Wagner gave the world the marvel of a music
that boldly draws the physical into the world of sound. He knew whom he
had to thank for all this, and wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck: ‘That I wrote
Tristan is something for which I thank you in all eternity from the depths of
my soul.’
Isolde is a lordly woman who has to bear shame, who becomes an openly
loving woman and who ends the work in a large-scale act of passion. At the
beginning she cursed Tristan, she wielded a sword and she was ready to defy
convention. She was determined not to be sold off to a king as a mere object,
even though she would have gained greatly in prestige thereby. All this is
proof of her independence and strength. These qualities, however, are largely
 Richard Wagner’s Women

annulled by her love for Tristan, for this love is the source of her weakness.
She is undone because as a woman she stands for the world of sexuality, of
darkness, night, the maternal, the mother’s womb, the magic healing arts and
a lack of restraint. She thus also signifies the abandonment of the paternal
world of the law, and this abandonment leads inevitably to death.
Chapter 
Mathilde, the ‘dear muse’:
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

W   Die Meistersinger during his years in Dresden,

making a sketch for the plot as early as . But then much else hap-
pened in his life, and for a long while he lacked the creative spark necessary to
develop the idea further. He took it up again only several years later. After his
departure in  from his beloved ‘Asyl’ in Zürich, he wandered about Europe,
remaining inwardly devoted to Mathilde all the while; they corresponded with
each other for years. Tristan und Isolde reached completion – his most per-
sonal, most intimate work – though it still had a long, difficult path to its first
performance. ‘I am thinking much of you!’ he wrote to Mathilde in July 
and asked repeatedly to see her again. A planned meeting in Zürich was post-
poned, and a putative visit by the Wesendoncks to Wagner never came about.
Richard and the Wesendoncks finally arranged a meeting in Venice from  to
 November .
It was not a happy sojourn. Otto Wesendonck desired distraction, so he
filled their days with visits to different galleries and museums. And all the
while, Wagner suffered. He describes the situation diplomatically in his mem-
oirs: ‘My friends, who were in very happy circumstances when I met them,
gloried in the paintings. It seemed that their intention was to have me enjoy
them as much as they did, in order to dispel my moods.’ Richard probably
learnt of Mathilde’s latest pregnancy – her fifth child was born in June 
– and the happiness of the Wesendoncks, coupled with Wagner’s depressed
state, will only have made him feel worse. In Zürich, he and Mathilde had
sworn sexual abstinence, but now it was clear that she had resumed normal
relations with her husband. She would never leave her family. He had to watch
as she tried to smooth over the tensions between the two men, and he felt for
her. At the same time, he was jealous of his rival. As it was his nature to put
into words whatever was troubling him, he sent Mathilde a stupid letter at the
end of , in which he claimed that Otto was obviously a hypochondriac
and clearly sick, and that reading held little interest for him. He maintained
that she herself was ‘under pressure, restrained, dependent’ , which was natu-
rally also a sideswipe at Otto. Mathilde, who had been keen to maintain the
peace in Venice, was now understandably chagrined at Wagner’s unwarranted
assault.
The visit made evident to Richard a fact that he had long consciously
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Mathilde Wesendonck
 Mathilde, the ‘dear muse’: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

refrained from acknowledging: he had simply not wanted to give up hope that
he might yet, in spite of everything, be allowed to be near Mathilde. But now
he realized that it was not possible, as he admitted to her. His presence could
offer her nothing:

and the thought that the miserably small reward I can be for you under
such circumstances – at the cost of all the freedom that is necessary for
true human dignity – this makes me feel this nearness myself as a tor-
ment […] Life and everything to do with it has no meaning for me any
more. Where? And how? – it is completely pointless to me.

The realization that Otto had won the battle between them hurt him extraor-
dinarily. The return journey from Venice to Vienna lasted two long nights and
a day. It was pure pain: ‘I sat between Then and Now, trapped between them
helplessly, and I journeyed on into greyness. I had to start a new work, other-
wise – I’d be at an end!’ This thought of being able to relieve himself emotion-
ally by means of a new artistic project appeared to him now as his salvation,
and his creativity immediately sparked into life. ‘I only see inner pictures now,
and they demand sounds,’ he wrote to her. A month later, the prose sketch
of Die Meistersinger was finished, and over the next five years Wagner busied
himself with the music.
What was it about the subject that so inspired him? When he took out his
prose sketch from  again, he saw that he could add to it what made him
suffer now – an inner act of renunciation of the woman he loved. This renun-
ciation was to be an act not of bitterness but of maturity. It was pointless to be
angry with Otto Wesendonck, his supposed rival. That would lead to nothing
but despair and self-destruction. But if he could reinterpret the act of renun-
ciation as resulting from his own initiative, then it could attain a heroic aspect.
To have a woman run away to one’s rival was damaging to male honour and to
one’s sense of self. But a voluntary act of resignation – in the full knowledge of
being loved – could prove uplifting. Mathilde’s rejection would have injured
his masculinity, but his own renunciation of her gave him strength. ‘You don’t
know how easy it now is to me to know that you know that I know what you
have long known!’ he wrote to her, while writing the libretto for the opera.
This convoluted statement presumably referred to his certain belief that she
still loved him.
Wagner took the older version of the plot, which he had once given Mathilde
as a gift and which in the meantime she had sent back to him. He then added
the love of Eva Pogner for Hans Sachs. He wrote to Mathilde: ‘The old sketch
offered little or nothing. Yes, you have to have been in paradise in order to
know at last what can be found in it!’ Paradise for him was being loved by
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Mathilde. She reassured him of it, making it easier for him to renounce her. It
was against this background that Sachs’s character had to be redrawn. Four
years later, Wagner wrote with hindsight that he had sketched the work in
order to ‘save [myself ] from a miserable world of experiences’ , which is a
further reference to the fact that the urge to complete the opera was less the
result of external factors than of inner motivation.
‘Watch your heart with Sachs – you’ll fall in love with him!’ wrote Richard
to Mathilde in late . While Sachs has his authoritarian side, he is depicted
all in all as good-natured and noble. He is the strongest character in the opera,
a first-person Über-Vater who steers the course of things and who is at the
centre of the whole plot. It is thus fitting that not only is his the longest role
that Wagner ever wrote for a ‘Heldenbaritone’ , but also that it offers a mul-
titude of ‘expressive subtleties and a richness of character facets that make it
one of the most demanding singing roles in operatic history’ .
Wagner’s self-identification with Sachs becomes especially clear at one
point. ‘Think of me sometime at the introduction to the third act,’ he wrote
insistently to Mathilde. While he was composing the first act, he jumped
ahead to compose this prelude; the moment of inspiration for it came on his
th birthday,  May . He had sat alone in the park of Biebrich the day
before and had tried not to think of Mathilde, for he could no longer hope ‘to
help you, but only desire, calmly, your well-being’ . Suddenly he had the idea
for the orchestral introduction. ‘When the curtain rises, Sachs sits deep in
thought, and I have the bass instruments play a quiet, smooth, highly melan-
cholic passage whose character is one of the deepest resignation.’ We shall
never know if this really happened as he described it, but what is significant is
that Wagner connected the composition of this passage with his renunciation
of the woman he had loved and lost.
Sachs sits in his room, brooding. He is accompanied by a solo cello, whose
descending melody signifies gentle melancholy. The remaining strings enter
successively; the orchestra exudes a velvety melodiousness, leading into a
chorale, which is intoned solemnly by the horns. This atmosphere of nobility
itself ennobles Sachs. The second part of the chorale is further enriched by
the trombones. Sachs stands here before us as a figure of authority, who by
his very nature will determine the course of events. This sense of dignity in
the orchestral parts underlines the graciousness of Sachs’s renunciation of Eva.
If we consider, further, that the chorale is later played in Sachs’s honour on
the festive meadow, then it seems natural to assume that Wagner recognizes
himself in Sachs and offers him as an idealized self-portrait – indeed, he calls
himself ‘Hans Sachs’ in a letter to Mathilde.
While Wagner identified himself with Sachs, his own biography offers few
 Mathilde, the ‘dear muse’: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

traces of Sachs’s nobility. All the same, it would be absurd to imagine that this
suggests any contradiction in terms. Sachs occupies the cultural-historical
position of the composer, the ‘creator’ , with all its masculine connotations.
Wagner created for himself a sense of equivalence with his hero, in which
Sachs/Wagner shows the people whom they must admire and to whom they
should be subordinate. After his painful departure from Mathilde, this pre-
sumably offered him emotional comfort. ‘By identifying with Sachs to the
extent that he does, Wagner is both playing God and suggesting that it is all
right to do that,’ writes Michael Tanner.
It becomes clear in another context that Wagner was keen to see himself
not as a man unlucky in love, but as a strong, independent actor. Through the
figure of the shoemaker, he projects an image of himself as someone who can
take a world that is out of kilter and put it right again. Sachs stands between
all the interested parties and brings about a genial compromise. He holds
all the cards, mediating between the strict notions of the Mastersingers and
Walther’s enthusiastic song, with its origins in passion and love.
There is yet another example to prove that when Wagner took up the
Meistersinger topic again he saw the centrality to it of Sachs’s love for Eva and
his voluntary renunciation of her. When he was traversing the galleries and
churches of Venice with the Wesendoncks, they saw Titian’s famous picture
of the Assunta. The ‘ascension of Mary in the great hall of the doge had in its
nobility such an impact on me that I have, since that moment of conception,
felt my old powers suddenly return ’ . At the lower edge of the painting there
is a group of men who take their farewells of Mary and are visibly moved, lift-
ing up their hands as if they want to reach towards her. Surrounded by angels,
she hovers up. At the very top, God the Father looks down on her. If one imag-
ines Mathilde in her place, then we can see how she soars away, for ever unat-
tainable, with Richard looking on at her. The picture must have made clear to
him that he had to withdraw in dignity in order not to be enveloped by depres-
sion and jealousy. On later visits to Venice with Cosima, he returned time and
again to this painting. On one occasion, he saw in it the ‘pain of the mother
in childbirth mixed with the delight of love’; on another occasion he criti-
cized the appearance of God in it, which he found inappropriate. The refer-
ence to Mary’s role as mother allows us to draw a parallel with Mathilde, who
in Venice was already pregnant with her fifth child. And Wagner’s criticism
of the inclusion of God is further proof that in art he was able to transform
the loss of Mathilde into something noble: God had nothing to say here, for
Richard now had to act of his own accord. This ability to transform personal
pain into creativity was admirable, helping him to master the blows that life
dealt him and at the same time create exceptional works of art. It was thus the
 Richard Wagner’s Women

notion of a ‘voluntary renunciation’ that freed him from his distress and ena-
bled him to focus on his art. Only in this manner could he turn his frustration
into resignation – a masterstroke of personal psychology. Perhaps it was also
only possible because he felt that Mathilde still loved him.
Expressing ‘renunciation’ in music was something that occupied Wagner
above and beyond his own work. He knew well the string quartet op.  by
Beethoven, and there are certain similarities between its first movement and
the introduction to the last act of Die Meistersinger. Wagner wrote on three
occasions about this quartet. He maintained that it encapsulated all the
moods of Beethoven’s inner life, ‘from the melancholy morning prayers of a
deeply suffering spirit, via appearances charming, captivating and ravishing,
through sentiments of delight, rapture, yearning, love, devotion and playful
pleasure, to the final, most painful surrender of all earthly happiness’ . He
wrote this on the occasion of a Zürich performance of the quartet in ,
which was attended by Mathilde. He will have meant this as a message to her,
and he returns to it again in his Meistersinger. Wagner, Sachs and Beethoven:
all three had to give up what they loved.
The result of this creativity-from-surrender is Wagner’s only comedy. It
presents a clearly hierarchical world, with those above and those below, and
Wagner makes evident in several ways how this hierarchy has grown organi-
cally and is thus ‘natural’ . It comprises the different classes within the pop-
ulation – knights, artisans and the people, plus the two genders. Men are
organized in guilds; they are the ones who act and whose work is recognized
by society. Wagner ignores the fact that there were also female guilds in the
Middle Ages. At the same time, however, the men are not depicted solely in a
positive light: the composer was even accused of portraying the Mastersingers
as pedantic and out of touch, and he does, indeed, show how creative people
can encounter difficulties when over-formalized structures become ossified.
Wagner had long been angry about the musically blinkered world of the pro-
fessors at the conservatories, and in Die Meistersinger he avenges himself
on the critics of his music. But he also shows another, very positive side of
the guild – through the music, which depicts the high regard in which the
Mastersingers are held. The principal motifs of the overture are presented
in a powerful, block-like structure, and in a monumental style that is deter-
mined, steady and venerable in character (Example ). The chromaticism, sus-
pensions and harmonic alteration that are characteristic of Tristan und Isolde
would be out of place here. The chordal structure, the steady note values, the
music’s weighty tread, the proud ascent of the ensuing broken-chord motif,
the prominence of the wind, the dotted march rhythm, the classical fanfare
sounds, the diatonicism and the brilliant C major tonality all convey values
 Mathilde, the ‘dear muse’: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

Ex. 

such as steadfastness, nobility and sublimity. Above all the inner voices gravi-
tate towards the cadences that support the large-scale edifice. This stable
scaffolding, with its combination of the festive and the resolute, establishes
a world in which the old medieval chivalric ideals have been transferred to
the Mastersingers. The third section of the overture is, in its central passage,
orchestrated thinly and bears the expression mark ‘sehr kurz gestossen’ (‘stac-
catissimo’), though the common assumption that this is supposed to parody
the Mastersingers is not convincing. The same passage is, in fact, to be heard
when Beckmesser begins his Prize Song in Act . This derogatory music thus
refers only to him, while his colleagues remain under the musical banner of
nobility.
These archaic-sounding, contrapuntal passages utilize stylistic elements
of the Baroque. By employing them in the context of a massive orchestral
texture, Wagner depicts the Mastersingers’ world of nobility and display as
something superior. Baroque music is a well-loved bastion of masculinity.
The well-known musicologist Arnold Schering described the Baroque era as
possessing an ‘unbridled addiction to the monumental’ , which he coupled
with traditionally masculine characteristics: majesty, eternity, fate, emotional
strength, the sublime, heroic greatness. He also assigned ‘intellectuality’ to
this monumental tendency. All that is dainty, flirtatious, gallant and flattering
(and thus, by implication, all that is sensually feminine) is, for him, of second-
ary importance. We here have a gender-specific order that is also reflected in
Die Meistersinger. The feminine realm of love is heard in the second theme of
the overture (Example ). The orchestration is here reduced in size, the music
is marked ‘very tender and full of expression’ , and we hear a legato motif that
is embellished by the woodwind. The clarinet is the most prominent instru-
ment, providing erotic colour. The transition in bars – of the overture
(Example ) depicts both Eva and her namesake from the Garden of Eden, for
it includes the motif from the ‘Abgesang’ of Walther’s Prize Song, in which
he sings in praise of both. The instrumentation is reduced to woodwind and

Ex. 

Ex. 
  Richard Wagner’s Women

strings, while the passage is marked ‘full of expression’ and ‘piano’ . It is not
by chance that both of Eva’s motifs move downwards, signalizing ‘feminine’
weakness in contrast to the theme of the Mastersingers, which – despite its
initial descending fourth – in fact strives upwards.
Thus the most important motifs that depict Eva are already to be found in the
overture. The curtain opens: at the beginning of the first act, the Eva of para-
dise and her earthly counterpart are subtly fused together by the brief ritor-
nello-like interludes punctuating the chorale in the church. Walther exchanges
glances with Eva, who according to the stage directions at times ‘looks soul-
fully up at him’ and then ‘sinks her eyes, ashamed’ . Since women were not
supposed to show desire openly, Eva is assigned the sound of the oboe, an
instrument that is suited to lending ‘urgency to tenderness and gentleness, for
the moving, touching nature of its timbre derives from its subtlety and loveli-
ness’ . It can also express shame and shyness, and it follows from this that ‘the
oboe is primarily assigned to female characters’ . Eva’s appearance on stage is
also often accompanied by the clarinet.
Although the whole opera is marked by motivic splinters and variants of all
possible kinds, there are two motifs that refer in particular to Eva. The first of
these is the yearning motif (Example ), which is often heard in the second
act. Its chromatic ascent conveys urgent desire, and it is hardly surprising that
it is related to the ‘Abgesang’ of Walther’s ‘So rief der Lenz’ (‘Thus did spring
call’) in Act , scene iii, for this song has an undoubtedly erotic component. It
also sounds when Eva wants to elope with Walther, and in its multitude of
variants it determines the further course of the plot. Its sequences and suspen-
sions point to Eva’s desires: she is strong and capable of devotion when she
loves, though she shows passion always as a response to the advances of the
hero.

Ex. 

The ‘bridal motif ’ (Example ) is derived from the Prize Song, and can be
heard in both conversations between Eva and Sachs. It is reduced to three
notes when Sachs responds in the negative to Eva’s naïve question as to
whether he might not be the right man for her. A simple motif, periodic in
structure, becomes a determining moment in Eva’s dialogue with Sachs in the
last act (Example ). This motif sounds more than thirty times in its simple,
one-bar form, and is varied in many ways. When Eva’s shoe pinches her, it is
a metaphor for her perplexity over the result of the contest, though her feel-
ings for Sachs also play a role. This motif continually turns about itself, and its
frequent repetition affords it a certain monotony, all of which reflects Eva’s
 Mathilde, the ‘dear muse’: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

Ex. 

Ex. 

simple, small world. It is later ennobled, however, when it is transformed in

the final act into the theme of Eva’s ‘baptismal verse’ .
Eva Pogner’s motifs give her, on the one hand, an erotic component (chro-
maticism, surging upwards) and, on the other, an idealized aspect (diatonic
and descending). She thus corresponds to the stereotype of the traditional,
bourgeois woman. Commentators have liked to raise Eva up into a realm of
distant purity, writing at times of the ‘divine idea of female beauty’ that is
embodied by ‘the lovely figure of little Eva’ . She is generally regarded in a
positive light as the very model of an ideal woman. This may be the reason
why so much of the literature about this ‘purest of German virgins’ betrays a
kind of stale drabness. Her sacrosanct aura seems to have protected her from
any serious critical analysis. This is astonishing, given that Hans Sachs in his
second-act cobbling song makes the connection between her and the Fall
of Man, as brought about by the original, biblical Eve. Eva Pogner has been
described variously as ‘sweet’ , and possessed of a ‘touching simplicity’ and a
lack of sophistication. She has been summed up by commentators as a simple
middle-class girl with a good heart: demure, folksy, elfin, fresh with youth
and full of ‘true naïvety’ . Right down to the present day, German authors
have referred to her by the diminutive form ‘Evchen’ , as if they identified with
Sachs. He speaks to Eva patronizingly as ‘child’ and ‘Evchen’ , and fails to take
her seriously. ‘Child’ is how Richard often referred to Mathilde Wesendonck at
the time (though she was already  years old): ‘The naughty child won’t let the
Master have more of her news? […] if only the child from the green hill would
write!’ Mathilde took up the term when she invited him to spend a longer
holiday in Zürich so that he could ‘let himself be looked after by the child’ .
Similarly, though she was nearly , Mathilde Maier was referred to by him in
his letters repeatedly as ‘child’ , ‘dear child’ or ‘good child’ when he was urging
her to move in with him in  in order to look after his domestic affairs. (She
turned him down.)
In the conversation between Eva Pogner and her father, the difference
between the mature, distinguished man and his ‘charming’ daughter becomes
obvious (Act , scene ii). ‘An obedient child speaks only when spoken to,’ she
answers him, after he has announced that he will give her in marriage to
the best Mastersinger. Her good behaviour delights him: ‘How clever! How
good!’ Veit Pogner intones his diatonic melody in an unhurried, ceremonious
 Richard Wagner’s Women

manner, below him a carpet of strings playing long-held notes; the whole is
accorded a dignified, festive air by the sustained notes of the horns. Pogner’s
authority is written into the music. When he turns to his daughter, we hear
playful ornaments in the horn and clarinet. Eva’s ensuing interjections are
decorated by extended clarinet arabesques. The graceful image of the daugh-
ter thereby forms a contrast to the paternal, worldly wise experience of the
father.
Eva Pogner is assigned various motifs but no single, independent one that
would characterize her clearly. Where the men act, she serves as an object
for whom they fight and whom they woo. Nor is she a member of any society
comparable to the men’s brotherhood of Mastersingers. It is the image of an
idealized, passive femininity that makes it possible for us to appreciate and
recognize the masculine hero and his fraternity, and she forms an opposite
pole to them. For this reason, Eva has not a single solo scene, whereas her
counterpart, Walther, has five large-scale solo and duet scenes. Walther’s
feelings at first burst out unashamedly, though his expression becomes more
refined as he undergoes a process of increasing maturity that culminates in
the scene of the Prize Song. Eva, on the other hand, always bears both aspects
of her role within her. She is both the paradisiacal figure and a worldly woman,
and is always seen in conjunction with her ‘feminine’ nature – in other words,
she is worth something only when a man loves her and she returns his love.
Her identity is to be found precisely in this love that streams from her. She
is a prize to be won, an object of projection that reflects back to their origins
both male desire and an ideal image of woman. In  Kurt Overhoff could
still write approvingly: ‘this is the nature of woman, that she only awakens to
conscious individuality in love’ . He thereby proved merely that the modes of
thought that legitimated woman’s narrow scope of action were still subject to
uncritical reception until well into the th century.
The women in this opera in general have far less space for action than the
men. They appear rarely on the stage, and when they do it is in their well-
tested role of observing, applauding or making peace. When a mass brawl
spreads out across the stage they throw buckets of water over the angry men
in order to bring them to reason. Magdalene and Eva belong to different
classes and are thus characterized in contrary fashion in their music. It was an
established operatic tradition that women from the lower classes were char-
acterized by large melodic leaps and syllabic word-setting (such as Blonde in
Mozart’s Entführung or Ännchen in Weber’s Freischütz), whereas the virtuous
bourgeois girl would be assigned a more sustained melody with smaller inter-
vals. This tradition is continued here: in her conversation with Walther and
Eva, Magdalene has to sing a leap of a seventh ten times, Eva only once.
 Mathilde, the ‘dear muse’: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

Wagner’s musical art of characterization can also be seen clearly in the male
roles. In the last act we hear the apprentice David babbling in syllabic fash-
ion and accompanied by woodwind; then Walther, whose passionate, lyrical
lines are joined by the harp; and Beckmesser, whose dissonant harmonies and
irregular, rhythmically fragmented phrases ensure for him a negative connota-
tion. Attempts by certain commentators to depict Beckmesser’s dissonances
as progressive are out of place, for in Wagner’s time, dissonance was used
consciously for things unpleasant and was perceived as such by the public.
Beckmesser is denoted by the augmented third – an ugly-sounding chord that
we also hear when he is beaten up during the big brawl. While Beckmesser
is usually accompanied only by his dreadful lute, Walther has at his disposal
the whole orchestra. As a member of a noble family, he is assigned knightly
attributes and self-confidence in his bearing; this is underlined by his motif,
with its dotted upbeat, its staccato chords and its melodic ascent. His melodic
lines usually have an energetic, free-flowing accompaniment that contrasts
with his ‘rival’ Beckmesser.
If Beckmesser is devoid of nuance, there are nevertheless hints of irony in
other places. When Eva compares Walther with the David who slew Goliath
and compares his appearance with a (fictitious) painting by Dürer, she sees
him as a blond youth with a sword in his belt and his sling in his hand. This
picture is shortly afterwards caricatured by the ‘real’ David on stage, who
carries a ruler in his belt and swings a piece of chalk on a string. Wagner
thereby parodies his ‘ideal’ image of the hero – which, given the Siegfried cult
to be found in his Ring des Nibelungen, is no mean undertaking. In another
scene, we encounter Wagner’s criticism of bourgeois sensibility. The first song
that Walther sings is permeated by sexual allusions: it is all about love in one’s
breast, about flowings and gushings and swellings. He earns resounding criti-
cism from Sachs for it (Act , scene ii):

It is with such fire of poetry and love

that one might seduce daughters into adventure;
But for blissful, loving wedlock
other words and melodies were invented.

Here bourgeois propriety is treated ironically. We also find contempt for

unmarried women in a parodistic dig at Magdalene, supposedly an ‘old
spinster’ .
With regard to Wagner’s portrayal of the relationship between Hans Sachs
and Eva (and thus by implication between Richard and Mathilde), it pays to
take a closer look at the ‘Schusterlied’ (‘Cobbling song’), which Sachs sings at
full volume in the second act to interrupt Beckmesser’s serenading. It tells how
 Richard Wagner’s Women

the biblical Eve, whom he calls a ‘sinner’ , was expelled from paradise and then
hurt her feet on the hard gravel. God had mercy on her and sent an angel to
make her shoes. Adam, too, received a pair of boots. There follows an obscure
denunciation:

Oh, Eva! Eva! Wicked woman, you have it on your conscience

That, by reason of human feet, angels have to become cobblers.
When you were in paradise, there was no gravel.
And because of your recent misdeed, now I’m busy with awl and thread,
And because of Mr Adam’s wicked weakness, now I’m soling shoes and
putting on pitch.
If I weren’t a fine, pure angel, the devil would have to be a cobbler!

The final strophe runs:

O Eva, hear my lamentation, my distress and my heavy vexation!

The works of art a cobbler created, the world treads underfoot!
If an angel did not give comfort who has drawn the lot of similar work
and did not often call me into paradise, how I’d leave shoes and boots
behind!
But when he has me in heaven, the world lies at my feet,
and I am happy to be Hans Sachs, a shoemaker and a poet with it!

If one considers that Sachs is confusing the ‘real’ Eva with the biblical figure
in his song, the description of her as ‘sinner’ is an insult. In the Bible, as we
know, Eve tempts Adam to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, at which God
drives them both from paradise. She is responsible for the Fall of Man – the
first woman on earth carries a heavy burden of guilt. Does Eva Pogner serve as
an allegory for original sin that hinders the artist from engaging with his art?
Hans Mayer makes of her a seductress and a corrupter, for he writes: ‘And yet
the return to paradise is possible: not, as Walther writes and sings, with Eva’s
help, but despite the sinner. A return is possible thanks to art.’
Wagner himself described it thus: ‘There (in the Schusterlied), the man,
resigned, expresses his bitter lament, though he shows the world a happy,
energetic countenance; Eva understood this hidden lament, and her heart was
so pierced by it that she wanted to flee, just so as not to hear this song again,
though on the surface it seems so cheerful.’ The Schusterlied is thus bitterly
serious. Wagner here pours out his frustration about his lack of recognition.
At one point, Sachs sees himself as an ‘angel’ , who makes shoes for the original
Eve (the one from paradise); in the final strophe, he is himself called to para-
dise by an angel. This makes sense if one sees the angel as his muse. It would
match Richard’s relationship to Mathilde, for he does not have Mathilde before
 Mathilde, the ‘dear muse’: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

him in person, so must instead draw on his memories and seek her inspiration
from afar.
The Prize Song makes clear what it means to be Wagner’s muse, and it has
a central role to play in the opera. Here, Walther sings of the bourgeois dream
of the ideal woman. First he sings, enraptured, of ‘Eve in paradise’ , whom he
desires. Then he finds himself in a poet’s waking dream in which ‘the noblest
woman, the muse of Parnassus’ appears to him. Finally, he sees paradise itself
before him, the same place of which he dreamed. There he finds ‘the loveli-
est picture on earth, dedicated to me as muse, as serious and holy as she is
mild, and I wooed her bravely, in the light of the sun’s day, and through song
I won the victory: Parnassus and paradise!’ In Greek mythology, Parnassus
was the place of poetry and it is here meant as a place of artistic creativity,
where the muse inspires artists of genius. Wagner has thus won woman-as-
muse. Since he cannot possess Mathilde in real life, she must at least influence
him creatively. This is why he so often speaks of ‘being resigned’ in connection
with Hans Sachs. The woman-as-muse must also be a sexual being, and she
has to be able to lead the artist to Parnassus, the home of the Muses. Walther
is thus crowned by Eva, not just with a laurel wreath but also with myrtle, ‘a
symbol of life in paradise and of art in Parnassus at one and the same time’ .
Wagner thereby declares art and the artist divine, and at the same time presses
woman into service – the service of the artist.
The degree to which Richard needed Mathilde as his ‘muse’ becomes clear
in the following lines, in which he let her know that he was waiting for her
(they were at this time still neighbours in Zürich). He describes her visit
as being undertaken of her own free will, yet his words apply pressure in a
manner verging on compulsion:

And my dear muse stays away from me? I waited for her visit in silence;
I did not want to discomfort her by my begging. For the muse, like love,
can only bestow happiness of her own free will. Woe to the fool, woe
to the loveless man who endeavours to force her to give what he does
not receive freely! You won’t let yourself be forced. You won’t, will you,
will you? How could love still be a muse if she let herself be forced into
things? And my dear muse stays away from me?

The muse is herself supposed to know when she is needed, and it is this
Wagnerian fantasy of which Walther sings in his Prize Song.
When Eva appears in the third act, Sachs admires how she looks. While
the woodwind and the horns intone sustained notes, the strings twirl their
garland-like runs around the praise he utters. These melting sounds depict her
beauty. Eva’s value rests in her looks. There follows a conversation about her
 Richard Wagner’s Women

shoes: they are too narrow, too broad, or – as Sachs soon suspects – perhaps
her confusion is the real problem? The instrumentation thins out as she sings,
the oboe repeatedly plays a little motif, and she is accompanied only by the
woodwind. After Walther’s entrance, there is another conversation between
Sachs and Eva. This culminates in Eva’s cry of thanks to him, which points to
the fact that he has steered her whole development as a woman:

O Sachs, my friend! You dear man! How can I reward you, noble man?
What would I be without your love, without you?
Wouldn’t I always have remained a child if you had not awoken me?
Through you I have won what people prize, through you I learnt what
the spirit can achieve;
Awoken by you, only through you did I think nobly, freely and boldly;
You made me bloom!

At this point, the orchestra shines out and triplet chords heighten the sense of
climax reached at the word ‘erblüh’n’ (bloom’). For the first time in the opera,
Eva has to sing extreme melodic leaps, which merely intensify her praise of
Sachs. In all this, too, Eva’s similarity to Mathilde becomes evident. The latter
described in her reminiscences how she had arrived in Zürich ‘quite unedu-
cated’ . The ‘Master’ read her his libretti, he led her through Beethoven’s sona-
tas, he played to her in the evening what he had composed in the morning,
and he explained works of music to her that were being performed in Zürich.
Besides this, he read and discussed the classics of literature with her and gave
monologues to which she dutifully listened. She wrote: ‘I saw the whole world
before me in its richness, which you opened up before my child’s spirit, my
eyes took delight in this marvellous construction, my heart beat ever more
urgently out of a deep sense of thanks, and I felt that nothing of this could ever
be lost to me!’ She soaked up everything eagerly. Her growing knowledge
and her increasing experience of the world was in large part thanks to Wagner.
Thus in the s she stood in the same relation to Wagner as does Eva Pogner
to Hans Sachs. To suggest that Eva’s relationship with Sachs is ‘a highly erotic
father–daughter relationship’ thus hits the nail on the head.
But nothing physical results from this eroticism. The work’s topic of renun-
ciation is too dominant for that, and Eva submits herself too quickly to the
wishes of the men around her. And yet it would be inaccurate to describe her
as asexual. Rather she is a figure that stands between the two feminine poles
of virtue and desire, of the same kind as Wagner created later in Brünnhilde.
Since he was convinced that love can overwhelm two people and make them
powerless to resist, Wagner had to admit to sexual desire on the part of woman.
So while Eva is well behaved, to be sure, she is also equipped with the ability to
 Mathilde, the ‘dear muse’: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

desire. Yet the musical depiction of this ‘unfulfilled’ love is different from other
similar constellations in Wagner’s operas. The renunciation motif assigned to
Sachs is intoned by the warm, intimate sound of the strings and not, as in the
case of Elisabeth, Brünnhilde, Wotan or King Marke, by the rather depres-
sive sound of the bass clarinet. Thus Sachs is a man who suffers less and is
characterized, instead, by his goodness of heart and his wisdom – a man who
registers and understands everything that is happening around him, but who
distances himself from the flow of everyday bustle and everyday vanities.
Whereas Wagner describes femininity time and again as his ‘muse’ and
conceived music and the feminine as existing in parallel with each other (as
was the norm in the th century), in his own life he sought intensive rela-
tions with the opposite sex. With Cosima, for example, he discussed literature,
music and contemporary intellectual trends. He also spoke out against any
primitively negative attitude to women. But in his opera we find little evidence
of the value he placed on them. Eva complains ‘How difficult I find it with
men!’ , but as the Prize Song makes clear, she remains nothing more than an
object. Her wooing of Sachs is the decision of a moment, and her acquies-
cence in fleeing with Walther is the result of her love for him. The fact that she
is ready to do everything for her lover is at one with her abandonment of inde-
pendence: only what her lover wants or does is of value. And it speaks volumes
that almost every motif heard in connection with her is derived from the Prize
Song.
But is not Eva often also an active agent? After all, she reacts to Walther’s
wooing, she tries to find out more from Hans Sachs, she agrees to elope with
Walther (though this is thwarted by Sachs), she cries when Walther greets her
with his passionate Master Song, she lets Sachs know that she feels encour-
aged by him, and she finally gives Walther his crown of laurel and myrtle.
These acts are prompted by men, but Eva does not let herself be reduced to a
mere object of male desire – after all, her planned elopement brings her into
conflict with paternal authority. She reveals her subtle, complex relationship
with Sachs, and at the end attains what she wants. It would certainly go too far
to admit to any clear development of Eva’s character in the course of the opera.
Mary Cicora assigns particular weight to the love between Eva and Sachs,
believing that Eva’s monologue in the third act (‘O Sachs, my friend! You dear
man!’) is a sign of strength and evidence that she has undergone an evolution-
ary step, as it were. (Indeed, this passage contains a great number of extreme
intervallic leaps in the melody: Eva has to cover a melodic span of one and a
half octaves.) But she is so passionate only because she is praising Sachs for
having taught her so much; her music does not depict any demonstration of
strength of will on her part, only her feelings for the man she loves. All this
 Richard Wagner’s Women

compliments Sachs, not her. In the final scene, she once more falls silent and
appears only as an object of veneration. As ‘muse’ , woman gains in value and
is idealized, but at the same time the opportunities for action on the part of
the ‘real’ woman are diminished.
Since Wagner believed that art has to hide itself and appear as nature, it
seems reasonable to suppose that he treated gender roles in a similar manner –
they appear as determined by nature. He even gives musical expression to the
message that it is natural for woman to play the servant to male interests. By
means of a thinning out of the accompanying orchestration, the woman is
assigned a status similar to that of the ‘Volk’ as a whole, which, with its folk-
like songs and dances, is situated on a lower level than the wise man predes-
tined to rule.
Wagner was an adherent of the writings of his contemporary Constantin
Frantz, and when Cosima’s friend Malwida von Meysenbug paid them a visit
and spoke of women’s role in legislating, Richard read to her from Frantz’s
book Die Naturlehre des Staates als Grundlage aller Staatswissenschaft (‘The
natural law of the state as foundation of all political science’ , ). The chap-
ter in question is entitled ‘An example of confusion in the emancipation of
women’ , in which gender equality is rejected since it ignores the natural other-
ness of woman. ‘This difference in how men and women act, whereby the one
complements the other, is the basis of all beauty and health of human exist-
ence,’ writes Frantz. ‘We have to admire the clarity of form and the precision
of thought,’ added Cosima. If Eva did not complement and support Walther,
but rather acted according to her own needs, she would lose her positive aura.
Wagner’s depiction of man is closely related to his convictions about the
uniqueness of the German character. This is reflected in the final scene of Die
Meistersinger, with its honouring of the German masters and of holy German
art. The text that he added to Sachs’s final monologue in , ‘Habet Acht!
Uns drohen üble Streich’ (‘Beware! Evil tricks threaten us’), which evokes the
decay of the Volk, warning of ‘French [wälsch] mists with French vanities’ ,
adds a tone of vengeful resistance to the conciliatory, bourgeois atmosphere
of the earlier prose sketch. (The word wälsch refers generally to the Romance
countries and languages, but more specifically to things French.) In his arti-
cle ‘What is German?’ (–), Wagner lists some of the character traits of
the Germans. They are supposedly pure, they maintain their language and
their customs, they are conservative; the German is more concerned with pre-
serving what there is than with winning something new; he does not desire
anything from outside, and takes religion seriously. Johann Sebastian Bach is
named as a composer who is, to Wagner, an example of ‘what the German
spirit truly is’ , which affords his compatriots a quite specific aspect of
 Mathilde, the ‘dear muse’: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

spirituality and a tendency to greatness (Bach’s music is, of course, alluded to

in Die Meistersinger).
As is well known, national hegemonic discourses have historically been
structured as gendered dualities. Parliamentary democracy and values such
as enlightenment, rationality and emancipation have no place in this model.
A few weeks before his death, Wagner mentioned Walther von Stolzing to
Cosima and said: ‘Gobineau would have liked him, he’s so knightly through
and through and proud, until Hans Sachs comes along and guides him with
wisdom.’ The unbroken unity of artisanship and technique in the old art-
ist that is Sachs is not a matter of chance, nor is the fusing together of Bach,
Sachs and Wagner. Wagner has devised an image of creative activity that
by its very nature refers exclusively to the (German) man. This is amplified
by the pleasing, affirmative musical portrait offered of the Mastersingers
themselves.
This opera also treats the topic of ‘love’ in manifold fashion. David and
Magdalene belong to the lower classes (David is a member of the ‘Lausbuben
Zunft’ , the ‘Guild of Rascals’) and live out a functional relationship that is of
use to each of them. Eva and Walther are mad about each other. Although they
have known each other for only a day, they have already decided firmly that
they must be married. In the case of Walther it is his exaggerated sexual drive
(that ‘sweet necessity’) that spurs him on. With Eva, it is rather something that
seizes her passively. Thus in an emotional outburst, punctuated by tritones,
she makes clear to Sachs that she could do no other: ‘But now it’s chosen me
to suffer unsuspected misery: and if I were married today, it would be without
making any choice – it would be a necessity, a compulsion! – You yourself,
my master, would be anxious’ (Act , scene iv). This passionate infatuation is
contrasted by the composer with the affectionate relationship between Sachs
and Eva, characterized by loving care, which has existed for years. This rela-
tionship also contains elements of a father–daughter bond. Sachs knows that
he is too old for Eva and that his love is different from the passion that drives
the young couple on. But we must not forget that Sachs repeatedly connects
woman with the topic of the Fall and makes allusions to her sinfulness. Here
it is not simply the traditional view of woman that shines through, but above
and beyond it Wagner’s aggressive stance towards his lover Mathilde – namely,
his distress at her decision to remain with her husband. Despite all the ways in
which the notion of renunciation is idealized in the opera, this is a disappoint-
ment that Wagner is unable to suppress completely.
Although the wording on the composition sketch of the last act runs
‘Finished on  Febr , St Richard’s Day, especially for Cosima,’ it was his
love for Mathilde, of many years’ standing, that had given Wagner the real
 Richard Wagner’s Women

incentive to write Die Meistersinger. In June , four years after leaving
Zürich, Richard wrote to Eliza Wille, a friend of Mathilde:

In these days I at last want to write to the Wesendoncks again. But – I

can only write to him. I love the woman too much, my heart is so overly
tender and full that when I think of her I cannot at all engage with her
in the form that is now more than ever obligatory. The way my heart
is, I cannot write to her without committing an act of betrayal towards
her husband, a man whom I dearly treasure and value. What is there to
do? Nor can I hold it completely secret in my heart either. One human
being at least has to know what is going on in me. That’s why I’m tell-
ing you: she is and remains my first and only love! I feel it with ever
greater certainty. It was the climax of my life: those anxious, delightfully
anguished years when I lived in the growing magic of her nearness and
her affection, they contain all the sweetness of my life … she remains
always beautiful to me, and my love for her will never grow cold. But I
may never meet her again.

He had known Mathilde for eleven years and his feelings had lost nothing of
their intensity. Die Meistersinger is intimately bound up with her.
Later, Wagner exchanges one female figure of identification for another.
In her diary, Cosima notes how Richard calls out to her: ‘I have married Eva.’
Eleven years before, he had said to her, laughing, ‘I did it differently from
Wotan and Sachs. I married Brünnhilde and Eva all at once: I let those good
men do excellent things, but I take care not to do what they say.’ In other
words: Sachs had renounced Eva, but Wagner had declined to follow his
example. It was now forgotten, or suppressed, that he had identified intimately
with Sachs’s act of renunciation when he wrote the work.
Cosima’s opinion of Richard’s relationship with Mathilde was understand-
ably merciless. ‘A love born of boredom, vanity and the need for money.’ In
 Cosima moved in with Wagner in Tribschen on Lake Lucerne and they
remained there for six years – years of agonizing guilt but also of intimate
togetherness. In  her daughter Eva was born. A year after that, Cosima
was divorced from Hans von Bülow. Richard promptly constructed an analogy
between his own daughter and her stage namesake: ‘In the morning Richard
plays the duet from the second act of Meistersinger and says that he cannot
play it without being transported to the time when he wrote it and I bore Eva
within me.’ ‘When I woke I heard the sounds of the Prize Song, the melody
that brought Eva into the world and with which R. greeted me on my birthday
().’ ‘Eva’s birthday: the melody is played.’
And yet it was Mathilde Wesendonck who was responsible for Sachs’s
 Mathilde, the ‘dear muse’: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

character. A man here relinquishes a young woman because he thinks more

of her than of himself. This was not an aspiration that Wagner was able to
fulfil of his own accord, it was an interpretation that he applied to his enforced
renunciation of Mathilde. Love is here raised up onto a spiritual plane. Like
the Marschallin in Richard Strauss’s later Rosenkavalier, a mature person here
performs an act of relinquishment without descending into aggression or self-
pity. Instead, he overcomes his pain with dignity and grandeur. Wagner, too,
rose above his own self, and with his remarkable music in all its complexity
he created a masterpiece. Nevertheless, the massive, block-like structures
that depict the Mastersingers, coupled with the work’s heroic eulogies to the
strong and the masculine on the festive meadow, continue to sustain the sup-
posedly ‘natural’ dominance of the male.
Chapter 
Der Ring des Nibelungen:
Genesis and Prelude – Der Ring I

I   Wagner wrote as follows to his friend Liszt:

I deteriorate more and more every day. I lead an indescribably worthless

life. I know nothing of any real enjoyment of life; to me ‘enjoyment of
life, of love’ , is only an object of my imagination, not of experience. Thus
my heart has to go to my brain and my life becomes an artificial one. I
can only live as an ‘artist’; in him the whole ‘man’ has been subsumed.

This lament is undoubtedly to be understood in the context of Wagner’s

failed romance with Jessie Laussot in Bordeaux. And yet their relationship
had begun so promisingly: ‘I have now become acquainted with the fullest,
noblest and most beautiful love: the only true love, which does not lay down
conditions but encompasses its object so completely just as he is and how
his nature makes him. She has also saved me for my art!’ He was supposedly
close to realizing just such a love, but then Jessie withdrew at the last minute.
Disappointed, empty-handed and empty-hearted, Wagner returned to Zürich.
A year later, we hear him singing a different song:

My friend! I’m living a miracle! A new world lies open before me. The
great scene in the Rheingold is finished: I see riches before me such as
I had not dared to contemplate. I now regard my riches as immeasur-
able: Everything is surging and making music within me. It’s – oh, it’s
love! – and such a divine belief enthrals me that I myself do not even
need – hope!

Richard Wagner had fallen in love with Mathilde Wesendonck. His relation-
ship with her set free his creative powers. After a hiatus of five years, when
he composed nothing but only wrote articles, programme notes and perform-
ance instructions, two draft libretti for the Ring and letters to journals, his
ideas now simply flowed from him and he was barely able to commit them
to paper fast enough. The actual composition of the Rheingold was begun in
November . By autumn , after a year of swift, concentrated work, the
whole of this ‘prelude’ to his tetralogy was complete.
Innumerable interpretations have been written of Der Ring des Nibelungen
since Wagner first presented this ground-breaking, four-evening-long work to
his public in Bayreuth in , after which it began its conquest of the world’s
 Der Ring des Nibelungen: Genesis and Prelude – Der Ring I 

stages. George Bernard Shaw was the first to offer a complete theory, accord-
ing to which the Ring was a comprehensive critique of capitalism. If one wishes,
one can see the Ring as a parable ‘in which is told the story of a world ruined
by politics’ . Commentators have found ever new ways to thematicize the
psychological, literary and mythological implications of the work. This mighty
undertaking undoubtedly allows for the most varied interpretations, yet none
of them can ignore the work’s one, overarching theme: the conflict between
the need for love and the need for power on the part of the bourgeois male.
The importance of this can also be perceived in the story of the Ring’s concep-
tion and the process of its maturation over more than two decades. During
this time, its creator revised the work several times according to what he was
reading and experiencing at the time.
Before Wagner began his comprehensive study of mythology and of the
sagas of the Germanic gods and heroes in , he turned to several histori-
cal topics that seemed to him particularly suitable for operatic treatment. He
found Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa especially attractive – as so often, it was
a powerful man who stimulated his imagination. ‘The concept of the “leader”
was here summed up in all its most powerful and terrible significance,’ he
wrote. His sketch for a libretto deals with traditional male spaces of action:
imperial power, the conquest of Milan, the ‘Imperial Diet and the great court
in Mainz, the conciliation with the pope, taking the cross and setting off for
the East’ . We can be relieved that he dropped his plans to compose that
work and instead finally settled on the saga of the Nibelung and Siegfried for
musical treatment.
Wagner’s first foray into the topic is his booklet Die Wibelungen of . He
was enthusiastic about the emperor–hero Friedrich Rotbart (‘Redbeard’), and
felt compelled to turn his story into a libretto. Its central idea deals with own-
ership. The legendary hoard will give power to whoever possesses it, and it
is desired by the descendants of the divine hero. But the hoard ‘will not be
won anew in lethargy nor by mere means of contract, but only though a deed
similar to that of the man who won it first’ . Wagner was already thinking of
Siegfried, who has a just claim to the hoard by virtue of his tireless actions,
in contrast to those others who attempt to gain it by cunning and trickery.
Noteworthy, too, is Wagner’s negative opinion of contracts, which shows that
Siegfried was conceived as a positive counter to the pedantry of the guardians
of the law. In his Wibelungen, Wagner drafted ‘a complete picture of the curse
of greed for money and of the downfall that is connected with it’ . We could
add to this ‘and of the opposing world of love’ , for Wagner offers love as a heal-
ing force in opposition to material possession.
In the end, this subject seemed unsuitable for opera, and instead Wagner
 Richard Wagner’s Women

wrote his first prose sketch for the Ring in October : Der Nibelungen-
Mythus. Although the proportions are not yet what they would be finally, the
plot is not far from its later, finished form. Already in this first version, the
hierarchical order is clear: the giants and the Nibelungs are the lower beings,
the gods the upper ones. The gods are the highest authority, but they have
endangered their own status by their irresponsible actions, based on violence
and trickery. Now the ‘real hero’ has to be born, who must possess free will
to do brave deeds. Siegfried is the saviour of a world in which the gods act
wrongly, and thus he stands at the centre point of the action. He first kills the
giant dragon, then Mime. His coming together with the Gibichungs is also
already present in the prose sketch, as is his betrayal of Brünnhilde. She is
described here as a Valkyrie, just as in the final tetralogy; she falls in love with
Siegfried, and the loss of her divine status makes her ‘powerless like a normal
woman’ . Incidentally, when Wagner writes of ‘powerlessness’ as being the lot
of ‘normal women’ , it speaks volumes.
There are also differences from the final version. In the prose sketch,
Brünnhilde describes the dying Siegfried as ‘pure’ , with no hint of the criti-
cism she levels at him in the later version (‘all vows, all contracts, the most
faithful love – no one betrayed them as he did’). Here he is seen only in a
positive light: ‘Never were oaths kept more faithfully than by him.’ Brünnhilde
regards herself as guilty: ‘Now I have also done penance: I am pure and free,
for he, the magnificent one, coerced me.’ Such an idealization of the hero went
too far, even for Wagner, when he later came back to the work.
There is also a decisive alteration at the close. Wotan’s downfall is not found
in the prose sketch, nor does Brünnhilde die. Instead, she accompanies the
dead Siegfried to Valhalla. She gives the Ring back to the Rhinemaidens and
conjures up an idealized image of both Wotan and Siegfried: ‘Only one may
rule, All-Father, you magnificent one!! Since power is eternally yours, I am
leading this man to you: receive him well, he is worth it!’ After Siegfried’s death
she wants ‘to sacrifice her body to the gods’ along with his corpse. The flames
of the funeral pyre light up and suddenly Brünnhilde appears in full armour
and on her horse, changed back into a Valkyrie. She takes Siegfried by the
hand and leads him up and away. In this early version, she attains her knowl-
edge again, and once more becomes a goddess. But she does not embody the
ideal female characteristics, as she did later, when Wagner made her human.
The verse draft of Siegfrieds Tod also closes as described above, but this was
later dropped. What is notable in this first sketch is the elaborate manner in
which Wagner deals with Siegfried’s death and the circumstances that lead
to it. His imagination is fired by this man possessed of supernatural powers,
a man who can do everything, and who becomes ensnarled in the world’s
 Der Ring des Nibelungen: Genesis and Prelude – Der Ring I 

dealings only because of evil intrigues. It is a phallocentric view, such as we

also find in popular action films and westerns of the th and st centuries,
with their various ‘supermen’ . Wagner’s description of Siegfried is almost
homoerotic in tone.

In my conception of Siegfried I had penetrated as far as to see this man

in his most natural, happy fullness of sensual manifestation; no histori-
cal garb constricted him … he was to me the embodiment of the male
spirit of eternal, creative spontaneity, that spontaneity of the man who
does real deeds, a man in full possession of the greatest, most immedi-
ate power and undoubted charm. Here, in the movements of this man,
there was no more conscious will to love, for this was love, a love very
much alive, swelling each and every vein and muscle of this happy man,
urging him on to his enchanting actions.

It becomes equally clear that Wagner’s intention was for Brünnhilde to be

another female character like Senta, Elisabeth, Elsa and Isolde, whose iden-
tity was acquired through love for a man. In this highly authoritarian version,
there was no doubt in Wagner’s mind that patriarchal dominance was a ‘nat-
ural’ phenomenon. Wotan rules uncontested as ‘All-Father’ , and Siegfried –
the second man in the state – is redeemed by woman. Fricka is still miss-
ing in this sketch, but we do have ‘Wodan’s Wunschmädchen’ in the form
of ‘Schildjungfrauen’ (literally ‘shield virgins’), who lead the dead heroes into
Valhalla. The reference to their virginity is important, for this underlines their
positive connotations.
This first version did not wholly satisfy Richard. He later told Cosima that
he had drafted Der Nibelungen-Mythus and Siegfrieds Tod in a more ‘classical
manner’ , but then after several years in Zürich he had ‘taken a closer interest
in Wotan’s downfall; he was more of a kind of Flying Dutchman’ . Wotan is
now humanized; he is no longer the god reigning over everything. He perishes
because power and love cannot be united and because he is unable to relin-
quish power. Brünnhilde does not return to her life as a battling Valkyrie but
remains the loving, self-sacrificing, highly feminine partner of the hero. The
loving woman is more important than any gold or money. And the character
of Siegfried, too, is altered, for Wagner allows himself a little criticism of his
hero – without, to be sure, questioning his exceptional status.
In , while he was busy writing his ‘great dramatic poem’ , Wagner real-
ized that he would have to expand the original plot in order to bring it to life,
and he recognized, too, the far greater potential that lay in it. The portrayal of
Siegfried’s death demanded in dramatic terms a portrayal of his earlier life. It
seemed to him almost sinful ‘to leave unused the exciting, gripping aspect of
 Richard Wagner’s Women

the topic that I could win for my portrayal, and which would offer me a rich
vein into which to tap for my artistic development’ . And he listed who and
what could be added:

Just think of the content of Brünnhilde’s narration – in the last scene

of Young Siegfried – the fate of Siegmund and Sieglinde, the struggle of
Wodan between what he wants and what is morally permissible (Fricka);
the marvellous pride of the Valkyrie, the tragic anger of Wodan that
leads him to punish her; just think of this in my fashion, with its incred-
ible richness of possibilities, all united in a single concise drama. This
would be a tragedy of the most shattering impact that at the same time
would accord to everything a surely sensual impression, everything that
the public would have to experience in order better to understand the
young Siegfried and his death in their broadest significance.

This description is remarkable because Wagner here already names the char-
acters that he will group around Siegfried. They are first and foremost the two
couples: Siegmund and Sieglinde and Wotan and Fricka. They offer a picture
of ideal love and its opposing image of love lost. In the relationship between
Wotan and Brünnhilde, the struggle between love and duty, or love and power,
shimmers through. Siegfried remains the overriding hero at the centre of the
whole action, though Wotan’s role is strengthened in comparison to the earlier
version, especially on account of the Wanderer scenes.
In  Wagner turned to Schopenhauer’s philosophy and revised the close
of Götterdämmerung. According to the philosopher, love is a blind urge that
leads to tragedy, a tragedy from which one can emerge only through self-
renunciation. This opinion was contrary to Wagner’s conception of Siegfried,
for the meeting of Siegfried and Brünnhilde is a veritable apotheosis of love.
At first, Wagner could not compose the last act, and so broke off his work on
it. He finally succeeded in interpreting Schopenhauer in such a manner that it
did not make love an impossibility. In  he wrote in his diary for Mathilde
Wesendonck that, in contrast to the philosopher, he could prove the existence
of a ‘path to salvation for the complete pacification of the will, through love’ ,
and that this was ‘not any abstract human love, but true love on the basis of
sexual love, i.e. the love that emerges from the attraction between man and
woman’ . His letters from this period make it clear that he had come to this
conviction through his renunciation of her. He still desired her, but knew per-
fectly well that his efforts to win her would fail. Thus he had to convince him-
self that he could leave his disappointment behind by making a conscious act
of renouncing her. He knew that Mathilde loved him, and this gave him – he
was convinced of it, at least – the strength to gain the peace he needed to
 Der Ring des Nibelungen: Genesis and Prelude – Der Ring I 

compose. As in Die Meistersinger, so too in the conception of the Ring the

theme of renunciation plays a central role, together with the question as to
the possibility or impossibility of love. This becomes particularly evident in
Wagner’s numerous reworkings of the final scene.
In a letter to August Röckel, Wagner explained how he had originally
created his Nibelungen libretto with the goal of sketching out a better world.
He had assumed that man could build up a good world if he really wanted to.
But then it seemed sensible to him to show that one wrong act ‘creates a whole
world of wrongs that perishes in order to teach us how to recognize wrong-
ness, how we can root it out and found a new, just world in its place’ . Wagner
no longer wanted to offer an optimistic view of love; now his subject was a
pessimistic view of the current woeful state of the world. But he could not find
a suitable way of ending his work, so he decided ‘nevertheless’ to offer up love
as the highest power in the following verses, which Brünnhilde was to sing:

Neither chattels nor gold, nor divine splendour,

Neither house nor court, nor lordly pomp,
Neither dark contracts and their deceptive ties,
Nor the harsh law of hypocritical mores:
Blessed in joy and sorrow – let only love be!

But later on he found these words ‘tendentious’ – in other words, too direct
and, above all, unsuitable to the plot. For he had at first portrayed the love
of Brünnhilde and Siegfried in a Schopenhauerian manner and thus not as
redemptive, but as ‘fundamentally devastating’ . So he cancelled this passage,
though the praise of love as the essence of the whole Ring had become clear
to him. He created a new version that ends with the words: ‘The deepest suf-
fering of sorrowful love opened my eyes: I saw the world end.’ But this was
dropped too. In the end, Wagner could not get away from the notion of blissful
love. In his final version, Brünnhilde sings of her love for the hero whom she
has forgiven for everything. It is fitting that, for the scene in which Siegfried
discovers Brünnhilde, Wagner offered a rediscovered demonstration of the
strength of love: thus Brünnhilde loves Siegfried even before she has seen him.
This is not in the original Völsunga Saga, which was one of Wagner’s main
sources.
Just how central the topic of love was to Wagner’s conception is recognized
even by those commentators who have occupied themselves with the philo-
sophical influences on the composer. ‘Our primal, most fundamental craving,
thought Wagner, the one that does most to shape our personalities and our
lives, is the craving for love,’ writes Bryan Magee. Sandra Corse also shows in
detail how Wagner replaces Hegel’s central thesis of the power of reason with
 Richard Wagner’s Women

one insisting on the power of love. Gold is a perditious power and thus a ‘real
poison to love’ . Whoever seeks such power is egoistical and loses the ability to
love.
The themes of power and love can be seen as a dichotomy that dovetails
with the gender-specific divisions we have been investigating. Man strives for
power and primacy, while woman is the giver of sexual joy and love. With the
exception of Siegmund, it is Wagner’s women who possess the ‘natural’ gift of
being able to love unconditionally. Only women, who cannot know the will
to power, could, according to th-century conviction, develop characteristics
such as empathy and maternal loving care. And it was only women who pos-
sessed the ability to fulfil male sexual desire.
These basic ideas are to be found in Wagner’s reworkings of his Scandinavian
sources, the Völsunga Saga and the Edda, but not in the originals. Wagner
treated them in the same way that he treated the ideas of philosophers, or
the composing traditions to which he belonged: he regarded this material as
a quarry in which to mine what was useful for his creative work, and took
up what he needed and wanted. He was not concerned with revitalizing old
myths. He wanted his works to be a modern art that would speak to the mind
and soul of his audience and confront them with their own problems. The
Valkyrie Brünnhilde was, in the final version of the Ring, turned into a model
th-century woman, who was endowed with the ability to redeem man.
Wagner thus offers a re-creation of his figures of Senta, Elsa and Elisabeth, and
demonstrates the elemental importance that this ideal construct had for him.
It was also this that he meant when he wrote of the ‘other, further, more deci-
sive interpretation of the new, all-knowing Brünnhilde’ .
Although love is regarded by Wagner in a gender-specific manner, it first
seems as if his starting point is the equality of the sexes. ‘Love in its fullest
reality is only possible within sexuality: only as man and woman are we human
beings able to love truly. All other forms of love are only derived from this,
issuing from it, referring to it, or in artificial imitation of it.’ In the union of
man and woman, the human being is created both sensually and metaphysi-
cally. Only in beholding one’s beloved can the world become truly real. This is
all well and good, but then comes the decisive statement: Siegfried is without
his partner, ‘only half a person; only together with Brünnhilde does he become
a redeemer’ , and ‘the suffering, self-sacrificing woman finally becomes the true,
knowing redeemer: for love is really “the eternal feminine” itself ’ . Wagner
here describes the essence of his work: woman has to sacrifice herself, she has
to suffer, for she personifies love itself. This also makes clear that power-con-
scious, independent women were bound to offend him deeply, because they
did not fit in with his model of the sexes.
 Der Ring des Nibelungen: Genesis and Prelude – Der Ring I 

Wagner was convinced that he had created a great monument to woman

with this work. He planned to present an elaborately bound copy of his Ring
libretto as a birthday gift to the Grand Duchess of Weimar. Liszt was given the
task of getting her actually to look at it. The glorification of woman in it ‘that
has never before been accorded her’ consisted primarily in the fact that he
had created a woman in Brünnhilde who chose self-destruction ‘out of sympa-
thy’ for her beloved.
Let us take a closer look at the women and men we find in this work. When
the curtain rises, the three Rhinemaidens begin the prelude to Das Rheingold.
Their origins are in the lower spirit echelons of mythology. They are creatures
of nature, who cannot take an active part in the story; nor do they possess souls.
Their first, childlike words (‘Weia! Waga! Roll, you waves …’), which take up the
wavelike motion of the introduction, show that they are bound to nature and
lack the power to reason. Wagner took them from the Nibelungenlied, which
in turn drew on the age-old legends of the swan-maidens. So in his first draft,
Wagner imagined them as ‘three mermaids with wings like swans’ . Because
they belong to nature and thus pose no threat (one can flirt and banter with
them, but they have no claim to any power or authority), they are character-
ized in music by a wave motif that turns about itself – an image of watery
motion and at the same time of the aimlessness of their everyday existence.
But the Rhinemaidens are not quite as satisfied and happy as they at first
appear. They mock Alberich, treating him heartlessly. Just like the Sirens that
tried to seduce Odysseus, they too are a mixture of human and beast. Their
flirtatiousness makes them come across as ‘loose women’ , who understand
men and their desires and who delight in using their erotic aura so as to tease
them to the point of distraction. This is later confirmed by Fricka, who claims
that the Rhinemaidens have already seduced many a man. Even the language
that they use to praise the Rhinegold is permeated with erotic imagery: ‘We
will play lovely games with you: the river flickers, the floodwaters surge, we
will flow around you, diving, dancing and singing, with you blessed in your
watery bed! Rhinegold!’ They take a devilish delight in teasing Alberich with
their ‘feminine’ wiles. Flosshilde sings a parody of an operatic love scene; the
harp that we hear in this scene is intended to be ironic, as is the solo violin
– an instrument otherwise employed in intimate circumstances. The erotic
power of woman is tangible everywhere here, but also her power to mock and
shame. Alberich is described by the Maidens as ‘beastly’ , a ‘lustful codger’ with
a ‘toad-like form’ , a ‘hairy, humped fop’ , a ‘black, calloused, sulphurous dwarf
with a straggly beard’ . He is an outsider, probably modelled by Wagner on the
then common, negative, stereotypical image of the poverty-stricken Eastern
European Jew. His desires are primitively sexual, as is proven by his description
 Richard Wagner’s Women

of how ‘rutting fire burns and glares wild and powerful in all my limbs’ or how
his heart ‘hesitates, twitches and shrivels’ . He alternates between charm-
ing phrases such as ‘womanly child’ , ‘loveliest, sweetest maid’ and aggressive
curses such as ‘cold, bony fish’ , ‘you miserably sly, slutty, evil wenches’ or ‘faith-
less brood of nymphs’ . The insults are thus traded on both sides.
The tone changes abruptly when Alberich discovers the gold. His desire
for the golden treasure is depicted by musically ‘negative’ signs – such as
many tritones – and one senses soon that the hoard will bring bad luck. After
Alberich has disappeared and the Rhinemaidens flee to the bottom of the dark
river, the scene brightens. The world of base instincts was coupled with the
Rhinemaidens, but now the ‘breaking day’ illuminates ‘with increasing bril-
liance a castle with glittering balconies’ . Wotan and Fricka are about to appear.
Wagner took these two figures from the Edda, an Icelandic collection of
songs that itself had many different sources. Heroic myths are there combined
with the myths of the gods, and it was this work that provided Wagner with
the figure of Odin. Odin – otherwise known as Wotan, the father of all the
gods and of men – is married to Frig (later ‘Fricka’). He is the highest, oldest
god, rules over all things and all beings and over the other gods. His abode
consists of gold both outside and in. Above it is a building that serves as a
boudoir for the goddesses – the first mention of women in the saga. Although
the goddesses are rarely named, we learn that their power is no less than that
of the male gods.
Wagner must have been particularly fond of the character of Wotan, for
his autobiographical traits are obvious. ‘To be sure, it is the god who is the
noblest and the furthest from man who bears the most human traits – Wotan.
Onto him, the suffering, desiring, sad, lamenting god bound in action, Wagner
projected characteristics, feelings and moods that corresponded to his own,’
writes Peter Wapnewski. Wagner identified more and more with this figure:
‘Take a good look at him! He’s the spitting image of us,’ he wrote to August
Röckel. He wanted to create a living human being, not a bloodless figure.
Wotan is ‘the sum of contemporary intelligence’ , a rational, thinking ruler who
makes contracts and has to live by them. He is much more than an every-
day man. His various names denote him as one who directs armies, decides
over life and death in battle, and is the lord of victory – ‘Allvater’ , ‘Heervater’ ,
‘Walvater’ , ‘Siegvater’ (‘father of all’ , ‘father of armies’ , ‘father of decision’ ,
‘father of victory’). Even when Wotan lies and deceives, he is still depicted in
the music as the male ruler of the gods.
This god is ensnared in a net of greed – greed for money and power – and
broken contracts. He really should come across as a negative figure. But
his portrayal is of a noble man worthy of respect, predestined to lead and
 Der Ring des Nibelungen: Genesis and Prelude – Der Ring I 

possessed of a great aura. Wagner’s sympathies clearly lie with him – this
god who puts the love of a brother–sister couple above all convention – even
though he is a tyrant. The so-called ‘Valhalla motif ’ , which accompanies him
at his first appearance and later as well, is also a ‘Wotan motif ’ , for it often
sounds in the first act of Die Walküre whenever he is mentioned. It is heard
in his conversations with Fricka and Erda. It returns when Sieglinde explains
how Wotan appeared in her house, and later during the confrontation with
Siegfried when Wotan appears on stage for the last time. We also hear it in
Waltraud’s narrative, when she tells urgently of Wotan’s unhappiness. But this
motif also describes the imposing castle of Valhalla. Wotan’s praise for the
structure is expressed in music of a serious religiosity that is ceremonial and
ecclesiastical in tone. So despite his many lapses, the musical means used to
depict Wotan are positive ones. In fact, Wagner tried for a long time to find
the right motif for Valhalla; it was important to him, probably for the very rea-
son that it depicts not merely the castle but also the highest god.
The fact that Wotan’s power is founded on a system of laws and contracts
that he has created himself serves to underline his significance as a man, for in
the th century women were allowed to enter into contracts only in limited
cases. The symbol of Wotan’s political, legal and phallic power is his spear,
which gathers significance during the course of the drama. In a detailed pas-
sage of text (‘from the most hallowed branch of the World-Ashtree he created
a shaft for himself ’) Wagner explains the position of power that the weapon
affords him. Wagner’s preference for hierarchical structures finds itself com-
fortably at home here. Although Wotan’s opponents, Alberich and (later on)
Hagen, are also hungry for power and are clearly ‘evil’ , Wotan himself remains
noble despite his faults. ‘His world embodies numerous values that have been
closely linked with western civilization at various points in history: legality,
mutual respect, aristocratic nobility, the control of nature through societal
development, and the untouchability of social institutions’ . The Valhalla
motif symbolizes this concept of a natural order: the male god is predestined
to rule, both in a positive and a negative sense. As so often in the cultural his-
tory of the West, nobility is assigned a symbolic male gender, although Fricka
and Freia offer examples of goddesses who ought to stand on the same level as
Wotan.
In the Edda, Frig does not play a significant role. Although she is Odin’s wife,
she does not possess the same rights as he does. She knows about the fate of
all living things and Odin often asks for her advice. There are indications that
she was the goddess of marriage, but also that she indulged in sexual promis-
cuity and had children. Wagner altered several aspects of the myth in order
to present her as a wife who, instead, corresponded to the moral notions of
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Richard Wagner, c. 

 Der Ring des Nibelungen: Genesis and Prelude – Der Ring I 

his time. Thus he left out her sexual activity and her children and retained her
status as guardian of marriage. Her concern about Wotan’s relationship with
Erda, who ‘bore you [the Valkyries] in a union of wanton fancy’ is Wagner’s
invention, as is her shock at the incestuous relationship between Siegmund
and Sieglinde.
When Wotan and Fricka wake up on a flowery field on a mountainside, they
are accompanied by weighty, ceremonial-sounding wind and brass chords in
long note values that serve to depict the castle. This is praised by Wotan as
‘The honour of man, eternal power rising up to endless fame’ . With the cou-
pling of the words ‘power – eternal – honour – man’ , another gender signifier
is offered that lifts Wotan above Fricka. The wind instruments surge towards
a majestic climax: three trumpets, a bass trumpet, three trombones, a contra-
bass trombone and five Wagner tubas provide a massive sound. The Valhalla
motif accords to Wotan, the highest of the gods, a sense of determination and
self-belief. The festive wind sound of the god’s world is thus clearly different
from the musical depiction of the flirtatious Rhinemaidens. Fricka’s a cappella
cry ‘Wotan, husband! Wake up!’ is also contrasted in the greatest possible way
with the concentrated mass of brass music that we have just heard. While
Wotan intones arpeggio triads, Fricka interrupts him and urges him to stop
dreaming; her melody is marred by two tritones and is accompanied by irregu-
lar note values. The music thus also plays its part in the depiction of Fricka as
an unsympathetic character, such as she emerges from so many analyses of
Das Rheingold.
Wagner uses the argument between Wotan and Fricka to demonstrate that
‘the firm bond that binds the two is [derived] from the involuntary mistakes
of love’ and has led to the ‘mutual agony of lovelessness’ – an experience that
he had endured himself. In a letter to Liszt, he complained that ‘an over-hasty
marriage in my rd year with a woman who is respectable, but doesn’t belong
next to me’ had made him unhappy. The parallels are clearly visible. His love
for Mathilde Wesendonck had now come to full flower, and when he was com-
posing Die Walküre immediately after Das Rheingold, it became inescapably
clear to him that his marriage to Minna had truly fettered him. He wrote to
Liszt that he had long sought relief in the dream of becoming rich or famous,
in order to hide the emptiness in his heart. This had lasted until , when
he had finally become conscious of this emptiness (that was the year in which
Minna inwardly cast herself loose from him on account of his activities in the
revolution). His words reveal the inner alienation between him and Minna,
of which he was becoming ever more aware.
While he was composing the argument between Wotan and Fricka, a letter
arrived from Minna, who was in Berlin. She assumed that he was spending
 Richard Wagner’s Women

time with Mathilde Wesendonck instead of working. This prompted him to

write: ‘When I received your somewhat suspicious letter yesterday, I was just
about to compose Fricka’s appearance. It wasn’t a bad pairing at all.’ Even his
good friend Eliza Wille was promptly compared to the unsympathetic Fricka
when she went to tend her sick son during a reading of the tetralogy given by
Wagner in her home (he interpreted her departure from the room as an act of
negative criticism). He also gave Fricka qualities that he knew all too well from
his own wife. In Dresden she had angrily accused him of letting himself be
influenced by political meddlers. Fricka, similarly, is of the opinion that Loge
exerts an evil influence on Wotan. The goddess calls Wotan a ‘böser Mann’ (a
‘bad man’), and Minna had succeeded in teaching their pet parrot, Knackerchen,
to repeat the phrase ‘Wagner is a bad man’ . Richard thereupon gave her
a night lamp on which he had engraved the words ‘But he is a good man’ .
There is one more matter reminiscent of the Wagners: Fricka suffers under
the infidelity of her husband, which the latter forthrightly defends: ‘But I hon-
our women more than you like!’ Minna once wrote to a female friend that she
bore much in silence, so the topic was by no means unknown to her and her
husband. When Fricka takes pleasure in their new castle only because it might
help to keep Wotan away from having new affairs, we are reminded of Minna’s
difficulty in coping with Richard’s need to surround himself with luxury. In
, when she was taking the waters in her beloved Seelisberg above Lake
Lucerne, she was perfectly happy with her little room there: ‘There’s no silken
furniture to oppress me here – what’s the point of that trumpery?’
Fricka’s question regarding the gold also casts an ill light on her: ‘Would
the golden treasure’s glittering jewels also be suited for pretty adornments
for women?’ But when Loge tells her that she could ensure Wotan’s fidel-
ity if she owned the ring, she straightway asks: ‘Would my husband win the
gold?’ So she is primarily concerned with re-establishing marital faithfulness
on Wotan’s part. What really concerns her is the barter that her husband is
planning for her sister Freia. He promised her to the giants as their wages if
they built the castle of Valhalla. Wagner modelled Freia on the well-known
Germanic goddess of the same name, but added several characteristics of the
goddess Idun. In the sources, she was married and sexually active. He omits
both these facts, and instead makes of her a goddess of youth and love who has
to be pure and virtuous. This is derived from Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie,
where she is described as a ‘happy, gratifying, loving, gracious goddess’ . She
was regarded as the most beautiful of all the Germanic gods; Froh, Fasolt and
Wotan all praise her looks. Wagner also added characteristics that he took
from Frau Holda in Grimm; Holda was young and beautiful, friendly to people,
and loved music and singing. The reason for this positive connotation of Freia
 Der Ring des Nibelungen: Genesis and Prelude – Der Ring I 

is clear: although she seems to play a subsidiary role, Wagner has made of her
the goddess of love.
Thus the determining aspect of Freia’s motif is love. In this point, however,
there has been disagreement among Wagner scholars. Deryck Cooke points
out that commentators let themselves be misled by von Wolzogen’s division of
the Freia motif into two parts, and that this has led to innumerable misinter-
pretations. Von Wolzogen took his cue from Freia’s agitated entrance and gave
the second half of her motif the incorrect name ‘fleeing motif ’ . In other works,
it is even called the ‘anguish motif ’ . This leads to a fatal misunderstanding,
because it fails to recognize a musical reference to love as the counterpart of
power, and love as the central topic of the whole Ring des Nibelungen. The first
part of this Freia motif, heard in Loge’s narrative, signifies the sexual aspect
of love, and reappears in Die Walküre at Siegmind’s enthusiastic cry ‘Most
blessed of women!’ , as well as in Siegfried at the moment when Siegfried seeks
Brünnhilde. The second part of the motif depicts love in its all-embracing form
and is thus one of the central, most fruitful inspirations in the whole tetralogy.
This motif, split off from the rest, appears in various combinations in order to
depict different aspects of love: yearning, frustration, fulfilment, ecstasy. So
it also appears during the flight of Siegmund and Sieglinde. This important
theme is retained right through to Götterdämmerung and shows the signifi-
cance that the composer wished to assign to the power of love (Example ).

Ex. 

It is well worth using the example of Das Rheingold to examine how Wagner
depicts love in musical terms. First Alberich curses love, singing a leap of a
descending seventh while the woodwind and the horns play quick triplet leaps
that come across as startled, almost violent. But then in the course of the plot,
love – along with woman, who is indispensable to it – is depicted positively
several times. When Fricka accuses her husband of frivolously gambling away
‘love and the worth of woman’ , she sings with an emphatic upsurge and the
cellos intone the sliding, descending melody of the Rhinemaidens at ‘Love’s
power fails’ . When the giant Fasolt insists on getting Freia as his wages, he
sings of ‘woman’s delight’ and the oboe decorates his vocal line by playing the
lovely Freia motif. But the musical climax is provided by Loge. He has traipsed
across the whole world, hunted everywhere, and now asks: ‘What is more
important to man than the love of woman?’ He confirms that no one will let
go of ‘love and woman’ , and in so doing naturally refers exclusively to male
desire. At his lament that he could find no one who was prepared to renounce
 Richard Wagner’s Women

‘woman’s delight and worth’ , waves of triplets and quavers begin in the lowest
strings, piano, one after another. We hear the Freia motif, which once more
proves that it has less to do with the goddess than with love, which women by
their ‘nature’ are able to bestow. The triplets wander through the cellos and
violas to the violins, which rise further up and are outdone only by the flutes,
which play a brilliant a''', supported by a carpet of sound from the woodwind.
The woodwind are traditionally in charge of the realm of ‘love’ . The horns
join them, with long-held notes. The diatonic string accompaniment is thor-
oughly euphonious and cantabile, conveying an impression of sweetness and
joy. Suspensions, woodwind and mordents belong to the means that Wagner
uses to characterize the loving woman. The concept of love is thus primarily
understood as what woman is able to give to man. The word ‘Wonne’ (‘delight’)
culminates in a trill and an ornamental mordent: the accompaniment attains
an emphatic sweetness with its suspensions, its woodwind, and the Freia motif
at the centre of it all.
The importance of this scene in Das Rheingold to Wagner himself can be
observed from the lines that he wrote to Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein, telling
her of its completion: ‘There is a very sad note that runs through my music:
“Only he who renounces the power of love” are the words of this horribly
deep, often heartrending lament; the same melodic idea, however, is trans-
formed into “The delight and worth of woman”.’ This places a heavy burden
on woman. All the happiness of the world originates in the ability to love,
which streams forth from her. Woman guarantees joy, delight and bliss, and
this happiness is supposedly far superior to joy in mere mammon. But who-
ever exposes herself to such promises and expectations is at the same time in
danger, because the yearning for woman can turn to frustration if it finds no
satisfaction. The dependence that is the product of such a promise of happi-
ness necessarily leads to an aggressive reaction, which encompasses the possi-
bility of woman’s death, by way of revenge for a state that she has done nothing
active to bring about.
Wotan agrees to exchange the gold for the return of Freia. Her depiction
as an object of barter is a conspicuous criticism of a society that reifies and
commodifies women. When he is finally supposed to add the ring to the
hoard being exchanged for Freia – the same ring that he has just taken away
from Alberich – Wotan refuses. No one can make him change his mind until
finally the goddess Erda appears from out of a cleft in the rock to warn him of
the pernicious power of the ring. Together with the Norns, she is among the
female characters who are seers, though as the future mother of Brünnhilde
she is superior to the others. According to Grimm, fateful auguries from the
mouths of women are of great holiness in German mythology, for divination
 Der Ring des Nibelungen: Genesis and Prelude – Der Ring I 

is a female gift. ‘Men earn fame through their deeds, women through their
wisdom.’ As a relic of past ages, Erda divines things intuitively, but has noth-
ing to do with forming things actively. Her motif underlines, in musical terms,
her ascent out of the earth, but beyond this its similarity to the opening music
of Das Rheingold stresses her proximity to the Rhinemaidens. At her insistent
warning to Wotan – ‘Yield, Wotan! Yield! Flee the curse of the ring!’ – her dot-
ted notes and her octave leap have the effect of a command, though this impe-
rious tone is weakened by the periodic construction of her line ( +  bars),
its diatonicism and its minor mode. At the word ‘curse’ , there is – appropri-
ately – a tritone. Auxiliary notes are avoided in the harmony, which as a whole
reinforces the directness and forcefulness of her message. And Wotan listens
to her.
The conflict appears set aside, and the gods cross happily over the bridge
into their mighty castle. Although we know from Loge’s reasoned comments
that their conflicts are by no means at an end (‘they are hurrying to their end,
they who thought themselves so permanent’), the musical accompaniment of
this scene is appropriate to Wotan, with its full complement of wind and its
orchestral extravagance. When he greets the castle, we twice hear a massive
build-up to the sword motif. This is presumably intended as a warning, but in
musical terms it comes across as ostentation. The song of the Rhinemaidens
remains harmless, despite their contempt for the men bickering about their
gold (‘false and cowardly are those who are happy above’); their harp accom-
paniment merely adds charm to their song. The Db major close, fortissimo,
is pompous and affirmative: for  bars we hear a tonic chord at full volume.
The rainbow motif, played by trombones, tubas, trumpets and horns, rises up
more than one and a half octaves. Obviously, the music has a stronger impact
than the text that is sung to it, and thus the impression conveyed is one of
superb power, male in origin, while the Rhinemaidens and Erda, as creatures
of nature, stand apart from the action.
At the close of Das Rheingold, the women seem to have won. Fricka has
saved Freia, Freia has been freed from the clutches of the giants, and Erda
has so impressed Wotan with her warning that he has even given up the ring,
albeit unwillingly. But at Erda’s second appearance, the situation has already
changed. In Die Walküre, Fricka’s protest to Wotan sets in motion the trag-
edy of Siegmund and Sieglinde, and at the end of the tetralogy, Freia goes to
her downfall with all the other gods and goddesses. Since women here can
express themselves only by insistent requests (Fricka), begging for help (Freia),
warnings (Erda) or laments (the Rhinemaidens), they are from the start – and
remain – subservient to the men who engage directly in the action and appear
completely in command of things.
Chapter 
Wotan and the Valkyrie – Der Ring II

I     that he bought silks and beautiful wallpapers in order
to satisfy his sensual needs, Wagner needed an erotic kick to prompt his
creativity. ‘I need only the necessary charms of life in order to reach the happy
mood upon which I depend for the motifs to spring forth willingly and joyfully,’
he admitted to Liszt. His love for Mathilde Wesendonck was a great incen-
tive. When he now began the composition of Die Walküre, this young woman
inspired him to the most beautiful love scene that he had yet composed: that
between Siegmund and Sieglinde. It is so touching because in no other of his
works is the slow blossoming of love between a man and a woman depicted
so organically in its development and given such extensive musical treatment.
Tristan and Isolde fall in love with the help of a magic potion, while in the case
of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, their fixation on each other is clear right from the
start.
Composing was now a pleasure to Wagner. He spoke of his ‘complete rebirth
after completing a migration of the soul’ , and now became seized by a fanati-
cal mood ‘in which I could perceive or give regard to nothing else, neither left
nor right’ . The composition of Die Walküre was undertaken with even greater
urgency than that of Das Rheingold; it lay ‘marvellously at my fingertips’ . In
order to begin it, Wagner even interrupted the writing out of the score of Das
Rheingold: ‘I shall have no rest until I have begun Die Walküre’ . And shortly
afterwards, he wrote to Liszt: ‘I have begun Die Walküre: now I can really get
started!’ The reason for his happy haste is clear, for apart from Tristan no other
work of his bears so many transparently autobiographical traits. The composer
sought an inner contact with his beloved by writing seventeen secret messages
to her on the composition sketch of the first act of Die Walküre. They show
the parallels between their situation and that of Siegmund and Sieglinde, and
refer specifically to Act . The abbreviations he used are nowhere explained,
but are easy to understand. The first is written above the prelude to the first
act: ‘G.s.M.!’ (‘Gesegnet sei Mathilde!’ – ‘Blessed be Mathilde!’); others include
‘I.l.d.i.m.!’ (‘Ich liebe dich immer mehr!’ – ‘I love you more and more!’), ‘S.m.g.,
M.!’ (‘Sei mir gut, Mathilde!’ – ‘Be good to me, Mathilde!’) or ‘L.d.m.?’ (‘Liebst
du mich?’ – ‘Do you love me?’). When Hunding threatens to kill Siegmund
and then leaves the room, Wagner writes ‘G.w.h.d.m.verl?’ (‘Geliebte warum
hast du mich verlassen?’ – ‘Beloved, why have you forsaken me?’). The last four
messages reflect the happiness of the two characters on stage. At the words
‘Auf lach’ ich in heiliger Lust’ (‘I laugh in holy desire’), Wagner writes ‘O.w.i.d.l.!’
 Wotan and the Valkyrie – Der Ring II 

Wagner’s composition sketch for Act  of Die Walküre, with one of his secret messages to
Mathilde Wesendonck (‘G.s.m.’ – ‘Gesegnet sei Mathilde!’, ‘Blessed be Mathilde’).

(‘O wie ich dich liebe!’ – ‘Oh, how I love you!’). We hear the love motif on
several of these seventeen occasions. It is also noteworthy that a full seven of
these entries come at moments when the two lovers exchange glances, which
is plausible, given the situation of Mathilde and Richard: they had to hide their
feelings and could only communicate in public through their glances. Wagner
had written to Liszt in March : ‘A moist, glistening woman’s eye often
pierces me with renewed hope.’ Now he had Siegmund cry: ‘The rays of her
eye touched me there: I won warmth and the light of day!’
The love that suddenly overcomes one is once again the theme here: the love
that knows no boundaries and against which no lovers can defend themselves.
Sieglinde’s actions that result from this – her sexual union with Siegmund, the
flight from her husband – are an expression of this sudden event in her life.
Wagner depicts it as something natural, against which conventions appear like
imitation jewellery. The entries he made in the sketches, and his remark that
composing the first act of Die Walküre was a shattering experience for him,
both point to his need to convince Mathilde of the necessity of eloping with
him or at least of admitting the inevitability of their love. With Jessie Laussot
 Richard Wagner’s Women

nothing had held him back, just as later in his life he accepted the scandal
surrounding Cosima’s adultery as collateral damage and lied to those around
him for years. During his work on Die Walküre, he dreamed of being able to
live with Mathilde. Where Tristan und Isolde deals with the yearning that
knows no fulfilment, here he was still living out his fantasy of a union with
her. Incest is reviled by all moral laws of society, but here it becomes pure
love, based on a true mutual sense of understanding. This is also how Cosima
Wagner saw it, to whom the union of brother and sister ‘appears like a force
of nature that leads them all to perdition, meaning that nothing immoral is
depicted’ .
Wagner allocated motifs to the two main characters that describe both their
personalities and the emotional situation of the moment. Whereas Siegmund’s
melody contains an augmented second and maps out a tritone twice (between
B§ and F, then G# and D; Example ), Sieglinde is assigned graceful parallel
thirds (Example ). Her motif proceeds upwards, for – from a male perspec-
tive – she has become a bearer of hope; Siegmund’s motif descends, however,
for he is unhappy.

Ex. 

Ex. 

When the siblings first meet in Hunding’s hut, Siegmund is thirsty and
Sieglinde hurries to bring him water. Her ascending motif with parallel thirds
is heard for the first time in the violins. When she gives him the water, a cello
solo swells up and is then passed on to the other strings. It is repeated twice,
before a cello quartet and two double basses intone a calm passage that gently
accompanies a cello solo and offers Sieglinde’s motif in a slightly varied form.
This interlude,  bars long (marked ‘very calm and expressive’) creates a lyri-
cal, effusive atmosphere that nevertheless succeeds in avoiding any hint of the
sentimental. At Siegmund’s words ‘The sun smiles anew at me’ we immedi-
ately know that he is referring to his encounter with Sieglinde, for her motif is
played four times in the violins. The bassoon, the horns and the clarinets repeat
the first part in a triplet rhythm, intensifying the atmosphere. Somewhat later,
Sieglinde gives him mead, at which two clarinets play the aforementioned par-
allel thirds; in musical terms, this is a presentiment that they will fall in love
with each other. He wants to leave the house because he feels he is cursed.
She confesses to him that she too lives in sadness, making evident that they
share an unhappy lot. The love motif and Sieglinde’s motif sound immediately,
 Wotan and the Valkyrie – Der Ring II 

conveying warmth and tenderness. Time and again, Sieglinde is accompanied

by the clarinet: the Classical instrument of love here fulfils its function.
The couple’s love motif is derived from the second part of Freia’s motif.
We have already remarked that it is named incorrectly in the literature, for
it refers not to Freia personally but to love in general. We now hear the so-
called ‘sibling love’ motif as well, which with its descending tritone promises
ill. And finally, the so-called ‘Volsung suffering’ motif conveys a sense of bleak-
ness, with its minor-mode colouring and its descending triad. We sense that
their relationship, despite their burgeoning happiness, will bring troubles with
it. This impression is confirmed by the arrival of Sieglinde’s husband, Hunding.
The horns play a militaristic, dotted motif that is taken up by two tenor tubas,
two bass tubas and a contrabass tuba. They play in a uniform rhythm, result-
ing in an unusual, almost brutal severity of tone. A diminished-seventh chord
supports the harmonic accompaniment of this two-bar motif. This is one of
the few passages in Wagner’s works where militaristic allusions are used to
convey negativity, for the composer here stands squarely on the side of the
lovers. Hunding’s first question – ‘You gave him refreshment?’ – is permeated
by a tritone that intensifies the threatening mood. Hunding’s heavy bass voice
stands in contrast to the bright timbre of Siegmund’s tenor. The sense of threat
increases constantly, as also in Hunding’s vocal line, which frequently uses
descending motion. In his first phrase, ‘How he looks like the woman …’ , there
are already three tritones; despite the objective tone of the words, his manner
is daunting.
After Sieglinde has disposed of Hunding with a sleeping draught, she tells
Siegmund of the hero who is to save her. The trumpets blare out the sword
motif, sounding stiff and erect (as it were). Its connotation is thrice mascu-
line: in the use of the trumpets, in its ascending line, and in the phallic sym-
bolism of the sword. Battle, strength and potency are here evoked all at once.
Sieglinde’s desire is made evident when Siegmund draws the sword from the
tree, prompting in her a state of ‘highest intoxication’ . Cascades of notes in the
strings and a huge arsenal of brass evoke the coming sexual union. ‘Siegmund
is my name, and Siegmund I am,’ he sings jubilantly: Sieglinde’s love has given
him the identity he has long yearned for. Man needs woman in order to be
complete: Wagner here realizes on stage what he had written to August Röckel
in January . Sieglinde brings Siegmund refreshment, she protects him
from Hunding, and she understands him; the sudden switch from stormy
darkness to the full moon of spring at the end of the first act symbolizes the
life that she gives back to Siegmund.
Wotan, god and ruler of the universe, is convinced that Siegmund – and
then, after his death, Siegfried – will be able to create a world order in which
 Richard Wagner’s Women

love, not violence, reigns. A free, fearless hero has to achieve what Wotan is
denied: to gain the ring from Fafner and give it back to the Rhinemaidens.
Siegmund is an astonishing creation, for like Tristan, he places love for a
woman above everything and is ready to give up his life for her (even Tristan
needs the love potion before he can go so far). His love for Sieglinde is more
important to him than his life, and he wishes to safeguard her even after he
learns that the protection of his sword is to be denied him. He would rather
descend into hell than have to renounce her: ‘If I must fall in battle, then I will
not go to Valhalla – Hella can hold me fast!’ Brünnhilde understands in this
moment what love can mean. Such complete love is not to be found in any of
Wagner’s other male characters.
One might think that Siegmund’s great love causes him to slip into the femi-
nine domain and thus undergo a process of devaluation. By placing his love
above everything and thereby demonstrating a traditionally feminine trait,
he is indeed feminized. Nor does he correspond to the image of the strong
son that a father might wish to have. Even his first appearance occurs under
a cloud: he is on the run, afraid of being pursued, sick and suffering (though
we do not learn from whom he is fleeing or for what reason). He can draw the
sword from the tree trunk only because Wotan gives him superhuman pow-
ers. In this dichotomy of strength and weakness, he is thus really on the side
that has female connotations. Wagner, however, compensates for this by mak-
ing several gestures intended to raise his status. Contrary to the mythological
sources, Wagner makes Wotan himself the father of Siegmund, which accords
the latter a superhuman aura. The fact that he meets his own sister appears to
be the fulfilment of a divine plan, which also offers him legitimacy. ‘This incest,
accepted consciously by them both, raises them above the moral laws of both
men and gods,’ writes Dagmar Ingenschay-Goch. Despite these attributes of
high status, there is no happy ending for Siegmund – men who offer them-
selves wholly to the love of a woman are by necessity doomed to die. The same
will be true of Tristan. Men can give themselves up to woman only under an
unlucky star. Theodor Adorno, who in his Versuch über Wagner often exagger-
ates, here offers a just opinion of Siegmund that recognizes what is remarkable
about him: ‘He abjures the heroic ideal that he in fact represents better than
the hearty heroes who have already won before they even fight.’
In the second act, Wotan’s favourite daughter, Brünnhilde, appears for the
first time. Her ‘Hojotoho!’ encompasses an octave and exudes strength and
happiness. With her high trill, lasting more than two bars, and a leap onto her
high final note, she overflows with an unfettered lust for life. She expresses
solidarity with her father when he sees Fricka approaching, and announces
the latter’s arrival in an ironic undertone. Fricka is coming ‘angry, ready to
 Wotan and the Valkyrie – Der Ring II 

fight’ and is swinging a whip, treating brutally the poor beasts leading her car-
riage, which are ‘groaning from fear’ . Brünnhilde admits to Wotan that she
can cope with the battles of courageous men, but not with a bickering Fricka.
These advance descriptions provide baggage enough for Fricka before she has
even said a word herself. As with her first appearance in Das Rheingold, she
enters here in order to lay down the moral law. Her scene is weightier this time
and her intention more serious, for she is shocked that Wotan has accepted
Sieglinde’s adultery. Wotan despises the oath of fidelity that binds human
beings who do not love each other any more, and he remarks that he also
needs these two humans in order to create a hero who, without divine pro-
tection, will free himself from the law of the gods. ‘You only understand what
you already know,’ he complains to Fricka; incidentally, Wagner made simi-
lar accusations to his wife. Fricka replies that Wotan’s support of Siegmund
ignores the order of things, and that he will therefore lose his power. She urges
him agitatedly to take away his son’s ‘throbbing sword’ – a symbol of power
and male potency at one and the same time. She complains about the scandal
of incest, Sieglinde’s adultery, Wotan’s adultery and the time he spends with
the Valkyries. She exhorts her husband to accept that Siegmund cannot be the
hero who will perform heroic acts independently of the law of the gods.
Fricka’s complaint is dominated by the dejection and wrath motifs, the
despair and the so-called ‘need of the gods’ motifs and by the threatening aura
of Hunding’s motif. This concentration of negative motifs gives an unpleasant
undercurrent to her words and makes her appear unsympathetic. Wotan on
the other hand, who is busy defending love, is accompanied by the love motif
in all its sweetness and by the spring motif (‘Winter storms gave way to the
moon of love’). These give his words a positive connotation. But he becomes
increasingly bitter as he understands that he has to give up his plans. Fricka
shows dignity at the close of their argument, consistent with her status as a
goddess. Her exhortation ‘May the holy honour of your eternal wife protect
her shield today!’ is accompanied in ceremonial fashion by chords in the vio-
lins in a triplet rhythm. The cor anglais, which with Wagner often has the role
of supplication and lament, is heard here with insistent, long-held notes.
In one interpretation, the goddess is seen as a conservative character, who
is unwilling ‘to accept change and the dissolution of a pre-industrial eco-
nomic and social state’ . As so often in the reception of this figure, the fact
is overlooked that Fricka is a woman. Is it not probable that Wagner was less
concerned with the problems of industrialization than with the impact of the
progressive women of his day, who often felt that they had a moral impera-
tive? In  Bettina von Arnim wrote Dies Buch gehört dem König (‘This book
belongs to the king’), a report on social misery in Prussia, which was directed
 Richard Wagner’s Women

at Friedrich Wilhelm IV. It created a great stir and was for a while even banned
in Bavaria. Many bourgeois women were gaining ability and experience in the
social field, and while this brought them recognition, it also brought them
enmity, for in some areas they began to dispute man’s competencies. More
than once, Richard and Cosima criticized ‘emancipated women’ . Richard did
not particularly like Emma Herwegh, who was not only a revolutionary but
also a friend of Minna’s. He was friends with Malwida von Meysenbug, but
treated her with the same critical distance as he did Liszt’s life partner, the
Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, whom in his letters he ironically named
the ‘Kapellmistress’ .
Liszt came to Zürich in  together with his lover and her daughter Marie,
where on the occasion of his birthday on  October he accompanied the first
act and the ‘argument’ scene of the second act of the Walküre in a semi-public
performance in the Hotel Baur au Lac. Heinrich Porges later attended the
‘Master’s’ rehearsals for the Wotan/Fricka scene and kept notes of his com-
ments. He remarked that Fricka should acquire a lordly air in the course of her
argument. She cries out ‘sharply, in a cutting manner’ , her ‘urging’ becomes
‘ever more lordly’ , her argument is made ‘in harsh tones’ and ‘with the great-
est passion’ , and her expression is one of ‘noble disgust’ . She is thus not to
descend into henpecking (although at the world première, Wagner remarked
on Fricka’s entry from the left and said ‘The devil always enters stage-left’).
The public was to have the impression of a mighty conflict, and they were to
take sides with Wotan. Fricka, the partner of the highest god, had to keep her
dignity, and yet her complaint had to come across as harsh and unbending.
Wotan is notably described by Porges in more comprehensive terms. He ‘has
an expression of daemonic energy that breaks out in ever more terrible fash-
ion and overflows with emotional violence’ . His condition is given ‘convulsive
expression’ . Within his ‘silence, surrounded by a mysterious sublimity’ there
takes place ‘a deep self-examination’ . This broad emotional spectrum, plus
the manner in which he is glorified despite his anger, is intended to make the
public sympathize with Wotan and not his wife.
When the twin lovers flee from Hunding, there occurs a further gender-
specific asymmetry. Whereas Siegmund is still overcome by his love, Sieglinde
places all the guilt for their incest on herself. She says that she is ‘dishonoured’ ,
‘unholy’ , ‘disgraced’ and ‘without honour’; she feels horror at their ‘most awful
of sins’ and describes herself as ‘ignominious’ and ‘cursed’ . Siegmund, on the
other hand, is to her ‘the purest man’ and ‘noble’ . It is noteworthy that she
tries to stop the men who would murder Siegmund by crying out ‘Kill me first!’
Siegmund does not want to go to Valhalla, for she will not be there and the
place is thus devoid of love. But as Will Humburg has written perceptively, ‘In
 Wotan and the Valkyrie – Der Ring II 

the world that is Wagner’s Ring, weapons and women – thus war and love –
cannot exist at one and the same time.’ Just as Brünnhilde later cannot be
an equestrian Valkyrie and a loving partner, so here too a union is impossible.
It is not permissible for a man to be subsumed into the world of love, and so
Siegmund must die.
A new hero has to emerge. Brünnhilde tells Sieglinde that she is bearing
a child and that he will be a hero. For the first time we hear the triumphant
Siegfried motif: ‘The noblest hero of the world you carry, woman, in your
sheltering womb!’ The leap of a fourth with its ascending sixth chord encom-
passes a ninth and is followed by Sieglinde’s hymnic cry ‘O noblest miracle!
Most glorious of women!’ To the sound of the Siegfried and the sword motifs,
Brünnhilde gives the pregnant mother the fragments of Siegmund’s shattered
sword. In an instant, the pregnant Sieglinde is strong again, for she is going to
bear the greatest hero and nothing can be more uplifting for her than to be
chosen for that purpose. Brünnhilde has helped to bring this about, and thus
Sieglinde’s gratitude gushes out on her. ‘For him, whom we loved, I will save
the dearest [child]: May the reward of my thanks one day smile upon you!’
The redemption motif that sounds at the words ‘O noblest miracle’
(Example ) has prompted the most varied interpretations. Sieglinde’s excla-
mation is directed at Brünnhilde, but only because she is protecting the male
heir who is so important for the continuing plot. There is also something auto-
biographical about all this. When his son Siegfried was born several years later,
Wagner was irrepressibly excited, and projected so much onto him that the
boy found it difficult to bear the resulting heavy burden. The praise of mother-
hood, the birth of a hero, and the proof of an overriding love are all united in
this exclamation. The redemption motif is further ennobled by only appearing
again at the very close of the whole Ring, when Brünnhilde takes her farewell
from the world: ‘Siegfried! Siegfried! See! Your wife greets you in bliss!’ At both
points it is Siegfried who prompts this enthusiasm (and thus the appearance of
the motif ).

Ex. 

After the dramatic events surrounding Siegmund’s death, the third act of
Die Walküre presents us with the Valkyries themselves. They have no clear
mythological origins but appear repeatedly in various myths, legends and
folktales as strong, independent female characters. In some cases they pos-
sess supernatural powers, in others they are the daughters and sisters of kings.
Odin sent them into battle in order to gather up fallen heroes and accompany
 Richard Wagner’s Women

them into his heaven. They are also called ‘Wunschmädchen’ (‘Wish maidens’)
in the sources – hence Wotan’s reference to Brünnhilde as his ‘Wunschmaid’ .
The notion that death need not be the end of things originated in the ancient
world and was recorded in various narratives. Wagner took numerous aspects
of his Valkyries from the Edda, from Ludwig Frauer’s book Die Walkyrien der
skandinavisch-germanischen Götter- und Heldensage (‘The Valkyries of the
Scandinavian-Germanic sagas of gods and heroes’), and from Jakob Grimm’s
Deutsche Mythologie of . Grimm provided him with the information
regarding their number, their armour – spear, shield, helmet and mail shirt
– and the fact that they fly through the air and are associated with the clouds.
Wotan is responsible for the fate of heroes and for battles. By accompanying
the fallen to Valhalla (to heaven in Grimm), the Valkyries carry out Wotan’s
wishes and are thus both dependent upon him and subordinate to him.
The dependence of the Valkyries on male authority is a given right from
the start. And yet they must have seemed foreign, even shocking, to the audi-
ences of the th century, for they play a role that is normally assigned to men.
They are well-versed horsewomen, they ride out into the world, they help
their paternal warlord to prompt heroes into battle and then take the dead
with them to Valhalla. They thus assumed the function of an ‘ideal’ for many a
woman who thought along the lines of the poet Karoline von Günderrode. In
, well before Wagner’s birth, she had written: ‘I often had the unwomanly
desire to cast myself into the wild hurly-burly of battle and to die – why was I
not born a man!’ The female body was subject to strict rules in the th cen-
tury, when bourgeois women were required to forgo sports and physical labour
and keep their bodies covered in as many situations as possible. So these
armed Valkyries, storming off on their horses, were a provocation for many.
The Valkyries certainly had their precursors in operatic history. The
Venetian operas of the th century had not a few warlike Amazons. It was
fashionable at that time to put brave warrior-ettes on the operatic stage, and
between  and  there were some  operas on the topic (making, in
total,  per cent of all operatic performances). The typical characteristics of
these Amazons make them very similar to Brünnhilde. The Amazon is always
single, though in the course of the plot she realizes that it is never satisfying
to be without a man. At the close she renounces her original calling, marries,
and subordinates herself to her husband. The Valkyries are created for battle,
not for love. According to Grimm they were co-responsible for the outcome
of a battle, though Wagner does not go that far. Ludwig Frauer believed that
their function was less to participate in battle than to perform acts of homage
to male bravery (such as offering drinks to the heroes). Their asexuality pre-
vented them from exuding any sense of desire that might provoke anxiety.
 Wotan and the Valkyrie – Der Ring II 

Wagner was thus able to endow the Valkyries with traditionally masculine
attributes without making them laughable, though later they did inspire jokes
and caricatures, with their armour breastplates and helmets.
The fact that the Valkyries are dependent on Wotan does not mean, however,
that the music they are assigned is itself powerless. The ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ ,
which with ‘Siegfried’s Funeral March’ is one of the most popular numbers
from the Ring, first and foremost gives musical expression to the rapid move-
ment of their galloping horses. Perhaps Wagner was influenced by Jakob
Grimm, who wrote of the gods: ‘Their riding and driving is portrayed as being
so impetuous that it makes a loud noise and is the reason for the reverbera-
tion of the elements.’ This effect is achieved in Wagner by dotted rhythms,
a quick tempo, cascading strings and an ascending motif. The Valkyrie motif
thrusts upwards and makes a powerful impression. Ascending leaps of a third
and a fourth in the trumpets accompany their cries of jubilation, and the large
intervallic leaps of the Valkyries’s cries and their augmented thirds have a
grandiose impact. The dotted rhythm, the ascending melody, the ‘Heia-ho’ of
the women, expressing their unrestrained lust for life, the extreme leaps in
the vocal lines, the militaristic rhythms of the accompanying brass – all this
sweeps one along. The percussion booms out and the women laugh together.
‘There was work to do,’ sings Siegrune: the Valkyries are needed and are happy
at their work. The musical means that traditionally belong to the realm of men
are now applied to women. Although the music describes the activities rather
than the character of these women, it nevertheless suggests things that were
perhaps unintended by Wagner. Here women are at work who have a differ-
ent kind of life from what was the norm in the era of corsets – and on top
of this, they enjoy themselves while doing it. ‘The gods were allowed forbid-
den passions without having to take into account the moral sensibilities of the
audience,’ writes McGlathery. This is exactly the case here, for Wagner offers
a wild musical portrayal of the divine Valkyries’ vitality and action-filled life,
and this diverges from the gender-specific view of woman that was generally
accepted in his time. Yet all this is still only possible, nota bene, because the
Valkyries are dependent on male, paternal authority.
This piece only has two motifs – the Valkyrie motif and the riding motif.
They are very similar, and, in fact, one could even speak of a single motif. This
explains why the piece as a whole comes across as rather uncomplicated (and
might be a reason why it rapidly became popular). In the first  bars, six harps
play – though any suggestion that they have a connection with the Valkyries’
‘fanatical enthusiasm for war’ would be incorrect. For one thing, they give
expression to a general joie de vivre, while harps are on the whole associated
with traditionally emotional matters and thus have ‘feminine’ connotations.
  Richard Wagner’s Women

Perhaps they are meant to remind us that the Valkyries, despite their unusual
appearance, are still women after all.
Meanwhile, Fricka’s powers of persuasion have changed Wotan’s mind. He
feels forced to reject Siegmund and orders Brünnhilde to protect Hunding. But
she goes against his order. When Wotan hunts her down, furious at her diso-
bedience, the Valkyries gather round their sister to protect her and offer their
solidarity. ‘The dishonour touches us as it does our sister,’ they sing. Finally,
though, they have to give way, for the father’s authority is too great. Wotan
reveals himself to be terribly brutal: he intends to let his favourite daughter
be raped by a man she does not know, just because she guessed his innermost
desire and acted upon it. He furthermore threatens her with the spectre of
her ‘feminization’ . She will no longer be allowed to ride through the air, but
will have to obey a ‘lordly man’ . He will shame her – something that should be
unimaginable to a loving father. Worse still, he paints a detailed picture of her
future state. The flower of her virginity will wither, she will have to do what her
man wishes, sitting at his hearth, spinning, ‘the object and plaything of eve-
ryone who mocks her’ . So we see again that Wagner regarded spinning – an
activity that in his day secured the livelihood of many people – as contempt-
ible women’s work.
The orchestra dies away and we hear individual woodwind instruments, then
the clarinet alone. ‘Was it so shameful, what I did wrong?’ asks Brünnhilde.
Wagner usually chooses unaccompanied song for disquieting situations and
does so here too. When she asks her father to tell her precisely where her guilt
lies, oboes underline the tone of her request. It is not by chance that her ques-
tion ‘Was it so base, what I did to you?’ includes three descending sevenths.
The interval of a seventh will later – in a new motif for Brünnhilde – prove to
be a symbol of the loving woman. The woodwind instruments comment on
her statement in gentle tones, reminiscent of church music. At the words ‘he
who breathed this love into my heart’ (Example ) there is a grand climax in
the orchestra and Brünnhilde once more sings a descending leap of a seventh
at the word ‘love’ , stretched out over three bars – for it was love that led to
her decision. As punishment, Brünnhilde is to be placed in a lengthy sleep,
only to awaken in order to marry a man and to serve him. The ‘unfeeling maid’
will thus, upon waking, become a suffering, self-sacrificing woman, as Wagner

# #œ #### ˙™ ˙™ œ
Ex.  & œ #œ œ œ œ ˙ œ œ ˙
Der die - se Lie - - be mir ins Herz ge - haucht
(‘he who breathed this love into my heart’)
 Wotan and the Valkyrie – Der Ring II 

writes. Brünnhilde, terrified, sings of the ‘cowardly braggart’ and of the ‘most
cowardly man’ for whom she could become easy prey. It seems that Wagner
had just as low an opinion of fearful men as he did of spinning women.
The emotional reversal that occurs when Wotan has to say farewell to his
beloved daughter is one of the most moving scenes in the whole of the Ring.
‘Fare well, you brave, magnificent child!’ he cries, after he has taxed her with
her supposed misdeeds. The music is majestic and makes it clear that Wotan’s
words come from the depths of his heart. Wotan has never sung anything sim-
ilar, nor will he ever again. He realizes that he will never see his daughter again.
He has to give up what is most precious to him, for his daughter means more
to him than does his own wife. It is touching that Wagner, who preferred his
son to his daughters, here offers such a moving love scene between a father
and a daughter. Wotan knows that Brünnhilde will no longer offer him his cup
at meal times; she will no more greet him or ride next to him. He is punishing
the girl severely, but speaks to her as he would to a lover. He is here no longer
the ‘strict power politician’ , the ‘unscrupulous god, obsessed with power’ , as
Udo Bermbach calls him and as he is often described. He is a loving man. The
opera closes as a fire surrounds the rock where Brünnhilde lies asleep.
In the first two parts of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner offered three con-
trasting female characters as counterparts to the opposite poles of Wotan and
Alberich. In her first appearance in Rheingold, Fricka is fixed and implacable.
At her second appearance she is allowed greater dignity, though in the eyes
of Wagner commentators she has remained a jealous, unsympathetic, cold
defender of oaths and justice. Yet she is the one who complains about incest
and adultery – things that were surely bound to offend even the enlightened
society of Wagner’s day. She is in the end more human than her husband, for
while Wotan wishes to defend his situation and even strengthen it at the cost
of others, she argues in favour of her sister. Yet Wagner finally manages to
prompt the public, the critics and experts alike into siding with Wotan, despite
his negative characteristics. They also identify with Brünnhilde, the agent of
loving empathy. Wagner thus remains true to his intentions of showing the
‘enabling of love’ in this work: ‘not just imaginary, abstract, unsensual love (the
only one allowed to us) but the love of “I” and “you”.’ His own plight with
Minna, Mathilde and Otto Wesendonck led him to see himself reflected in
the conflict of Sieglinde, Siegmund and Hunding, and the result was a music
that was intensely passionate and sensual. This is why he shows such special
sympathy for the fate of Sieglinde, who has been forced into marriage with
an unloved, overbearing man. It is also why, in the character of Siegmund,
he affords nobility to a man who is given loving characteristics traditionally
regarded as feminine, even though he must pay for it with his life. Sieglinde
 Richard Wagner’s Women

weighs herself down with feelings of guilt and thus reveals herself as a typi-
cally female bearer of sorrows. It is Brünnhilde who makes a great transfor-
mation. In the th century, a militant woman could be accepted only if she
was asexual and subject to instructions from men. Now that Brünnhilde has
learnt what ‘love’ means, she must lay down her armour, sever relations with
her father, and subordinate herself to her lover. And this is the deed that gives
the whole Ring des Nibelungen a purpose.
Chapter 
Siegfried and Women – Der Ring III

‘H     that gleams about us, Hail to the sun that shines on
us!’ These were Cosima’s first words after the birth of her son, and she
took them from the third act of Siegfried. When the midwife congratulated
her on a ‘little boy’ , she cried, laughed and prayed in a happy delirium. She
knew that her husband wished for a son more than anything else and she
was overjoyed that after two daughters she could at last give him a strapping
boy. She was ‘great, truly great,’ he cried in praise of her. But Cosima would
not let it go at that: ‘What is great about me can only be the reflection of his
being.’ The father was overjoyed by the arrival of his first and only son, who
seemed far more valuable to him than his two daughters. Siegfried, he claimed,
would give him a new, long life, a life that had at last found meaning. He
composed his Siegfried Idyll out of the necessity of giving artistic expression
to his overflowing joy. He altered the text of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and
sang: ‘Whoever has had the great success of being this wife’s husband, yea, he
who even receives a boy from her …’ and called this his ‘Hymn to Joy’ . When
Siegfried smiled at him, he was truly moved, and observed that if this boy did
not become better and greater than his father, then all physiognomy was a lie.
The baby was loaded down with exaggerated expectations: ‘He is to realize the
things that I haven’t been able to do.’ Time and again the father occupied him-
self with Siegfried’s future, pondering how he would develop. And all this was
dutifully noted down by Cosima. Richard called him ‘Fidi the Olympian’ and
believed that he would ‘become something incredible and be a great worry to
us!’ Like every other boy, he was to have a wild-oats-sowing youth ahead of
him: ‘Of course, this period need not be as petty as it was with me, and maybe
it can be ennobled by something like a war for him to take part in or by travels
bound up with personal exertions – to Norway or somewhere like that.’ He
planned to learn Latin with him and bubbled over with plans: ‘At the time
he becomes a man, he has to go among the people, he has to learn adversity,
he has to romp about, he has to misbehave – otherwise he’ll become a day-
dreamer or perhaps even a cretin like we see in the King of Bavaria. He should
be taught by Nietzsche, offer an open table twice a week, and every Saturday
we’ll expect a report.’
Traveller, military man, houseowner, scholar – these were the exalted
expectations that occupied the father in his plans for the boy. Siegfried natu-
rally had to have a far more significant life than his sisters. This preference
for the male heir was wholly in tune with the times. Richard’s love for his son,
 Richard Wagner’s Women

however, seems to go beyond this to the point almost of an obsession. We can-

not deny the parallels to Der Ring des Nibelungen. Both the real and the ficti-
tious Siegfried are the object of projections, and high expectations are held of
them both. It is noteworthy that ‘No character in Wagner enters a drama with
such expectations as Siegfried and none seems to have engaged the feelings of
his creator so warmly.’ On him lay the hopes for a better world, just as Wagner
also expected acts of genius from his son. The sword-swinging, swashbuckling
hero had provided Wagner with his first inspiration and remained central to
his work on the tetralogy. Long before he turned into four operas what he
had originally planned as one, his attention was centred on Brünnhilde’s lover.
One whole drama is accorded to Siegfried’s coming of age, whereas, in the
sources that inspired Wagner, this aspect of Siegfried’s life is mentioned gen-
erally as pre-history.
Siegfried is to stand apart as a free, shining conqueror before he is led down
a false path by external circumstances. In Wagner’s essay Die Wibelungen, his
first foray into the topic, the young man already occupies considerable space.
Wagner began the first sketch of the whole project with Siegfrieds Tod and Der
Junge Siegfried, and called the first version of  a ‘great heroic opera’ . ‘My
hero is not to give the impression of a being completely unaware – in Siegfried,
rather, I have endeavoured to portray the most perfect man imaginable, whose
highest awareness expresses itself … always and only in living and acting in
the truly here-and-now.’ Thus Wagner describes the character of Siegfried. He
is ‘the truly naked man’ , who can be recognized ‘in every flush of blood, every
tremor of his powerful muscles in unconstricted, freest possible motion’; he
is ‘the truest man’ . As if there were not enough differences already, this set
Siegfried quite apart from any bourgeois woman of the th century, for she
was never supposed to show any ‘muscles’ at all, let alone any of the Siegfried,
rippling kind: instead, she wore tightly strung corsets that deprived her of air
and restricted her freedom of movement. The fact that Wagner protects the
boy Siegfried from undue suffering while letting Brünnhilde endure it to the
full shows the paternal care that he afforded to this character.
Wotan wants a hero who will live in freedom and independence from the
will of any other and who is capable of great deeds. Hegel’s idea of the high-
est stage of individual consciousness becomes evident here. Siegfried begins
his life close to nature, living far from civilization. Later, he achieves every-
thing intuitively until he encounters society and comes into conflict with it.
The directness embodied by the young hero results in a certain musical sim-
plicity that many critics interpret as superficiality. Siegfried has been seen by
some as one-sided – an impulsive, immature dolt, a coarse boy with restricted
intellectual abilities, a ‘heroic muscle-man with a bear on a leash’ . Some
 Siegfried and Women – Der Ring III 

have relegated him to the second rank of characters in the tetralogy, behind
Wotan and Brünnhilde, even though his experiences and adventures ensure
him a leading, expansive role in the plot. Wagner, however, regarded him as a
superman. In his first flush of enthusiasm for King Ludwig II, he compared his
royal lord with his stage character: ‘If I am Wotan, then he is my Siegfried,’ he
wrote. In the first years of their acquaintance, his patron displayed a tender
love for Wagner and looked after him generously. Would Wagner have com-
pared him to a naïve yokel? Further proof of Siegfried’s ‘greatness’ is offered
in the notes made by Heinrich Porges when he attended the first production
of the tetralogy under Wagner’s supervision. The naturalness of expression
that Wagner desired of Siegfried was not to be mistaken for self-indulgence.
Siegfried was in no way to give the impression of being the opposite of a civi-
lized man. His boyish traits were to be interpreted as ‘involuntary expressions
of a personality that is heroic to the very core of its being’ , and he was to be
portrayed accordingly. Porges describes Siegfried as ‘energetic and heroic’ , yet
at the same time he possesses ‘a deeply felt emotional life’ .
In the course of the drama, the protagonist continually gives the impres-
sion of strength and power. He plays fearlessly with bears, miraculously tam-
ing them, he forges a sword and by means of it becomes almighty. He slays
a dragon, kills the hated Mime, shatters Wotan’s spear, and walks through
the fire on Brünnhilde’s rock as the strongest hero of all time. Later, a magic
potion will lead him off the righteous path, but he is fundamentally upright
and innocent of character, a decent man who is at peace with himself. No one
in the whole of the Ring is given such a thoroughly positive, optimistic musi-
cal characterization. Wagner wanted the Siegfried motif to sound always with
the commanding grandeur that is appropriate to him. The ascending triadic
motif with its leap of a fourth encompasses a ninth – one of the largest inter-
vals – which signifies the greatest possible degree of activity and a spirit of
enterprise; it then moves into the more gracious parallel major. Its march-like
character and its double-dotting give it a rhythmic tautness that underlines
its masculine/gladiatorial quality (Example ). The motif displays similari-
ties to the ascending, military-sounding, dotted sword motif (see Example ),
and the two often sound together: ‘Siegfried is unthinkable, as it were, with-
out his sword.’ A total of six motifs are allocated to the youthful hero, all of
which have an opening ascent and are dominated by leaps of a fourth or a fifth.
These are the motifs known as the Siegfried, horn, sword, youthful strength
and work motifs, to which is added the motif from the smelting song (also
called the forging motif; Examples –). No other character in the Ring is
depicted in such a multi-faceted, thoroughly positive manner, or is endowed
with such a positive, masculine identity. All these motifs signify decisiveness
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Ex. 

Ex. 

Ex. 

Ex. 

Ex. 

Ex. 

Ex. 

and certainty of victory. Later, in Götterdämmerung, the solemn, grandiose

hero motif will appear too (Example ).
It is in keeping with the overall heroic impression that the sword motif,
unlike numerous others, hardly ever changes. Wagner thereby under-
scores the hero’s inner determination and stability of character. In the opera,
Siegfried does not obtain his sword from the dwarf Regin, as he does in the
Nibelungenlied, on which Wagner based his plot. Instead it is a gift from his
divine relative, and this in turn underlines his own elevated, quasi-divine sta-
tus. The Nothung, Siegfried and sword motifs all possess masculine, com-
bative connotations. The horn, moreover, is an instrument of the hunt – the
purpose of which is killing animals – and the sword as a phallic symbol is an
instrument for subjugating women. The motif of youthful strength also refers
to sexual potency. We often hear the key of C major in connection with the
sword, which suits Siegfried’s character, being the tonality of the heroic per
se. These attributes of a male lust for life are used extensively by Wagner to
embroider Siegfried’s personality with positive traits.
Right at the start, Siegfried – described as a ‘rosy hero’ and a ‘thriving boy’
– comes into conflict with the unscrupulous Mime. The contrast is a marked
 Siegfried and Women – Der Ring III 

one. The fortissimo climax of Siegfried’s vibrant first appearance lies three and
a half octaves above the note with which it began. ‘That is hero music!’ com-
ments Ulrich Drüner. Diatonicism and an ascending triad are very often
heard in Siegfried’s vocal line, these being signs of dynamism and a zest for
action. Mime, on the other hand – who in the opening evening of the tetral-
ogy appeared as a clever, hard-working smith – has mutated into a negative
character. Siegfried curses him as ugly, grizzled and grey, small and crooked,
hunchbacked and limping, with hanging ears and bleary eyes. Mime is seman-
ticized as feminine: ‘While I sit at home, sweating hard at work, you gad
about to your heart’s content,’ he complains to Siegfried. This is how a woman
might complain about her husband, for the situation corresponds to a tradi-
tional family configuration. Mime has brought up Siegfried, fed him, clothed
him since he was tiny: he cooks for him and makes his bed. Later, he mixes
poison – also an activity traditionally associated with women – and he fails
to forge the sword – a task that requires strength. This feminine element is
intended to give him a further unsympathetic trait, namely weakness. He is
assigned a motif whose melodic line is dominated by small intervals and turns
about itself. His simple song (‘as a suckling child I took you in’) is influenced
by synagogue chant, meaning that his character combines both sexist and
anti-Semitic elements. Grace notes always signify something playful or child-
like, something unmasculine, and if they are sung by a man, they normally
have some connection to wooing. Here, they sound absurd. Mime’s line is
characterized by disruptive, often chromatic passages. His music is in formal
terms conventional and has numerous strophic and melodic repetitions that
give him something of an obsessive manner. The ABA form that Wagner criti-
cized as formalistic in the history of opera is here employed intentionally for
its negative connotations.
Siegfried feels only hatred for this substitute mother. He is disgusted by the
food Mime cooks and cannot sleep in the bed that Mime makes for him. He
loves animals more than he does Mime, and several times threatens to kill him.
The boy is on the threshold of sexual awakening and is eager to know more. He
yearns for a woman and dreams of his mother. When he asks about her, we
hear a tender melody. Small intervallic steps and sighing motifs show that the
composer here imagines something truly moving – he always entertained an
emotional, almost sentimental notion of maternal love.
In the next scene, Wotan encounters Mime. Wotan is assigned a chorale-
like, atmospheric, diatonic music, which accords him dignity, divine grandeur
and respect, and this contrasts strongly with the abrupt, erratic lines of Mime,
whose music is, furthermore, accompanied by a thinned-out orchestration.
Wotan is characterized by a power and magnificence fitting for kings and
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Siegfried’s sword, by Franz Stassen

 Siegfried and Women – Der Ring III 

heroes. The noble sound of trombones and trumpets, his measured diction
and long note values are the hallmarks of his appearance here. In his stage
directions for the Bayreuth world première, Wagner demanded that Wotan
‘combine calm nobility with a superior, sometimes rather mocking irony’ .
The irony at this point arises from Wotan’s refusing to take the smith seriously,
knowing himself to be Mime’s better. Mime tests Wotan with three ques-
tions: about the Nibelungs, the giants and finally the gods. The music becomes
increasingly intense in reflection of this hierarchical ordering. The Nibelungs
and the giants belong to the lower orders. The circulatio figure in Mime’s motif
during his first question reflects the subterranean travails of the Nibelungs,
while the giants are depicted, in the second question, by their clumsy, cumber-
some motif. At the third question, Wotan displays his superiority: when he
answers ‘The gods live in cloudy heights. Valhalla is the name of their hall,’
five tubas and a contrabass trombone intone the solemn Valhalla motif, while
three trombones and a bass trumpet add a triplet rhythm of the kind that was
a popular feature of ceremonial march music. Wotan’s answers thus display a
marked difference from the somewhat hysterical impression made by Mime’s
vocal line. At the words ‘with [his spear’s] point, Wotan rules the world’ ,
we find a typical example of the depiction of power. The melodic leaps, the
syllabic diction, the use of pause as a means of climax, and the cadence at the
close all together convey an impression of great wisdom and maturity (see
Example , p. ).
Wotan’s three ensuing questions deal with the Volsungs, then the sword,
and finally who will forge the sword anew. Wotan shows emotion when admit-
ting that the Volsungs are ‘dearest’ to him, once more eliciting our sympathy.
At the last question, which Mime cannot answer, we hear the motif of youth-
ful strength that depicts Siegfried’s superhuman power. Mime despairs over
the final question and capitulates. The whole scene, therefore, consolidates the
insuperable claim to power of the (male) god, above and beyond the dialogue
itself.
The smelting and forging scene in the last part of Act  is among the musical
highpoints of the opera, along with the slaying of the dragon and the discov-
ery of Brünnhilde. As already noted, the sword (or dagger or sabre) has to the
present day served as a symbol of the dominant man, ready and able to defend
himself. Beginning with the sagas of Celtic and Germanic origin, via historical
adventure novels to the fantasy tales of today, the sword has been the weapon
of the hero, which guarantees his victory from the outset. The sword is here
accorded magical powers and we already sense that Siegfried will carry out
impressive deeds with it. The sword also ennobles the one who bears it. It
is noteworthy that neither Mime’s failure to forge it, nor Siegfried’s success,
 Richard Wagner’s Women

is mentioned in the Scandinavian sources. The dialogue of this whole scene

is Wagner’s own, from Mime’s decision to teach Siegfried fear to the heroic
words that Siegfried sings when he forges the sword. Only he possesses the
supernatural abilities necessary to forge it. According to the stage directions,
while Siegfried stands firm at the anvil and works Mime jumps up, hurries and
scurries around, or falls to the floor in fright. The drink that he offers Siegfried
to refresh him at his work is rejected: ‘Away with that porridge! I don’t need it
– pap won’t bake a sword!’ Nor does he want the food Mime prepares for him:
‘I’m melting steel and you’re brewing soup?’ And he mocks him too: ‘Mime the
artist is learning to cook – being a smith isn’t to his taste any more.’ Time and
again, traditionally ‘feminine’ activities are drawn upon in negative fashion to
portray Mime.
The forging songs with their loud orchestral accompaniment and extended
periodic structure make Siegfried’s superhuman physical strength tangi-
ble. And the phallic associations are no doubt intentional when, pouring the
molten steel into a bar shape, Siegfried sings: ‘He becomes rigid and stiff, the
lordly, hard steel …’ It almost seems as though Siegfried is engaging in a con-
versation with his phallus as it swells and becomes erect. ‘With hard blows I’ll
stretch you out, now the red shame will disappear: become as cold and hard
as you can.’ The act culminates in a mighty explosion of power and strength.
Siegfried ‘tames’ his sword and makes it subservient to him. Physical strength
and technical arts unite in mastery of the material. The musical accompani-
ment increases in tension from strophe to strophe. Both songs are in a varied
strophic form. At the melting-down of the steel, the periodically structured
blocks are strung together. The ecstatic refrain ‘Ho-ho, ho-ho ho-hei!’ is
accompanied by the whole orchestra, while the individual strophes undergo
a process of enrichment: in the second strophe the strings accompany the
song with rapid demisemiquavers; in the third six harps are added and the
woodwind play semiquaver sextuplets. Wagner gave himself much trouble
with these songs of Siegfried’s, as the many reworkings in his compositional
sketches show.
The / metre of the smelting song moves into four/four-metre for the
forging song, and there is a further monumental climax, interrupted only by
Mime’s grotesque interjections. The strokes on the anvil are intensified by the
orchestra, and strength threatens to slide into sheer brutality. The Nothung
motif comprises an octave leap – just two notes whose large compass
expresses the greatest possible intensity. The ostentatious accompaniment is
written so that it simultaneously underlines the greatness of the man working
at the anvil.
Wagner himself was enthusiastic about his forging songs. He wrote to his
 Siegfried and Women – Der Ring III 

friend Mathilde Maier that his neighbour heard him singing and playing while
he composed them and wanted to know what was the ‘terribly majestic’ music
that he was playing. He told him that Siegfried was:

firing up the forge with the bellows in order to melt down the steel frag-
ments of the sword of victory he has shattered (which once was broken
in two in the hands of his dying father). In order to do this, he had to
fell the mightiest ash tree in the forest and turn it into coals. The sparks
of the angry oak spray him, but it is to no avail – the oak must burn and
melt the steel for him. The result will be a fearfully hard sword, which
will serve to do the bravest deeds. ‘You see before you’ , I said, ‘a ter-
rible kind of artist, and that is why his song is almost that of a majestic
lament.’ The smelting song prompted an exalted mood in me. It would
sound terribly beautiful with orchestra!

Massive, mighty, fearfully hard, terrible, majestic, exalted mood, terri-

bly beautiful – Wagner obviously took pleasure in the physical strength and
potency of his protagonist. The ash tree cannot be big enough, for the sword
has to have the sharpest possible blade: the image of a contemporary super-
man is undeniable. In the musical construction of this grandiose aural event
the striving for dominance and tyranny are afforded positive musical conno-
tations. It was precisely this musical impact that Wagner calculated. On one
occasion the composer became angry with a tenor who sang the forging songs
in a bland manner that he found Italianate, which was bound to provoke his
disgust: he had, in earlier years, compared Italian opera music with a ‘pros-
titute’ , and French opera with a ‘coquette’ , thus indicating that both demon-
strated specific, negative, feminine stereotypes. The musical style of these
operas seemed feminized to him. So it makes sense that at the first rehearsals
of the Ring, he demanded that the forging songs be sung ‘with the mightiest
strength’ .
In the second act, too, there are only male protagonists. After an encoun-
ter between Wotan and Alberich, Siegfried’s courage is demonstrated. He asks
himself how his mother might have looked; he thinks of her painful death
and immediately the ‘heroic’ tone of his music changes, thus underscoring
Wagner’s equation of woman (here, in particular, the motherly woman) with
love itself. ‘Oh, how I, her son, would like to see my mother!’ he muses pas-
sionately, stretching out the word ‘mother’ for longer than necessary. His voice
becomes calmer, the solo violin takes over from the gently sounding clarinet,
and the thinner orchestration signalizes emotional femininity. We then hear
the Freia motif as a symbol of womanly love.
The motif of Fafner the giant, who has transformed himself into a dangerous
 Richard Wagner’s Women

dragon, now has a fearsome air on account of its descending tritone. Mime
warns Siegfried thus:

Do you see that dark cave mouth there?

In it dwells a dreadful, savage dragon:
He is enormously fierce and huge;
His hideous jaws open up;
With one gulp the brute
Will swallow you up, with hair and hide …
Poisonous slaver flows from him;
If the drops of his spittle touch you
Your flesh and bones will waste away.

Beneath the surface, this is a matter of male sexual initiation, for what is
described here is essentially a ‘geography of fear of the female genitalia’ .
While Siegfried is preparing for battle, the horn and Siegfried motifs are heard
several times as an expression of a pioneering spirit and joie de vivre. We sense
already that he will be successful in his act of derring-do. During the battle
with the dragon, his success is again confirmed in advance when we hear the
sword and horn motifs announce his imminent victory. Siegfried is assigned a
triadic melodic line, the dragon chromaticism – a classical opposition of ‘good’
and ‘evil’ . The slaying of Fafner is not in the Germanic myths, but in the opera
it serves to underline the hero’s courage.
Whether Siegfried forges a sword, plays with a bear, slays a dragon, lis-
tens to the song of a bird, makes a flute and plays it, plays his horn for pleas-
ure, attacks the Wanderer or wins a woman, the musical accompaniment of
the youthful hero’s adventures is always affirmative. It lays out his exploits
spaciously before us. The brief scene after the dialogue with the Woodbird,
just before Siegfried comes upon Fafner, can serve as a representative example.
He blows ‘a lusty tune’ on his horn and we hear juxtaposed the horn motif, the
Siegfried motif and again the horn motif. Together, they depict his passion for
life.
Although Siegfried reveals a degree of brutality in his murder of Mime, it is
simply a matter of his succeeding at everything he does. He is spared in several
ways from being branded a mere killer. Even when Fafner lies vanquished and
dying, he describes his murderer as a ‘bright-eyed’ and ‘blossoming’ boy. Since
Mime for his part has been planning to kill Siegfried, the latter’s murder of his
foster father is a kind of pre-emptive self-defence. Mime is depicted so con-
vincingly as a devious villain that his death almost seems justified. Siegfried in
any case emerges without any metaphorical blood on his hands.
The last act of Siegfried was composed fifteen years after the completion of
 Siegfried and Women – Der Ring III 

the first two. In  Wagner decided to interrupt his work to write Tristan
und Isolde. He also wrote Meistersinger in the meantime, with the result that
during those years his compositional art gained considerably in subtlety. The
agitated prelude with its symphonic treatment of different motifs woven
together (there are seven in total) displays the transformation in Wagner’s
manner of working with his material. This agitation might be a result of the
coming storm, which culminates in an effective thunderclap on stage, but the
whole is dominated by the Erda and nature motifs. Since they are almost iden-
tical, they demonstrate again Erda’s proximity to nature.
The conductor Hans Richter was surprised by the orchestration of this prel-
ude, and asked Wagner about it. The latter answered, laughing: ‘Yes, it sounds
childlike and strident: like a virgin who has never loved and never become a
mother and who has something demonically childlike and strident about her
when compared to what is holy and noble. One can only imagine a witch’s
voice as something high-pitched and childlike; the throbbing sound of the
heart is absent from it.’ A childlike, strident witch’s voice is not necessarily
what one might imagine for Erda, given her nobility of character and her con-
tralto tessitura, while the mention of a barren virgin who has never become a
mother is odd, when one remembers that Erda has borne eight children.
Wotan appears again, this time to speak with Erda, for he is worried about
the future. He wants to ask her about it and summons her to the surface of the
earth. ‘No one knows more than you,’ he sings, and calls her ‘the wisest woman
in the world’ . Wotan is convinced of her paramount intelligence, but he is the
one who has the say over everything. A melodic ascent depicts Erda rising up
out of the earth. As she sings, however, the accompaniment sinks downwards
and is marked by calm note values – a sign of powerlessness, as if Erda were
barely able to open her eyes from sleep. She herself is characterized by the
wan sound of woodwind and brass, especially the cor anglais. This makes her
seem frail in comparison to Wotan, with his tempestuous, blustering ques-
tions. His passages are livelier and employ a mesh of motifs that refer beyond
the immediate situation, and he enjoys a more varied orchestration. He tells of
the ‘loveliest Volsung’ and the ‘bravest boy’ , who is ‘happy in love, free of envy’
– another semantically positive appraisal of the hero. The Siegfried and sword
motifs sound together several times, brilliantly, optimistically, along with the
jubilant motif of Siegfried’s love, all surging upwards (and this despite the fact
that Siegfried has just murdered his foster father). By contrast, the mixing of
the nature motif with the Erda motif, rising up from the depths, underscores
the th-century trend to equate woman with nature, thereby underlining her
passivity. Thus there arises once more a gender-specific divide between the
active man and the sleepy, nature-bound woman.
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Erda admits that she was once conquered by love, and we hear the Valhalla
theme that alludes to Wotan’s sexual trespasses. She makes no bones about her
criticism: ‘Men’s deeds make my mind misty; even I, with all my wisdom, was
once overcome by a ruler. I bore Wotan a wish-maiden.’ Thus she is a victim
of the god who impregnated her by force. That took away her courage to face
life, so now she is sleepy and passive. She casts the god’s own contradictions
back at him and has no intention of meeting his wishes: how can he punish
Brünnhilde’s decision if it was he who urged her to action? How can he, who
protects the law, rule by perjury? When she can only refer him to the Norns
and to Brünnhilde, who cannot serve him, he sends her angrily back ‘to eter-
nal sleep’ , down in the underworld. Although Wagner claimed that Erda is the
inexorable voice of Wotan’s own conscience, never to be silenced, it is clear at
the same time how dependent she is upon him. She cannot return to seclusion
until Wotan wishes it.
Wagner normally allies himself clearly with one party or the other, so whose
side does he take here? Sandra Corse believes that Erda evokes memories of
someone who understood herself neither as Wotan’s slave nor as a self-sacrific-
ing woman, but who possessed an older power. She sees in Wagner’s unfavour-
able depiction of her his emotional defence against matriarchal influence.
But we could just as easily read a criticism of Wotan into this, to whom erotic
passion was more important than the power of knowledge and who overcame
the wise woman against her will. As a result Erda gained a moral superiority
over Wotan, because she neither lies nor deceives and keeps out of the con-
cerns of the world. But this view must be regarded as doubtful too, for in the
end it is the music that allocates sympathies, and these are on Wotan’s side.
After Erda has disappeared, we come to the first and only encounter between
Wotan and Siegfried. Wotan’s spear serves as a symbol of his authority, but he
has to admit that the younger man is superior to him. ‘Whoever would win
her [Brünnhilde] would make me powerless for ever!’ he sings, sensing that
his supremacy is endangered. In a letter, Wagner offered an important reason
for the conflict between the two men: Wotan is jealous of Siegfried. ‘Before
his downfall he becomes so involuntarily human at last, that – quite against
his highest intentions – his old pride rears its head once more, prompted
(nota bene!) by jealousy for Brünnhilde. For she has become his sorest point.’
Siegfried shatters Wotan’s spear in two with his sharp sword and the path
before him lies open: he can stride through the wall of fire and discover his
‘dear companion’ .
The following love scene can in part be explained by an important auto-
biographical event. In  Wagner was under the influence of Schopenhauer
and still wanted to prove that love figures in the course of the tetralogy ‘in an
 Siegfried and Women – Der Ring III 

essentially ruinous manner’ . He stood by the version that he had sketched
in –. In , however – after his geographical separation from Mathilde
Wesendonck – he saw things differently. He began a letter to Schopenhauer, of
which a fragment is extant, in order to make it clear to the philosopher that
it is the greatest joy of all to know that one is loved. There had thus been a
sea-change in his thinking. Until now, he had believed – presumably under
the impact of the Jessie Laussot debacle – that he had to show that love has
no future in a world ruled by embargoes and laws, in which evil triumphs. But
now he wanted to show that love between two people can be a great source of
happiness, even if they have to renounce it. For he knew that Mathilde loved
him. The importance he places on ‘sexual’ love (Geschlechtsliebe) in his diary
entry is noteworthy. He thus consciously included desire in his idea of love.
In Tristan he wished to demonstrate that women too can desire, which meant
breaking a mighty taboo of his time. To create a monument to agape would
have been too little for him. He wanted to depict in all its details the erotic
attraction that can seize hold of two people, and he wanted to enhance it
through music.
Only some  per cent of the duration of the whole opera remains for
Brünnhilde. But her encounter with Siegfried turns it into the most intense,
musically colourful act, which makes up for its comparative brevity. Much of
this scene was taken from the Völsunga Saga, in which Sigurd kills the dragon
Fafnir and rides away on his horse Grani until he comes to a fire. Sigurd sees
someone sleeping there, clad in full armour; taking off the person’s helmet, he
discovers that it is a woman. He cuts open her armour with his sword as if it
were a dress. In the opera, Brünnhilde’s text is influenced by the same source.
There, she calls out, ‘Hail to thee, day, hail to you all, sons of the day … Hail
to thee, beneficent earth!’ And she tells Sigurd, ‘I killed Halmgunnar in battle
(to whom Odhin had promised the victory); but Odhin punished me by pierc-
ing me with the thorn of sleep and said that I would never again enjoy victory
and should be married off. But I then swore to marry none who knew fear.’
There is therefore a considerable correlation between the original source and
Wagner’s reworking of it.
In correspondence with Ludwig II, Wagner underlined the significance of
this loving encounter: ‘This is not a familial scene with children: the fate of
the world depends on this divine innocence and uniqueness of the one who
does not know fear! – Yes! – My Siegfried is beautiful, my noble beloved! My
king! –’ . He said to Cosima that the scene depicted the highest joy through
the union of two perfect beings. Both are perfect; and above and beyond this,
Siegfried is beautiful, divine and unique (again we see that this character is far
from a doltish lout).
 Richard Wagner’s Women

The flames flicker up before Brünnhilde’s rock where she lies sleeping. The
surging of the fire is associated with Siegfried’s sexual desire, and from here
on Wagner makes use of an eroticized language. Siegfried plunges into the
fire and blows his horn repeatedly, a reminiscence of the hunt and the slay-
ing of prey. He is the one who brings light to Brünnhilde and opens her eyes.
Arpeggios on the solo harp introduce this last scene, followed by the Freia
motif, which depicts the love of woman per se. Then we hear Brünnhilde’s sleep
motif, repeated several times. It encompasses a sixth and depicts the feminine
ability to love. When he stands before the reclining figure, Siegfried wants to
loosen its armour: ‘Come, my sword, cut the iron!’ Since Brünnhilde loses her
mythical, divine power when her armour is cut open, the phallic sword also
signifies the loss of her virginity. The Valkyrie motif refers to her previous life,
but when Siegfried opens up her armour, we hear the sword motif: thus he
vanquishes the Valkyrie.
At the words ‘Who is the hero who awakens me?’ we hear the Siegfried
motif, and solemn chords in the wind instruments are interrupted several
times by trills on the strings. Wagner rarely uses the trill, and here it depicts
newly discovered love. It is, above all, the harps that accompany Brünnhilde’s
first words, as is traditional for female characters. The opulent, jubilant sound
is moving, for this scene is constructed as an apotheosis. First Siegfried’s
mother is celebrated and praised by him (‘O hail to the mother who bore me’),
and then by Brünnhilde (‘O hail the mother who bore you’). (This further
proves Siegfried’s primacy, for Brünnhilde’s mother, Erda, remains unmen-
tioned.) He praises Brünnhilde as ‘resplendent star’ , she him as ‘victorious
light’ and ‘radiant life’ . She is thus for him an object, whereas for her he is life
itself. Brünnhilde dreamed of her lover in advance, just as Elsa and Senta did.
She admits that she has always loved him and, later, that she has always known
him (which is a male fantasy, for before she was put to sleep she knew only
that Sieglinde was pregnant). Now she draws her strength and ability from her
unconditional love for Siegfried. ‘What you do not know, I know for you: but
I am only knowing because I love you.’ If one puts this illogicality aside for a
moment, we see that Wagner has placed man and woman on the same level,
to the extent that love has seized them both equally. They are in an ecstatic
state. He wanted to demonstrate how strong the erotic power between man
and woman can be, and he unleashes glittering jubilation to portray a fantasy
union – a fusion of bodies and souls.
This dream world is fragile, however, for apart from their ecstasy the two
are by no means in the same condition. Brünnhilde’s new life is coupled with
a horrendous loss. Her protecting armour, her adventures in the saddle, her
community with her sisters, her divine status – all this has been taken away
 Siegfried and Women – Der Ring III 

from her. Now no longer either goddess or Valkyrie, she becomes aware of her
own defencelessness. This is also evident in that she possesses no motif of her
own that can be compared to the Siegfried motif. The Valkyrie motif signifies
only her past, and anyway does not belong to her alone. And the Brünnhilde
motif that will depict her in Götterdämmerung does not appear until the final
part of the tetralogy. The so-called Weibmotiv (‘woman’s motif ’) is wrongly
named, for it refers to both Siegfried and Brünnhilde. It appears only in this
scene, is divided equally between them, and then disappears. It thus depicts
the union of the two of them and would better be termed the ‘union’ motif.
Siegfried is astonished at his own sexual desires: ‘O woman, extinguish the
flames! Still the seething fire!’ Brünnhilde on the other hand is afraid: ‘He broke
my mail shirt and helmet [‘Brünne und Helm’]: I am no longer Brünnhilde!’
Her loss of identity is degrading to her. ‘The day of my shame shines bright
in the light of the sun! O Siegfried! Siegfried! See my fear! […] Do not destroy
the one who loves you! […] So do not touch me, do not besmirch me.’ This
request to be spared and to retain her sexual innocence is accompanied by a
small group in the orchestra, in contrast to the turbulent music that surges
around Siegfried. Here their musical inequality begins, for it is the agitated
music that comes across as positive, while emotions such as fear and defen-
siveness, which are Brünnhilde’s lot, are conveyed in correspondingly negative
terms. Plunged into a completely new world, she takes fright at the realm of
sexuality as yet unknown to her. Her vocabulary is extreme: she speaks of ter-
ror, of sad darkness, of the shame that clouds her vision. Her world until now,
the world of the Valkyries, was different. When she mentions it, we hear war-
like sounds, martial triplets, and she sings, ‘Not even a god ever approached
me! The heroes bowed shyly before the virgin.’ Men shrank from the Valkyries,
who were regarded as untouchable – but that is all at an end. Her former iden-
tity is destroyed and as yet she has no new, stable notion of who she is.
Brünnhilde now becomes increasingly agitated. She asks Siegfried if he does
not notice the ‘wild fire’ and the streams of blood that rage towards him: ‘Aren’t
you afraid of the wild, raging woman?’ Here, the Valkyrie motif sounds first,
reminding us of her earlier life. At her question as to whether he fears her, we
hear the Siegfried motif. It is thus the music that gives us the answer, and his
dominance remains unendangered. In the ensuing duet she sings presciently
of the coming twilight of the gods, while he sings only of her. The remarks that
Cosima made when Richard played her this last act at the piano are inappro-
priate and incorrect: ‘Brünnhilde’s fear as intimation of the downfall; her vir-
ginal, pure love to Siegfried truly German.’ Brünnhilde is not ‘deutsch’ , nor
is her love virginally pure, at least not at this moment. For a woman to show
sexual desire was contrary to the bourgeois norms of the day and it is thus
 Richard Wagner’s Women

understandable that Cosima did not want to know about it. Robert Donington
is probably on the right track when he takes the couple’s last two words in this
act – ‘laughing death!’ – as a reference to the metaphorical sexual climax in
music with which the opera closes.
On the one hand, Brünnhilde exudes the caring, empathetic, motherly love
that is bestowed on the person loved and that senses his desires and needs. Just
as Siegmund awakened her pity, and just as she saved Sieglinde from a sense
of care, so now she experiences maternal feelings: ‘You were my thoughts, my
cares!’ But on the other hand, Wagner allows Brünnhilde sexual desire, even
though it is soon overlaid by fear. The joyful surge of desire that we see in
Siegfried himself is impossible for her, for by accepting her sexuality she has
lost her high status.
While Siegfried is singing of his happiness in his jubilant final song, prais-
ing the sun, the day, the light and the world, and thus rejoicing in his very
being, Brünnhilde takes leave of her earlier life: ‘Fare well, Valhalla’s shining
world!’ She wants nothing more to do with the splendour of the gods, and
their race may now end. The Norns should break their rope. Everything can
pass away except for Siegfried’s and her love. These are dark words, which
contrast strangely with the joy of her partner. It is as if her whole life up to now
is extinguished. All she has is ‘radiant love, laughing death!’ She is at the mercy
of her lover. To describe the music to this passage as the ‘elation of two souls
who represent the ideal type of the new human being’ constitutes a failure
to acknowledge the domestication of woman and her reduction to an append-
age of man. If one follows this interpretation to its logical conclusion, it means
that the exclusive fixation of the woman on the man that was the norm in the
th century is here still taken as a given.
At the close of this act, the Siegfried motif is incorporated into Siegfried’s
love motif, though it is barely audible. This means that Siegfried’s love for
Brünnhilde is thematicized, and not the reverse. We perceive everything from
his point of view, not least because the Siegfried motif is heard a total of seven
times. It is noteworthy that it closes the whole opera and sounds at the very
moment that Brünnhilde falls into his arms. Wagner wrote of Brünnhilde’s
awakening: ‘We are not what we can be and should be until woman is awak-
ened’ , though in this connection we must remember the concluding thought
that he added several months later: ‘The creative work of this highest, self-
destroying will is the winning of the fearless, always loving human being:
Siegfried.’ Woman is to acknowledge and admire the intellectual greatness
of man so that he may achieve what he can and should be: the highest stage of
human development.
Chapter 
Götterdämmerung – Der Ring IV

T     of the tetralogy begins with a complex web of different

motifs. Three Norns appear who, like the Rhinemaidens, live in their own
element, distant from the everyday world. Like Erda, they belong to nature
and cannot intervene in the course of events, but only comment on them. This
powerlessness is predetermined, for in a world in which power is striven for
(Wotan on one side, Alberich on the other), women have no decision-making
function.
The mood grows gloomy and soporific, resembling the scene in Siegfried
when Erda was woken from her sleep by Wotan. An ascending motif normally
signals a positive attitude to life, but here it is reminiscent of Erda’s ascent
from the underworld, marked by dark-hued minor thirds in the woodwind.
The wave motif that originally accompanied the Rhinemaidens appears,
underlining the Norns’ proximity to nature. They are weaving a rope – weav-
ing being traditionally a task for women – and while they do so they lament
the state of the world. Because the light is so dim, they see poorly and cannot
pick up the threads. They weave badly, the rope is too loose; moreover, their
senses are confused. Their songs recapitulate the past, they tell of the future
and fret about things, making dark insinuations: ‘Do you know what will hap-
pen?’ The thin sound of the cor anglais is often heard, expressing lamentation
and sadness, and is partnered by the bass clarinet or the bassoon, whose tones
similarly convey a sense of sombreness. The minor-mode atmosphere bright-
ens only when the First Norn remembers the World Ash Tree – at which the
orchestra rises up to a brief, triumphant climax, for this is the tale of Wotan’s
regime. He is not criticized for having cut a branch from the mighty tree in
order to make the shaft of his spear. On the contrary, the description of him
as a ‘bold god’ extols him. Instead, the Norn laments her own discomfort: ‘My
song becomes melancholy of mind.’ Over an agitated commentary from the
orchestra, the Second Norn describes how Wotan and Siegfried fought. Then
the Third Norn takes over: ‘The castle looms up, built by giants’ – an opportu-
nity for Wagner to unfold a grandiose orchestral sound. Even when the Norn
imagines how the wood of the World Ash Tree begins to burn and how the
hall is destroyed (thus how the gods will perish), the music remains heroic and
grandiose, for it refers to Wotan and Siegfried. While the women are often
assigned only a pale wind accompaniment, the men are accorded trombones
and trumpets. If we compare the timbres allocated to Erda and the Norns with
the brilliant sword motif of Siegfried, which encompasses a shining major
 Richard Wagner’s Women

third (see Example , p. ), and consider that the natural beings whose con-
notations are negative are all female, it becomes evident that Wagner is con-
trasting man, striving for freedom, with woman whose nature is close to the
world of animals and plants.
Alberich’s theft of the Rhinegold is mentioned briefly, and then the rope
breaks. The Norns now have no further purpose: they are capable of nothing
more. After Siegfried’s horn is heard, sounding joyfully in the distance, they
descend into the earth, returning to their mother. Their ‘dusky toned retro-
spection’ , as Wapnewski describes their opening song, and their description
of the catastrophe in Valhalla, leave behind them a sombre atmosphere. This
is intentional, for the Norns symbolize a world out of balance and lurching
towards calamity. And again the Norns reinforce the prejudice that has repeat-
edly been applied to the female gender: they are passive, natural beings who
leave all action to men and content themselves with lamentation. When they
mention Siegfried and Wotan, the men who could intervene to change things,
their powerlessness and lack of energy is contrasted with the drama and action
of the male world. The Norns spin a useless rope, whereas the heroes handle
spear and sword.
After this, the orchestra intones a transitional music that begins with sol-
emn, portentous brass chords. The hero motif is presented for the first time,
juxtaposed with the new Brünnhilde motif (see Example , p. ). Brünnhilde
has lost her status as a Valkyrie. The former Amazon has been transformed
into a giver of unconditional love. Whereas the male connotations of the
ascending Valkyrie motif signalled both action and the urge for action, and
while it appeared in all the scenes where Brünnhilde, her sisters and their
father appeared, it has been almost completely absent since Brünnhilde was
put to sleep. This new, ‘feminine’ Brünnhilde motif is almost exclusively the
preserve of woodwind and strings – a slimmer orchestration. It comprises an
ornament around a single note and a leap of a sixth followed by a descending
seventh. This accords it a playful, romantic aura that equates femininity with
love, and its descending leap suggests the sufferings to come. This descend-
ing seventh is an expression of the female ability to love and is heard time
and again in the Ring in connection with loving women, as in Die Walküre,
when Brünnhilde has to defend herself before Wotan for having tried to
save Siegmund. Large downward leaps normally signal conflict of some kind,
which is in no way contradictory of an expression of womanly happiness in
love, for the loving women in the Ring are always pursued by ill fortune. Freia’s
motif, which as we have established does not belong exclusively to her but is
an expression of feminine love per se, also contains two seventh leaps. So does
the so-called ‘redemption’ motif.
 Götterdämmerung – Der Ring IV 

The new Brünnhilde motif is always distorted, melodically, harmonically or

rhythmically, whenever Brünnhilde is in conflict – for example, when Siegfried,
in the form of Gunther, overpowers her (for a magic potion has made him lose
his memory and forget his love for her). The upward leap of a sixth in her
motif is weakened by a so-called ‘sympathetic mordent’ (an ornamental figu-
ration around a single note). Since the mordent in Parsifal depicts the sym-
pathetic gaze of the Messiah and in Der fliegende Holländer Senta’s empathy
for the seafarer, we can assume that it here signifies Brünnhilde’s sympathy
for her partner, an emotion that belongs to her new role as a loving, caring
wife. In musical terms, her new motif signifies a weakening in comparison to
the strong ascent of the dotted Valkyrie motif, but on the other hand it is also
ennobled through her new role as a loving partner.
At first glance, one might imagine that the transitional music that precedes
the love scene between Siegfried and Brünnhilde depicts both partners as of
equal importance. But this is a false impression: in fact, the opposite is the
case. It becomes clear here how differently the composer values man and
woman. The heroic motif assigned to Siegfried is tonic-orientated, clearly
defined, has block-like harmony made up of triads placed one upon another,
keeps to a clear tonality, is played by the horns, and is marked ‘kräftig’ (‘pow-
erfully’). The sumptuous unfolding of his motif serves to describe Siegfried’s
strength, for the child of nature has turned into a superb hero. Brünnhilde’s
motif, however, tends to the dominant and is accompanied by a more tender,
typically ‘feminine’ orchestration of woodwind, violins and cellos. Its tonal-
ity is uncertain; the motifs do not begin and end in pronounced fashion as
with Siegfried, but thread into each other like chains and are marked ‘very
tender’ . Whereas the hero’s motif forms the beginning and end of the prel-
ude, the motif of the woman is heard in the middle. The manner in which the
hero’s motif is presented is also noteworthy. It undergoes a massive fortissimo
climax and is offered twice by the full orchestra in all its brilliance (with eight
horns, three trumpets, four trombones and six harps). In the background,
several wind instruments play a portion of the Valkyrie motif, referring here
to the horse that Brünnhilde gives to Siegfried. Although Brünnhilde’s motif
is repeated several times while Siegfried’s motif appears only at the begin-
ning and the end, Siegfried nevertheless achieves primacy on account of the
character, the orchestration and the presentation of his motif. Brünnhilde by
contrast is accorded a ‘natural’ strength, feminine and loving. By acknowl-
edging the male hero, she is depicted as a loving woman who is clearly sub-
ordinated to the man. This has failed to occur to any Wagner commentator
hitherto. Wapnewski, for example, insists that the melodies of both motifs
exist ‘in loving unity with each other’ , as if one could place them on the
 Richard Wagner’s Women

same level. Such an assessment is based on the notion of biologically deter-

mined character differences between men and women, and for this reason
is obsolete.
Brünnhilde takes a loving farewell of Siegfried, who sets off into the world
to live out his adventures. He takes more than her horse with him, as she con-
firms: ‘The strength of my maidenly race was taken by the hero to whom I now
bow. Deprived of knowledge, but full of desires; rich in love, but devoid of
strength.’ She stays at home like a bourgeois housewife, while he sets out to do
new deeds. Wagner wants to show here that the loving woman is not just obe-
dient and empathetic, but also possesses the ability to feel so much a part of
her beloved that her own life is subordinate to that of her man. This explains
the tender ornamentation of the Brünnhilde motif, as well as its descend-
ing seventh leap, which depicts a loss of power and thus a voluntary act of
submission.
There ensues a passage of rare musical beauty as the two assure each other
of their mutual love, though their dialogue thematicizes Brünnhilde’s transfor-
mation: her only anxiety is that she is worth too little to her ‘dear hero’ because
she is no longer a warrior–Valkyrie. She has given him the wisdom of the runes,
which has drained her of power, and she begs him not to despise her. Siegfried
answers that she must not be angry if he pays no attention to the wisdom she
has given him. He has learnt one thing: to think of Brünnhilde. Brünnhilde
immediately replies and says he should rather think of his own deeds – of
his walking through the fire and breaking open her armour. Brünnhilde thus
pre-empts his later disregard for her own person. By placing him above her-
self, she establishes a hierarchy that was typical for the th century. Siegfried
thereupon gives her the ring that he won from the dragon, wishing that it may
give her strength. Brünnhilde in return gives him her horse, which is to go
with him everywhere. A strong woman, capable of resistance against her own
father, here subordinates herself to her husband and freely gives him her horse,
the symbol of her independence. She thus represents an ‘ideal’ type, a repre-
sentative example of the contemporary definition of the feminine.
Now the first act begins and we enter the world of Gunther, Hagen and
Gutrune. The Gibichungs are weak human beings, conniving and corrupt,
who inhabit a world of empty convention and deceit. Since the Queen of the
Gibichungs gave herself to the ‘dark elf ’ Alberich and begat a son by him, the
whole race is tainted, for she acted from base motives – out of greed. Gutrune
is manipulated by the men around her, though she is ready to lie in order
to win a husband, for she would never otherwise find one by relying on her
charms alone. Wagner gives her a theme that is cautious in mood, with three
descending fifths. It symbolizes a certain narrowness of mind and does not
 Götterdämmerung – Der Ring IV 

make her appear particularly sympathetic. Hagen’s motif comprises a tritone

leap downwards – an unmistakable sign of evil – while Gunther does not even
possess a motif of his own.
In the conversation between Gunther, Hagen and Gutrune, the Valkyrie
motif appears briefly when Hagen speaks of Brünnhilde. In his description,
she still lies sleeping, surrounded by fire, at which point she was still a Valkyrie.
Siegfried is described by Hagen as ‘the most superb hero’ , also as a ‘cheerful’
and ‘dear’ hero who wanders about ‘carefree’ . His miraculous deeds are retold
again, and the account reinforces the positive image of him. It remains posi-
tive even when Siegfried betrays Brünnhilde, a betrayal that is not condemned
morally, for Siegfried is led to it by a magic potion and thus commits no wilful
deed. He is given absolution and retains his heroic status. After he has drunk
the potion, the bartering of the women begins. ‘I gladly give you Gutrune,’ says
Gunther, and Siegfried replies ‘I will bring you Brünnhilde.’ This is one of the
rare occasions when the Valkyrie motif sounds once more. Siegfried is thus
not thinking of the loving woman Brünnhilde, for his senses are befogged, but
of the Valkyrie, who is, in effect, unknown to him: this is morally an apologetic
tactic on Wagner’s part, who thus absolves Siegfried of any guilt.
In the interlude that accompanies the transition to Brünnhilde’s rock, the
world of men is followed by that of women. According to the stage direc-
tions, Brünnhilde sits, covering Siegfried’s ring with kisses. The clarinet plays
her theme twice, then the oboe and strings repeat it, together with the harp.
Two clarinets revel in blissful parallel thirds, underscoring the importance
of woman as the refuge that offers care and relief. The prominent presence
of the woodwind is intended to stress her ability to love. Now the Valkyrie
Waltraute appears in order to urge her sister to give back the ring that she has
received from Siegfried. This would redeem the world from its curse. Both
women serve men: Waltraute their father, Brünnhilde her lover. This is the
longest dialogue between two women to be found in the whole Ring. It allows
Brünnhilde to sing in praise of women who are willingly subordinate to men.
The music has two large-scale climaxes that deal with her love for Siegfried.
She sings of how Wotan condemned her to sleep, but how it all came to a
good end. ‘Thus the punishment brought me the highest happiness: the most
magnificent hero won me as his wife; in his love I shine and laugh in delight.’
The music underscores her belonging to Siegfried. The second climax occurs
after Waltraute has described how Wotan sits brooding in silence on his high
throne. For Brünnhilde, however, the ring that her sister begs for so insistently
is a pledge of love that she would not give away for anything in the world:
‘More than Valhalla’s delights, more than eternal fame – that’s what the ring is
to me […] for out of it Siegfried’s love shines blissfully upon me.’ She describes
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Brünnhilde and her sister Waltraute –

the feminine woman and the warrior Valkyrie
 Götterdämmerung – Der Ring IV 

loving Siegfried as the highest act and at this moment the jubilant ‘Siegfried
love’ motif sounds in a broad curve (Example ).

Ex. 

It is all the same to her if the gods disappear, if the Norns’ rope breaks, if
the night of destruction falls and brings the twilight of the gods with it – she
only belongs to Siegfried, and only that matters. He is for ever and ever her
‘inheritance, my own, my one and all’ . She accepts the coming destruction of
Valhalla, and the past does not interest her any more. She says her farewells to
the world of the gods in radical fashion. The words ‘May your proud castle fall
to dust!’ confirm her final break with the father she had once loved so much.
Given their earlier, close father–daughter relationship, it is disturbing that
she can so readily approve of his destruction: it gives her character a hitherto
unsuspected hard edge. In , when the Ring libretto was not yet in its final
form, August Röckel found her behaviour ‘hard and wilful’ , to which Wagner
replied that this is a misjudgement of her character, for she had broken with
Wotan and all the gods only out of love:

Since Siegfried has fully awoken her, she has no more knowledge except
the knowledge of love. Well – since Siegfried has gone into the world,
the symbol of this love is this ring. Since Wodan requires it from her,
she now only sees the reason for her break with Wodan (because she
acted out of love). And she only knows one thing now: that she has
given up everything godly for the sake of love. But she knows that love
is the only thing that is truly divine. So Valhalla’s splendour may perish,
but the ring – (love) – is something that she will not sacrifice.

Six times Wagner mentions the love with which Brünnhilde is suffused, and
his displeasure at Röckel’s misinterpretation of the situation is correspond-
ingly clear.
A radical shift in the plot occurs after Waltraute’s departure. Brünnhilde
joyfully awaits Siegfried’s return but is then confronted by a threatening
stranger. This scene is clear in the first prose draft of Der Nibelungen-Mythus:
‘Already robbed of her maidenhood by Siegfried, she has also lost her superhu-
man powers. She has given all her knowledge to Siegfried – who does not use
it – and she is as powerless as a normal woman and can offer only ineffective
opposition to this new, daring suitor.’ As a Valkyrie she could have defended
herself, but as a ‘normal woman’ she is helpless in the face of this attack. Of
all things, it is her loss of virginity – which really marks the beginning of her
adulthood – that robs her of her strength. In the moment when Siegfried,
 Richard Wagner’s Women

disguised as the stranger, wants to tear the ring from her finger, she fights
back and struggles with him, but is then overcome. Muted brass intensify the
eerie atmosphere. Still disguised as Gunther, Siegfried spends the night with
Brünnhilde but lays his sword between them. Even though he is really the man
she loves, this act remains indubitably one of violence, for she believes that she
is lying next to a stranger.
Until the beginning of the th century, the depiction of sexual violence in
literature and opera was restricted largely to metaphor and implication. The
deed itself was neither described nor shown, and the conquests of the bed-
room took place outside the action. Allusions sufficed to make clear what was
happening, and Wagner resorts to the same expedient here. Sexual violence
against women was only in the late th century acknowledged as a crime
against a woman’s right to self-determination. In many operas, the suffer-
ing of innocent women served as a means of added voyeuristic titillation and
acoustic delight to the audience, as, for example, when Gilda dies in Verdi’s
Rigoletto. Here, however, the music describes rape as a barbaric act, and it is a
matter of subsidiary importance whether or not the sword – a phallic symbol –
prevents the act of rape itself. With her cry: ‘How could you defend yourself,
miserable woman?’ Brünnhilde shows her helplessness. She has just refused to
give the ring back to Wotan on account of her love for Siegfried, and now she
undergoes a shameful physical assault.
Brünnhilde’s horror has nothing to do with jealousy or injured vanity,
though one sometimes reads this in the literature. The truth is that she is dam-
aged in her very identity. The reason for this lies in her all-encompassing love
for Siegfried. The rape leaves her inwardly destroyed, and she has to avenge
herself. When an artist once made a small sculpture of Brünnhilde and sent
it to Bayreuth, Cosima found it unsuccessful and regretted that the sculptor
had chosen not ‘the merciful, loving Valkyrie Brünnhilde – Richard’s true
creation – but the dark Valkyrie brooding on revenge, who might just as eas-
ily be the creation of Geibel or Hebbel, for when she is in this state, she is
in Richard’s libretto no longer herself.’ After this brutal scene, Brünnhilde is
indeed no longer herself. When Richard had sketched it, he played and sang it
at the piano to Cosima, and she felt Siegfried’s solemn pronouncement to be
‘terrible’ . One could interpret the rape as impairing Siegfried’s heroic status –
and, indeed, his behaviour is brutal when compared to that of his tenderly
emotional, deeply loving father, Siegmund. Nevertheless, he is subject to no
moral condemnation because he has been confused by the potion. Siegfried
is not, for example, equated with Hunding, for whom women are mere
possessions.
After the conversation between Hagen and Alberich, Siegfried returns to
 Götterdämmerung – Der Ring IV 

the Gibichungs and announces the arrival of Brünnhilde and Gunther. Hagen’s
men sing a mighty chorus and get ready for the marriage ceremony. While
they ‘beat their weapons in exultation’ , Brünnhilde ‘pale and with eyes down-
cast’ follows Gunther in. It is noticeable that the Valkyrie motif, which had as
good as disappeared, rises up once more when Brünnhilde understands the
deception. She is shattered, and her lament is made all the more moving by
the broad unfolding of Siegfried’s love motif with its aura of happiness: ‘Oh
misery, misery! Woe!, O woe! All my knowledge I gave to him: he holds the
maid in his power, he holds his prey in his clutches. Lamenting her shame, she
is now given away by him who is so rich!’
By depicting her turmoil, Wagner takes her side. Her decision to play her
part in Siegfried’s murder by admitting that he can be wounded in his back is
at first startling, as is her participation in an ‘oath of vengeance’ together with
Gunther and Hagen. But if we observe her transformation, her actions appear
no longer as cheap revenge but rather as a logical development. In her new
role, she saw herself as part of her beloved. After he has betrayed her, there is
no point to her life any more. His death is also her death. Although she is part
of a murder plot, she remains without moral stain.
It is not true that the prelude to the third act ‘lets us suspect no ill’ , as
the literature sometimes says, for the happy sound of the horn is immediately
countered by the ominous woe motif. We thus hear the contrast of Siegfried’s
youthful lust for life with the evil of Hagen. This in turn heightens the positive
image of the hero while also hinting at the coming catastrophe.
In the third act, Siegfried converses with the Rhinemaidens. Cosima writes
of this:

[Richard] shows me how the girls come very close to Siegfried, then dive
down again, how exulting and laughing they anoint him to destruction
with the whole childlike cruelty of nature that only shows its motives
and with unconcern gives up the individual; and therein they once
more display the greatest wisdom that is only surpassed by the wisdom
of the saints.

Like the Norns, the Rhinemaidens are able to have premonitions, though they
cannot take any action themselves. Because Siegfried does not believe them
they can have no influence on him. Wagner calls them ‘wise’ , though he does
not mean ‘wisdom’ that results from the maturity of actions and decisions
experienced. As with the Norns and Erda, this wisdom consists merely in the
things they say. They come across like the sibyls of ancient mythology or the
swan maidens in the Nibelungenlied, who are also able to tell the future but are
unable to take action to change it. These are a species of woman particularly
 Richard Wagner’s Women

attractive to the male gender, and as in Rheingold they are willing to flirt. It is
through them that Siegfried learns ‘the way of women’ , as he calls it.
The stage directions demand that the Rhinemaidens ‘swim about in a circle
as in a round dance’ , for, as is their nature, they turn aimlessly about them-
selves. This is underscored in musical terms by all kinds of water motifs: the
nature motif merges into that of the Rhinemaiden’s song, while the motif for
the play of water mimics the waves. Clarinets play cloying chains of thirds.
The ascending triadic figurations on the horn, which are assigned to Siegfried,
offer a further musical enhancement of the hero’s status. He flirts with the
Rhinemaidens, would like to ‘tame’ one of these mermaids and behaves at
times imperiously, at other times in a seductive, erotic fashion. He even
invites them to prostitute themselves by offering the ring as payment: ‘I’d give
it to you if you’d give me pleasure.’ There is little left of the hero who woke
Brünnhilde with a kiss. But of course Siegfried is still under the influence of
the memory potion. Wagner excused Siegfried’s behaviour in his preliminary
study Der Nibelungen-Mythus by writing of this scene that Siegfried has inno-
cently taken on the guilt of the gods. ‘He atones for their misdeeds through
his pride, his independence.’ Although in his final version it is Brünnhilde
who finally atones for the guilt of the gods, the positive image of Siegfried is
preserved.
Hagen appears with his men in tow and the descending second of his
woe motif sounds threateningly in comparison to the naïve, joyful sound of
Siegfried’s horn. Hagen gives him another potion that restores his memory,
then strikes him in the back with a spear. When Siegfried, mortally wounded,
remembers Brünnhilde, her theme is once more ‘feminized’ by being played
on six harps. It is heard twice with oboe and harp, while the brass are promi-
nent in Siegfried’s motif. Wagner composes this passage from Siegfried’s per-
spective by making audible his loving feelings for Brünnhilde. He wanted him
to die absolved, free of guilt, and this is why, at the close, the hero must feel
remorse for what he has done.
The whole panoply of the funeral procession offers a musical climax that
once more confirms the exceptional role accorded to this hero of the future.
We do not have to imagine, with Hans Mayer, that Wagner conceived the
funeral march as the culmination of the whole Ring (though, in so saying,
Mayer merely paid subconscious homage to the cult of the masculine). But
its significance, at least for this part of the tetralogy, is immense. Wagner had
originally planned a mighty lament of women and men, but then discarded
the idea. He was instead inspired by the ‘Marcia funebre’ from Beethoven’s
‘Eroica’ Symphony. Several weeks before he made the first sketch for Der
Junge Siegfried, he wrote programme notes on Beethoven’s symphony, which
 Götterdämmerung – Der Ring IV 

according to him is a depiction of a superb, masculine individual, who receives

the warm love of a woman. Wagner’s musical portrayal of his dead hero bears
a clear resemblance to this heroic image.
The funeral march begins with powerful, violent thrusts in the brass, the
bass trumpets, horns and tubas radiating a tragic aura. The Volsung, death
and Wehwalt motifs convey a sense of lamentation. Then, surprisingly, the cor
anglais plays Sieglinde’s motif. The clarinet and oboe – classical instruments
of the feminine – repeat it, and the appearance of the love motif supports this
transition, which prompts memories of the gentle, sorely afflicted Sieglinde
in her roles as sister, mother and wife. The manner in which individual wood-
wind instruments take up her motif is presumably intended to depict the unit-
ing embrace of the man by his loving mate, an image that Wagner so liked in
Beethoven, as his following analysis shows:

around this theme, which we may regard as depicting sturdy mascu-

line individuality, all the more tender and gentler emotions entwine and
nestle and are developed up to the moment when the purely feminine
element is made manifest. While the masculine main theme strides
energetically through the whole movement, it is this feminine element
that reveals itself alongside it as the overwhelming power of love.

The brass, on the other hand, are reserved for Siegfried, as are the cellos and
basses. Thomas Grey sees in this Wagner’s endeavour to achieve an equality
of the sexes that serves as a symbolic voice of collective humanity. Such an
interpretation, however, seems erroneous, since Wagner’s clear fixation on
Siegfried is confirmed by the composer himself. More apt is a comment by the
director Peter Mussbach: ‘The funeral march of Götterdämmerung mourns for
the composer lamenting his hero – though he has already long killed him off.’
Gutrune is waiting in the hall of the Gibichungs for Siegfried’s return.
Brünnhilde’s motif sounds for the last time when Gutrune asks if she is awake.
At this point, it has no import any more, for it no longer suits the woman who
will plunge into the flames for the sake of Siegfried. Her authority grows, and
Brünnhilde achieves superb stature as she cries at Gutrune: ‘Silence, miserable
woman! You were never his wife.’
Since from Wagner’s perspective the nature of woman comprises love alone,
there is no further function on earth for Siegfried’s partner. How we are to
interpret Brünnhilde’s role in the whole Ring cycle becomes clear in her final
monologue, shortly before her death in the flames. Despite the many motifs
employed (a total of ten different motifs are heard at the close of the opera), just
two dominate: the brilliant theme described by von Wolzogen as the redemp-
tion motif, and the Siegfried motif. The redemption motif is to be found in
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Brünnhilde, by Arthur Rackham

 Götterdämmerung – Der Ring IV 

all five individual sketches that Wagner made on a loose sheet of paper while
preparing this final scene, which shows the working out of his motivic mate-
rial. It obviously had to be there, and is therefore particularly illuminating for
his conception of the work. It appears in the tetralogy only on one other occa-
sion – when Sieglinde praises Brünnhilde because she is prepared to save her
and her unborn child, the future hero in her womb (see Example , p. ).
The number of attempts to interpret this motif is legion. Sometimes it is
called a ‘female melody’ (Catherine Clément) or a ‘cipher for the birth and
rebirth of a state of paradise’ (Sabine Henze-Döhring). For Thomas Grey it
is the ‘golden thread’ that winds through the whole work, and he sees in it
the ‘eternal feminine’ . Carl Dahlhaus suggests that it depicts a ‘ “redemption”
from a world of deceitful contracts’ , but at the same time he interprets it as
an ‘expression of blessed love’ , ‘a depiction of “enraptured” negation of oneself
and of the world’ . His description of it as ‘Siegfried motif ’ is also noteworthy.
And Sieghart Döhring points to Siegfried here as ‘a forerunner of the “new
man” ’ . Lawrence Kramer thinks that it is ‘undetermined’ , that it thus has no
inner sense – which could hardly be a more crass misinterpretation. For Dieter
Borchmeyer, it announces ‘the cleansing of the world’ . The assumption that it
is ‘the proclamation of a new, better and more just world order that [closes]
the tetralogy in a reconciliatory manner, full of hope’ (Mischa Meier) is some-
times turned completely on its head, thus: ‘What there lacks is a perspective
of a future, new human order’ (Bermbach). Kitcher and Schacht all the same
concede that the theme has something to do with love: ‘Despite everything,
love can depict a form of triumph; to that which would otherwise result in
emptiness and a bitter defeat, it offers significance and value.’ Thomas Mann
establishes a connection between the motif and Gretchen in Goethe’s Faust,
drawing a parallel with the close of that work: ‘The eternal feminine draws
us on.’ So, in the end, is woman at the centre of it all? The conductor Simone
Young describes the moment at which the motif sounds as death out of love:
‘That is not pain, nor is it a sunrise, it can only be love! It’s crazy music!’ The
most absurd interpretation is that of George Bernard Shaw, who said of the
motif that it has a ‘gushing effect’ and is ‘the most trumpery phrase in the
entire tetralogy’ .
Numerous sources confirm that the theme has to do with Brünnhilde. At
Richard’s behest, Cosima answered a query thus: ‘The motif that Sieglinde
sings to Brünnhilde [is] the glorification of her that is taken up at the close
of the work by the whole assembly, as it were.’ We find further such refer-
ences in her diaries. ‘This morning Richard sang me the theme of Sieglinde
to Brünnhilde and said to me: “that’s you” –.’ At a rehearsal on  April 
Cosima is ‘shattered, the whole close is really a paraphrase of the words left
 Richard Wagner’s Women

uncomposed: “Not the glitter of gold etc., blessed in suffering and joy, let love
alone remain” – the whole world of the gods, the powers of nature, the heroes
all serve the sole purpose of glorifying this noblest of women!’ And Richard
said: ‘I am happy that I kept back Sieglinde’s praise of Brünnhilde, to use as a
kind of choral song in praise of the heroine.’
So is that the conclusive answer? Wagner wrestled for a long time with the
final passage of text for the whole tetralogy, casting aside two versions before
deciding on the third. Verses were struck out, new ones added. In the first
version, love is placed above house, court, contracts and laws. But this ver-
sion was too direct for him, though he decided to leave out these lines only
because they had already been sung earlier, with great determination. This
suggests that he wished to retain their import. In  he replaced them
by Brünnhilde’s description of her imminent flight into another world. ‘The
blessed end of everything eternal, do you know how I achieved it? The deep-
est suffering of lamenting love opened its eyes to me: I saw the world end.’ But
this ending was not right for him either, since it again referred too directly
to love as the greatest power of all. Yet he returned to it again and again, for
even the last words upon which he finally decided – the ones that Brünnhilde
sings before plunging into the fire – are a glorification of her love for Siegfried.
She speaks to her horse Grane, whom she will lead into the fire where its lord,
her blessed hero, lies. She needs to be united with him again, she wants to
embrace him and be enveloped by him, and she dives into the flames singing
‘Siegfried! Siegfried! See! Your wife greets you blissfully!’ All her thoughts are
directed towards the man she loves. The deception she has undergone, the
violence she endured on her rock when her marriage ring was wrested from
her and she was forced to share her bed with a stranger, the humiliation of her
shattered love – all this is forgiven. Brünnhilde’s core is filled by Siegfried: like
a Russian doll she bears him within her. She is akin to Sieglinde, who, when
she was pregnant with Siegfried, was ennobled through her music.
At the words ‘to be wedded to him’ , shortly before the close, Wagner goes
further than his earlier sketches by intensifying the exultant praise of Siegfried.
He leads the melody upwards, broadening the last line by the insertion of rests
and by expanding ‘selig’ (‘blissfully’) at ‘Selig grüsst dich dein Weib!’ (‘Your
wife greets you blissfully!’). This again relates to Siegfried. It is a common-
place in Wagner scholarship that the music cannot be understood by refer-
ence to the motifs alone. But at this point, Wagner uses his motivic technique
to create a musical foundation for Brünnhilde’s ecstatic final song, and this
vividly accentuates his intentions. At ‘Grane, my horse, I greet you!’ , at ‘Do
you know too, my friend, where I am leading you?’ and at ‘Are you whinnying
joyfully to follow the friend?’ we hear the Valkyrie motif. It would be a mistake
 Götterdämmerung – Der Ring IV 

with far-reaching consequences to assume from this that Brünnhilde’s identity

as a Valkyrie has persisted. As the text here shows, the motif refers each time
to Brünnhilde’s horse, which is to leap into the funeral pyre, so the motif sim-
ply depicts the situation at hand. Wagner used his motifs at times in a wholly
colouristic manner, not always symbolically. This is important, for the Valkyrie
motif, with its triadic construction and dotted rhythm, displays traditionally
masculine qualities that would not suit Brünnhilde’s current status, despite
her courage and resolution. It is thus an act of mistaken interpretation when
productions of the opera feature Brünnhilde dressed as a Valkyrie in the final
scene.
The precise parallels between motif and text are noteworthy here. At ‘Feel
my breast, how it burns!’ we hear the redemption motif, as we do also at ‘The
bright fire seizes my heart’ , ‘Siegfried! Siegfried! See! Your wife greets you
blissfully!’ , ‘Embracing him, enfolded in him’ , and ‘to be wedded with him in
the mightiest love’ . The Siegfried and redemption motifs sound at ‘Your lord
lies shining there in the fire’ , ‘Siegfried, my blessed hero’ , and ‘Heiajo! Grane!
Greet your master!’ The magic fire motif can be heard at ‘Do the laughing
flames lure you to him?’
If one disregards the motifs that refer solely to the current action (the
Valkyrie motif, plus the magic fire motif, which depicts the flames blazing up),
there remain only the redemption and Siegfried motifs. Every time that the
redemption motif sounds, the text sings of Siegfried. Brünnhilde has only him
in her thoughts. It thus does not refer to Brünnhilde as a person, but to her
ability to sacrifice everything for the one who is unique to her: it implicates
and indeed refers directly to Siegfried.
It is worthwhile taking a closer look at the sequence of motifs in the final
apotheosis, after Hagen’s final cry of ‘Away from the ring!’ In the final  bars
the voices are silent, and in their place unfolds a glorious presentation of four
motifs in the orchestra alone, which has the effect of a final commentary: the
world of the Rhinemaidens, the castle of Valhalla in all its impressive grandeur,
the powerful motif of the free hero and the redemption motif. Valhalla refers
to Wotan, the tragic hero, who despite his faults always remained sympathetic;
the majesty of a godly castle is fitting for him. The Valhalla motif is the one
whose presence is most strongly felt and it is also supported by a grandiose
orchestration, together with the Siegfried motif. While the Rhinemaidens’
motif is played by the woodwind and is feminized semantically, the trum-
pets, trombones, horns and tubas lend all their virtuosity to place Wotan (to
whom the Valhalla motif belongs) and Siegfried at the forefront (these instru-
ments are later joined by the two harps). The redemption motif is played by
a smaller grouping of flutes and strings, but is heard in such a brilliant high
 Richard Wagner’s Women

register that it attains a quite special quality. The assumption often found in
the literature is that this motif announces a new world order and closes the
tetralogy full of hope. But it takes no account of the particular association
of this motif with Brünnhilde’s fixation on Siegfried; it underscores the love
that she is able to give, simply by being a woman. To assert that Brünnhilde’s
deed dissolves hegemony and places love in its place, as some do, is to ignore
the fact that the love of women for their men is hardly going to create a new
society. On the contrary, those same men, strengthened by love, can continue
their dominance – a dominance grounded on the pursuit of power. The con-
cept of ‘redemption’ as invented by von Wolzogen is correct only in a specific
sense: Brünnhilde proves to be the female ideal for the th century, because
she is a strong woman who at the same time gladly allows men to be predomi-
nant. She first feels herself to be a mouthpiece of her father, divining his most
secret thoughts. And she feels so closely bound to her lover, even after he has
betrayed her, that she cannot live on without him. Brünnhilde becomes strong
through loving, but this was, in the th century, no sign of personal strength
and independence. On the contrary, it was proof that she is ready to give up
her own needs in favour of her man’s redemption.
If one interprets the redemption motif in this context – played as it is by
ethereal-sounding violins with intense melodic warmth – then it refers to
Brünnhilde and to the two most important male protagonists. By ennobling
Wotan in music through the use of chorale-like melodies in the trombone,
and by utilizing the upward thrust of Siegfried’s motifs to signify his youthful
heroic strength, Wagner confirms and consolidates the basic patriarchal order.
Brünnhilde cannot match this. Her feminine motif, which she was assigned
after being awoken by Siegfried, is not heard a single time at the close. Her
Valkyrie motif – which in any case never belonged to her alone – here signifies
only her horse. The redemption motif refers just as much to the men as to her,
for it illuminates the woman’s ability to love, while at the same time casting a
glance at the men who are the receptors of that love.
So what remains, then, of Brünnhilde? Despite everything, quite a lot. For
her strength is in her singing. As our analysis has shown, Wagner endeavours
to present Brünnhilde’s dichotomy as battling Valkyrie and virtuous loving
wife in juxtaposition, but not simultaneously. We get the new Brünnhilde only
at the cost of the old. Nevertheless, there is one element that transcends this
dichotomy, and that is her voice. Wotan is silent and Siegfried is dead; but
she still has her voice, and it is a mighty one. She scales the highest heights,
she sings the melody of the redemption motif several times and she gains in
intensity from bar to bar. We hear a grandiose apotheosis of the art of depic-
tion and expression in music, offered in the context of a vast spectrum of
 Götterdämmerung – Der Ring IV 

emotional diversity. Large leaps, great intensity, compelling declamation – all

of this raises Brünnhilde far above the role assigned to woman in the th cen-
tury and thrilled many contemporary women in the audience to the point of
ecstatic enthusiasm.
Both Brünnhilde’s voice and her body are inseparable from her female
gender, for the voice is the space where the body of an individual articulates
itself in society. ‘The lyrical encoding of the voice bespeaks us in our multi-
ple aspects as biological creatures, psychological beings and cultural artifacts,’
writes Nelly Furman. Wagner knew full well the impact of song: for him, the
voice was an instrument far more beautiful and nobler than any in the orches-
tra. Brünnhilde’s voice sounds at its most intense when she comprehends
Siegfried’s betrayal and sings a vocal line encompassing large intervals to a
mighty brass accompaniment. Since she is depicted as unconditionally faith-
ful, her horror at his presumed adultery demonstrates how her identity has
been shattered and her life has lost its purpose. Altogether, Wagner achieves a
characterization of Brünnhilde that includes two different traits: his ideologi-
cal conviction of her ‘natural’ femininity, which makes her supposedly more
humane and more sensitive than her male counterpart, and at the same time
a touch of grandiosity and human strength that is allowed to develop into full
maturity (albeit always in the service of her man). Her pugnacious jubilation
as a Valkyrie is just as convincing as her jubilation in love. Brünnhilde’s voice
is her strength, her power.
What, then, can we take away from Der Ring des Nibelungen as a whole?
Wagner criticizes greed for money and power and the fatal consequences
of whoever wishes to possess them. He presents love as the strongest power,
though he retains the masculine claim to power in love relationships, for it is,
to him, the natural order of things. Brünnhilde is the counter-figure, ready to
sacrifice herself, who releases herself from paternal dependency only to enter
into yet another dependent relationship and to perish in it. In the first versions
of the libretto, Brünnhilde accompanied Siegfried to Valhalla, where both lived
on; in the final version, she leaps willingly onto the funeral pyre after Siegfried
has died. Her life and death are thus intimately entwined with those of the
hero. The Norns and Rhinemaidens appear in groups; as creatures of nature
they possess no individuality. Erda, too, is bound to nature and, despite her
impressive appearances, is in the end powerless. Nor are the Valkyries danger-
ous, for as virgins they are asexual and bound to follow orders. And Gutrune
reacts more than she ever acts. The women in the Ring are thus not active
agents, but at best respond to events and thereby conform with the ideology of
the century in which the tetralogy was written.
And yet Wagner also denounces violence against women. Freia is all but
 Richard Wagner’s Women

bartered away for the price of a castle. Sieglinde has entered against her will
into a marriage with an unloved, violent man – Wagner here depicts the fail-
ure of the conventional notions of love and marriage. The threatened rape of
Brünnhilde is a brutal attack on a woman’s body and displays Wagner’s criti-
cal potential. Brünnhilde rejects her status as victim, fighting against the role
that two men have decided upon for her. She avenges herself by agreeing to
the murder of Siegfried. Given the stereotypical image of woman in the th
century, this was a great achievement. And yet she is prevented from having
a positive role in shaping the action. She is brought down by the exclusivity of
her love for Siegfried and has no other option but to die. Wagner gives her the
power to act, but it is a restricted power, which may not overstep a specific
limit. At the end she has to give herself up and so falls back into a conven-
tional, feminine role. Thus we must doubt whether she really develops into
the ‘self-determining, emancipated heroine’ that is described in the Wagner
literature.
Although they are often subjective in import, the reports of Wagner’s con-
temporaries can prove illuminating. Valentina Serova, the wife of the Russian
composer Alexander Serov, met Wagner in August  and afterwards
recorded what Wagner said. He maintained that Siegfried embodied the best
qualities of the German peoples of earlier times: strength, an elemental root-
edness and ardour. Serova asked why Brünnhilde had to die, to which Wagner
replied that Wotan had ‘lost all power over his own will when she contra-
dicted him. That is why he was angry not with Brünnhilde, but with himself.
Brünnhilde is only a name; the deeper meaning lies in his inner dichotomy.’ To
the question why Siegfried had to perish, he answered:

because evil always and everywhere defeats the good. The power of
Alberich is unsurmountable. He is the spirit of evil; he has also followed
his dark designs firmly and confidently and he has bestowed this con-
stancy on his son Hagen too. Only the one woman, Brünnhilde, atones
for evil with her heroic deed and finally reconciles us with all the ill
deeds and intrigues of man. In the arms of the loving woman, all the
elements are united that ennoble our vices.

Wagner first devalues Brünnhilde by making her Wotan’s will, leaving her
without any independence. But then he speaks of his central theme, namely
the redeeming function of the loving woman. Brünnhilde is shown in a double
dependency: as the will of Wotan she can possess no individual profile, but as
the opponent of evil she is idealized and placed on a pedestal. This at one and
the same time silences her, and robs her of her own identity.
Brünnhilde’s love is human and contrasts with the calculated manner in
 Götterdämmerung – Der Ring IV 

which Wotan manipulates men for his own ends. Most analyses of the Ring
are at one here, yet they assiduously omit to mention that the concept of love
in the th century saw a different significance for each partner. For men, the
heroic was their ideal; for women it was loving kindness, paired with sexual
readiness towards her one and only partner. Thus the tetralogy’s message turns
out to be historically obsolete. Sensitivity, intuition, neighbourly love and the
creation of peace and balance are characteristics that are demanded not only
of women but of men as well. When Wagner writes ‘We are not what we can
and want to be until woman is awakened,’ he is raking up the old notion of
woman as the servant of masculine interests and certainly not paying homage
to woman as a role model.
Indeed, Brünnhilde cannot serve as a role model for woman’s behaviour
towards man, for idealization brings with it degradation. But perhaps she
could if the conflict between love and power that dominates the Ring were,
in the st century, made to refer to the conflict between the environment
and industry, for example. The basis of contemporary economic endeavour
is surely the hunt for profit at all costs; and does not this make our concern
for the environment an expression of our love for nature, a nature damaged,
exploited and unable to defend itself? Wagner never made any bones about
his love of animals and nature and would undoubtedly have sided with them
in the fight to save our embattled environment from destruction by the com-
mercial pursuit of profit (though he would not, we can be sure, have made
any concessions in respect of his own desire for private luxury). It is thus
worth considering whether, in fact, Der Ring des Nibelungen does not contain
a highly topical message for us after all. Until now, Alberich has always won
the day; Brünnhilde’s lovingkindness has never yet gained the upper hand. But
this love of hers should be seen to encompass not merely her partner but also
the world that, in turn, encompasses them. This, then, would transform the
theme from the love of woman for man (which is preached often enough) into
a new ability to love that is still to be discovered: man’s love for woman, for
nature, and for their environment.
Chapter 
Between Eva and Kundry: ‘… no woman at my side!’

W ’   , of their inexhaustible ability and

readiness to love and to die for their man, were undoubtedly influenced
by the image of woman common in his time. Unlike others of his contem-
poraries, who used irony to break with ideological models, he was deadly
serious about Senta’s willingness to sacrifice herself, about Elisabeth’s purity,
and about the unfailing love of Brünnhilde. Between the period of his inner
alienation from Mathilde Wesendonck around  and Cosima von Bülow’s
decision to live for ever at his side there passed seven turbulent, at times ter-
rible, years, in which Wagner hunted in desperation for a partner. He suffered
deeply; his encounters with women in those years were multifarious, ranging
from brief sexual encounters to emotional–intellectual infatuation. It was the
period during which Parsifal was maturing within him, and it was perhaps
the emotional battering he underwent that led him to the negative view of the
female gender found in that work. We now have to ask whether, or to what
extent, these dramatic years in his life had an impact on his œuvre.
In his writings, Wagner possessed the astonishing, chameleon-like gift of
adapting himself to his correspondent. He could converse in high tones with
Mathilde Wesendonck and at the same time indulge in a sexual relation-
ship with his Viennese maid, to whom he conveyed his secret desires about
underwear and perfumes. Shortly after exchanging vows of undying love with
Cosima, he invited Mathilde Maier to join him in Starnberg. And he probably
impregnated Vreneli Weidmann, his maid of many years’ standing, while he
was already in a sexual relationship with Cosima. But to decry his behaviour
as immoral would be misguided. He laid claim to his own ethical code, rejected
the moral norms of the day, and criticized petit-bourgeois modes of thinking –
as, for example, when he tried to convince Mathilde Maier to live with him
without a marriage certificate. ‘You will run my household. What else? What
do your cousins say? – Oh! Go away! You’re too wretched – you there! Too
wretched! You have to dare something if you’re dealing with Wagner!’
When the composer returned to Switzerland from Venice at the end of
March , he was tired and depressed. Mathilde Wesendonck did not want
to leave house, husband and children for a penniless artist. She wrote to him
kindly and sent him regular gifts, but he could not view her as a partner. He
needed a home where a woman would be waiting for him. When he arrived
in Lucerne, he decided to live in a hotel or a guesthouse while he finished
Tristan. After trying in vain to find suitable rooms in a private pension, he
 Between Eva and Kundry: ‘… no woman at my side!’ 

was provided with a posh salon and bedroom on the bel étage of the upper-
class Hotel Schweizerhof. A balcony ran round the whole of his floor, and he
took pleasure in promenading around it in his Venetian dressing gown to the
delight of passers-by down below. His beloved Erard grand piano was set up in
his rooms, and the chaise longue was delivered (the one he had ordered before
leaving Zürich, but which Minna had cancelled). And Frau Wesendonck had
to send new bed linen from Zürich since the green shade of the silken bed
linen he had brought from Venice just wouldn’t do.
Wagner had at his disposal the hotel servant Joseph Ackermann and the
chambermaid Verena Weidmann, who called herself Vreneli. Born on 
August  to a farming family in Embrach near Zürich, her job at the Hotel
Schweizerhof was Vreneli’s first. She spoke both French and German and by
no means conformed to the usual stereotype of the uneducated lower classes.
According to Wagner, she was ‘of a not unpleasant countenance’ and he fur-
thermore found her intelligent, faithful, attentive, skilful and loyal, but also
proud. ‘I literally see and speak to not a soul except for the servants,’ he wrote
to Minna. His need to communicate, combined with his relative isolation,
meant that Joseph and Vreneli spent much time with him – probably also their
free time too. Vreneli was much impressed, for he wore exotic clothes and was
able to tell all kinds of interesting tales. She helped him to measure out the
new bed linen, he sang her a verse to a folk melody that he had written, and
he called her his ‘guardian angel’ because she kept things quiet around him.
In these weeks, a close friendship must have developed, albeit one founded on
a clearly defined hierarchy. The -year-old Vreneli probably fell in love with
him. But she never saw herself as anything but his servant. Since Richard was

Photographs of Verena Weidmann’s daughter (Marie Köpp-Stocker, –)

and grandson (Max Köpp, –) reveal a remarkable similarity to Wagner
 Richard Wagner’s Women

still married to Minna there could be no question of marriage, and Vreneli

accepted it. The distance between her and Richard seemed so natural to her
that she would never have imagined criticizing their situation.
When Richard went to Paris, he wanted to make a final attempt to live
with Minna again, so he could hardly ask Vreneli to go with him – it would
have resulted in inevitable conflict. ‘I don’t want to make any decisions on
the female side [regarding the domestic servants],’ he wrote to Mathilde
Wesendonck, ‘otherwise I would have already had Vreneli go to Paris.’ Despite
his notorious lack of money, he nevertheless asked Mathilde before he set off
to organize a pretty gift for Vreneli. He proposed a dress of wool and silk. ‘She
should have a good present, whatever it costs.’ Since he does not mention any
gift for Joseph, he presumably wanted to thank her for special services ren-
dered. But we would be doing Vreneli an injustice if we were to write her off as
a gullible chambermaid, for there are enough indications that she gave herself
to Wagner out of a desire to help a man she loved. In her reminiscences, writ-
ten many years later, she wrote: ‘In my whole life I have never met another
man who, like Richard Wagner, was so full of gratitude for everything one did
for him.’
Wagner proposed to Minna that she employ a lady’s companion in Paris to
prevent her disturbing him with her complaints. That was bound to fail, and
Minna wrote bitterly: ‘I am not a wife here, and that’s fine by me, for the love
is missing and I wouldn’t have to endure my husband’s crudeness.’ Sex played
no role between them any more. She regretted having come at all, but she
stayed until late , when it became clear that she wanted to set up house in
Dresden. Richard promised half-heartedly to move there some time, though he
never did. He went to Vienna and in  became acquainted with Seraphine
Mauro, who was related to his friend Josef Standhartner. They soon became
intimate. Indignant that moral grounds prevented his black-haired ‘doll’ (as
he called her) from moving in with him, he wrote to his friend and colleague
Peter Cornelius: ‘I would find absolutely nothing wrong if the girl came to me
and were to me just what she can be, with her pretty little nature. But how to
find the “terminus socialis” for it?’ When writing to Mathilde Wesendonck he
naturally chose a different tone altogether. But his despair was no less real for
it: ‘It is not meant for me to nourish my muse in the bosom of cosy domestic-
ity: every endeavour to fulfil this great desire on my part and defy the illwill of
my fate is ever more emphatically thwarted from within and without. Every
clever semblance of it is cast out by the daemon of my life.’ Mathilde, whom
he had so often called his ‘muse’ , must have realized more than most just how
he needed a woman beside him in order to remain creative.
In February  Wagner became acquainted with the -year-old Mathilde
 Between Eva and Kundry: ‘… no woman at my side!’ 

Maier at a soirée held by his publisher Schott in Mainz. Although his letters
to her do not display the same ecstatic urge as does his correspondence with
Mathilde Wesendonck, he would gladly have had her as his lover, and even as
his wife – if Minna had only died in time. ‘I love you with all my heart! […] You
are mine! All the rest – will sort itself out!’ he wrote to her. But as an unmar-
ried woman from a good home (and presumably a virgin too) it was out of the
question for her to indulge in such an adventure. He thus had to find relief
elsewhere. In the autumn of  he had an affair with the actress Friederike
Meyer, whom he had admired on the stage of the city theatre in Frankfurt.
They spent several weeks together in Vienna, where Friederike hoped to get
a contract at the Burgtheater. But they then parted, although she had made a
great impression on Richard and he regarded her thereafter as one of his most
interesting female acquaintances.
In January  Wagner complained to Mathilde Maier for the umpteenth
time that he was suffering without a partner. And he now mentioned his
Lucerne chambermaid, Vreneli, saying how, despite her intelligence, she
remained faithful and devoted to him like a ‘little dog’ . When he left after five
months she was ‘miserable’ and ‘comfortless’ and wanted to give in her notice
and return to her parents. The next two and a half lines were blacked out by
Mathilde, some of them scratched out too: he presumably made some refer-
ence to the nature of Vreneli’s devotion, enough to let Mathilde guess that she
had been more than a servant to him. Tactful Mathilde obviously did not want
anything compromising to be left for posterity.
In Wagner’s desperation, the boundary between chambermaid and mistress
became a fluid one. He wrote to Mathilde that he missed a feminine being
‘who would, despite all ifs and buts, decide to be to me what in such miser-
able circumstances a woman can be to me, – and if I am to prosper, what she
must be to me.’ He is angry at ‘bourgeois bigotry’ and tells her of other socie-
ties in which it would not be considered at all immoral to live together out-
side of wedlock. Living alone is to him a ‘gaping hole’ . He wrote to Hans von
Bülow from Vienna that he felt the desire ever more strongly ‘to have a pleas-
ing female being’ around him. ‘But where to find one without stealing her?
The unhappy Friederike M. would gladly come to me; but what an abyss of dif-
ficulties and cares this would prompt yet again!’
In May of that year he pondered bringing Vreneli to him. He was in a bad
mood because Carl Tausig had promised him an ‘angel’ but was too ill to
present her to him. He wrote grumpily to Tausig:

That matter of the woman is miserable if it can’t be decided straight

away. If I get a positive response from the Swiss girl, I’ll have her come,
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Mathilde Maier
 Between Eva and Kundry: ‘… no woman at my side!’ 

and then it’s over with the other one. Before deciding, I’d have gladly
got to know your promised ‘angel’. Now I’ve got to wait until you’re on
your feet again! Always this bad luck!

The expression ‘angel’ presumably stood for more than just a household help.
Vreneli could only come four months later on account of another job. It seems
Wagner took up Tausig’s offer after all, for from August onwards a young
woman called Maria Völkl was running Wagner’s household in Penzing near
Vienna. She soon won his affection and became his ‘best treasure’ . A single
letter to her has survived in which he asks her to prepare everything nicely in
his house for his return, to warm up his little room and to spread perfume. ‘Oh
God, how I’m looking forward to relaxing with you there. (The pink under-
pants are also finished, I hope???).’ The milliner Bertha Goldwag was ordered
to Penzing and requested to sew ‘several elegant women’s negligees’ . When
he later had to flee from Vienna – once more from his creditors, who were
threatening him with prison – he gave Maria several pieces of furniture. These,
however, were pawned off until he was able to pay for them, at which point he
gave them to her again.
While he was still in Vienna, Wagner undertook a journey to Germany
that also brought him to Berlin. There he spent the night with his old friends
Hans and Cosima von Bülow. Cosima was the daughter of Franz Liszt and
the Countess Marie d’Agoult, and she and Wagner had met years before in
Paris when she was still self-conscious and shy. They had met again later in
Zürich, after she had married Hans von Bülow. On that occasion, they had
apparently parted in a ‘wonderfully moving manner’ . By  – in contrast
to later letters – Wagner was using the intimate, first-name form of address:
‘Adieu! Adieu! Dear Cosima! Be good to me and think well of me!’ On 
November  he met the von Bülows in Berlin. Cosima had long found her
marriage a torment and was deeply moved by Wagner’s music. If we believe
his description of their meeting, they looked into each other’s eyes and
confessed their love, though they were as yet uncertain how things should
proceed.
Richard was not doing well. ‘Something significant has to happen with me
now, or it will all come to an end for ever,’ he wrote in February  to Carl
Tausig. Mathilde Maier received a similar message. He did not harbour much
hope, for soon after he hatched a plan to marry a rich woman. Such a coup
would have released him from his money worries. But he dropped the plan
because he could not face pushing Minna into a divorce – she had already
given him short shrift on that front once. In March he fled from Vienna to
Switzerland, where he spent some time by Lake Zürich at the house of Eliza
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Wille, just a few miles from the Wesendoncks. His hopes of being allowed to
stay at the Wesendonck villa came to nothing.
Wagner’s need for constant female companionship was not grounded
in the simple necessity of having help to run the labour-intensive domestic
set-up that was the norm in his day. Masturbation, ‘onanism’ , had since the
early th century been pilloried as physically damaging and morally repug-
nant by philosophers, moralists and pedagogues. Philanthropists such as
Christian Gotthilf Salzmann and Johann Heinrich Campe campaigned against
‘self-abuse’ , while various apparatuses and corsets were produced to prevent
young people from indulging in the vice. Illnesses such as ‘softening of the
brain’ , spinal atrophy and blindness were feared to result from it. In the th
century, this conviction became a hysteria that prompted the development of
radical therapies. Wagner was convinced that Nietzsche was an ‘onanist’ who
preferred self-abuse (and homosexuality) to coitus with a woman – and he
went so far as to speak openly about it, reporting to Nietzsche’s doctor and
describing his observations. One can deduce from this that Wagner himself
was constantly in need of a partner in order to ‘avoid’ the above-mentioned ill-
nesses himself. But in his case, this was paired with an elemental need to pos-
sess a loving female, not on account of physical desire alone, but as an emo-
tional necessity. Other composers, such as Beethoven and Brahms, were able
to live without lovers, but he could not. His emotional disposition made him
yearn for a woman.
In May  a miracle happened: he was brought to Munich by the young
King Ludwig II of Bavaria and provided with all the financial means he
needed. This lucky stroke of fate freed him from the oppressive burden of
all his debts. He tried to persuade his Viennese chambermaid Maria Völkl to
move with him into his new home in Starnberg near Munich, though it was
in vain. Perhaps she felt uncertain after the temporary seizure of the furniture
he had given her and did not want to put herself in another such situation.
There are, however, no indications that he wanted to bring Seraphine Mauro
to Munich. He had promised her a plaster copy of a bust recently made of him,
but then did not send it. She complained more and more that he did not write
to her:

I find it beastly that the dear man has not given his poor doll a single
sign of life for such a long, long time … I am sad and angry, I love you
too much, and yearn for some news from the good man, your child is
very impatient but you are always so good you always spoilt me, now
you’ve got to suffer the bad consequences you dear adored man …

Wagner abandoned all correspondence with her in . Seraphine would not
 Between Eva and Kundry: ‘… no woman at my side!’ 

let herself be downgraded to the status of a mere chambermaid, and as a lover

alone she would have been too compromising for Richard.
At Lake Starnberg, where he was given a house, Wagner soon became fret-
ful, despite his joy at his new financial security. This mood finds particularly
harsh expression in a letter he sent to Mathilde Maier in June , when he
complains that he has to pack and unpack his furniture himself. ‘There’s no
woman at my side!’ Since the bourgeois Mathilde would be unable to act as his
concubine, he stressed in his letter the domestic duties of a woman. But much
more than a mere domestic help, he needed a loving woman in order to be
creative. The lack of a partner ‘was in the whole of the last year my basic need
and the reason why I was never able to get any work done’ . He required from
her ‘gentle relaxation and embraces’ . His oath of love to Cosima von Bülow
had receded into the background during these months. Wagner just could not
understand why he should have to live without a partner, when he was so sure
that he glorified women in his works.
When Wagner wrote the above-mentioned letter to Mathilde Maier, Cosima
was arriving with the children and their nanny in Munich. Ludwig II had at
Wagner’s request called her husband Hans to Munich, and Hans had sent her
on ahead. She and Richard spent a week alone together. Their daughter Isolde,
born in , was the result of this first encounter. After Cosima had left again,
Wagner complained to Eliza Wille of his fate, and he sounds perfectly serious:
‘I cannot deny that this complete solitude is highly ruinous to me: believe me,
it is a misery that will bleed me to death.’ His yearning was now focused on
Cosima. Since she was married and had to care for two small daughters, the
ensuing years were for all concerned parties fraught with conflict. This con-
tinued right up to the moment when Wagner and Cosima married in August
. If we believe the testimony of their servants, Hans von Bülow well knew
of their relationship and found it hard to bear. This explains Cosima’s long-
lasting feelings of guilt towards him, which she recorded for years afterwards
in her diary.
In August  Wagner wanted to move into his new apartment in
Munich and asked his Lucerne maid, Vreneli, to come to him. He wanted
people around him ‘who love me and who find joy in making my life pleas-
ant. You see, even after such a long time I think of you regularly and don’t
forget you.’ And come she did, bringing the Lucerne traditional costume
with her that he had ordered, along with a coloured silken bodice and silver
chains.
The large sums of money that Ludwig II gave Wagner had to be increased
constantly, and the more he received, the greater were the attacks against him
in the press. Apart from these external problems, Wagner’s woeful affair with
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Cosima Wagner
 Between Eva and Kundry: ‘… no woman at my side!’ 

Cosima proved emotionally almost more than he could cope with. She gave
herself to him physically, but then again and again withdrew out of respect
for her father, often for months at a time. Stuck between father, husband and
lover, she sometimes sent him contradictory signals. There are few explana-
tory documents from these years, for Cosima later burnt all her letters to
Richard. Some of Richard’s letters to Cosima were destroyed after the latter’s
death by Eva, her favourite daughter, because they were too compromising.
Only twenty-four letters have survived from the years between  and .
But there is another source that can illuminate their relationship. From 
onwards, Richard kept a diary of intimate observations and remarks that were
meant for Cosima: the so-called ‘Brown Book’ . It also contains the first drafts
of articles that he wrote. Their daughter Eva cut out fourteen pages and pasted
over several others, yet this book still tells us enough about Richard’s state
whenever Cosima had to leave him.
Together with his wife, Hans von Bülow travelled in August  to Budapest
in order to see Franz Liszt and to hear his oratorio St Elisabeth. But the trip
was also intended to remove Cosima from Richard’s influence, at least for a
few weeks. We can only imagine how torn she must have been. She had to be
available to Hans as his wife, but at the same time she knew how Richard suf-
fered when she was gone. After the departure of the von Bülows, Richard went
to the hunting lodge at Hochkopfberg where he gave expression to his despair.
While Cosima was able to send him letters intermittently, he was not able to
write to her directly and thus confided his unhappiness to the Brown Book.
He took ill and felt miserable:

I feel everything too – and I can’t any more – I can’t any more – the suf-
fering grows too much! – At last I’ve read [your letter]. And now – I fall
silent! I gaze blankly in front of me and ponder giving up speech again
altogether. Oh, what madness, what madness!! […] Oh! Idiot hearts!
Blind eyes! – But how beautiful, how beautiful you are, my wife! Yes,
you are mine and only you have a right to me.’

As in his passionate letters to Minna from the first years of their relation-
ship, and in his diary entries for Mathilde Wesendonck in , he all but lost
his wits when he could not be with the woman he loved. He drifted into a
strange state: ‘What is waking, what is dreaming?’ He wanted to live in future
in a kind of cloud, he wanted to give up almost all contact with people and
create ‘a complete court’ for himself. Hans von Bülow was to take on all exter-
nal things, such as running a singing school and organizing performances, and
he, Richard, would communicate with the world only through him:
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Cosima has to be with me always – always there: it can’t be any other

way. […] Oh Cosima! You are the soul of my life! Completely and utterly!
– I looked out into the flat country; I sought a ‘homeland’ – and thought
of Munich without you. It’s all a grave! – Nothing, nothing more with-
out you! You are the soul of everything that still lives in me.

He feared toppling into an existential crisis. Cosima’s presence was a basic

condition of all his actions:

I can only spin and weave for you and Parzival [Ludwig II]: other-
wise nothing has any point any more! Do you know anything else? –
Impossible! […] To complete my works in constant proximity to your
eloquent silence, there at the weaving chair! – It remains only to strive
for this. You lure my music out of my soul. But oh, give me the peace
that I need for it! Stay by me, don’t go again. Tell Hans openly that I
can’t exist any more without you. Oh heavens, if you could be my wife
in serenity before all the world!

Emotional disturbances immediately threw him off course. ‘And she doesn’t
understand me! Amid all the explanations for me, it doesn’t occur to her how
terribly bitter is my suffering through her absence. […] The separation from
her makes me more miserable than the grief for what is lost! […] I love you
more than you love me! – you have to leave me this sad pride!’ Even the small-
est signs of estrangement made him doubt immediately whether or not he was
loved. And what was most difficult: he could not concentrate enough on his
work. Later, he wrote to his stepdaughter Daniela von Bülow: ‘I made your
mother and me suffer incredibly because I knew we would both be unable to
live without each other.’
In December  Wagner returned to Switzerland together with his serv-
ant, Franz Mrazek, and his dog. The faithful Verena Weidmann came too.
The three of them travelled to Geneva, where he rented a villa for several
months. Cosima joined him in March. While on a boat trip on Lake Lucerne,
they came across a villa at Tribschen near Lucerne, which Wagner was able
to rent with the help of the king. He moved in on  April . After tying
things up in Geneva, Vreneli organized the transport of the furniture to
Tribschen. Cosima followed on  May with her three daughters. There were
spiteful attacks on them in the Munich press. On the outside Cosima, Hans
and Richard endeavoured to draw a veil over their relationship, but sections
of the press saw through it. Hans tendered his resignation and in June also
went to Tribschen, staying for almost three months. Everyone’s nerves were
near breaking point, and this impossible situation could not last for long. It
 Between Eva and Kundry: ‘… no woman at my side!’ 

was Hans who broke up their ménage à trois, leaving in September. Ludwig II
appointed him to the position of court Kapellmeister and six months later he
moved to Munich with Cosima once more. Richard stayed for three months in
Tribschen alone with the children and the servants.
In late January  the -year-old Vreneli married Jakob Stocker, the por-
ter from the Schweizerhof in Lucerne. She had made it a condition that he
should also enter into Wagner’s service, for she had no intention of leaving her
master. Jakob agreed and became the caretaker at Tribschen. Vreneli assisted
Cosima at the birth of Eva, her second daughter with Richard, on  February
. It was decided at the same time that Hans and Cosima should attempt
to resume their married life. Richard stayed in Tribschen with the conduc-
tor Hans Richter, Vreneli and the two daughters Isolde and Eva. Of the five
months from  September  to  February , Richard spent almost
two in Munich, where he could see Cosima. But when he was back home in
Tribschen, he was often unwell.
On  June  Wagner wrote in his Brown Book, ‘Vreneli pregnant. –
Serious, grave atmosphere.’ He took ill, suffered from sweats and was physi-
cally weak. The doctor had to come every day. ‘The beginnings of great clarity
regarding my condition and the state of things. Deepest despondency towards
any kind of action: have recognized in the fate of my relationship with Cos.
and Hans the reason for my inability to want anything. All for nothing: the
attempts in Munich have failed utterly. Imperative never to go back there.’ His
worries about Cosima remained, even now, his greatest concern, and Vreneli
will have understood this. There is no reason to believe that she ever made
any demands on Wagner regarding the birth of her child, of which Wagner
was presumably the father. The doleful mood that overcame Wagner when
he learnt of Vreneli’s pregnancy will have been more to do with his general
situation at the time. Everything had gone more than awry. He was being per-
secuted in the Munich press, he could no longer be sure of Cosima, he had
no real partner at his side, nor could he admit to being the father of Vreneli’s
child.
On  October  Vreneli gave birth to a son who was given the same
names as the composer – Wilhelm Richard. Wagner noted in his diary, ‘th
(Tuesday) returned home. What has fate bestowed! – Vreneli has already given
birth. Children fine.’ The exclamation mark could be a reference to the fact that
the boy was his own son. Richard became the boy’s godfather, later gave him
a scholarship and until his death regularly sent him money and gifts. During
Wilhelm Richard’s life, there was gossip regarding his physical resemblance to
the composer. A well-meaning contemporary remarked that one must ‘relegate
all rumours and presumptions regarding Wagner’s relationship to Vreneli to
 Richard Wagner’s Women

the realm of irrelevant gossip. Nothing can be proven, and if one wanted to
claim some similarity between Stocker’s first son and Richard Wagner, this
would be a highly unreliable reason upon which to construct arguments that
would be potentially injurious to the honour of a whole family.’
Not until  did Cosima decide to give up her commuting between
Munich, Tribschen and Basel (to which city Hans had meanwhile fled in
order to escape the attacks on him in the press). She settled for good in the
Tribschen villa on the banks of Lake Lucerne in November of that year. On
 May , Vreneli announced her second pregnancy. She said that she and
her husband wanted to start a business that coming autumn, which would
mean leaving Wagner’s employment. Only with difficulty could he convince
her other wise. The relationship of Vreneli to Richard had now lasted ten years.
She had been at his side in Lucerne, Munich, Geneva and finally in Tribschen.
Was this second child also Wagner’s, and did Vreneli for this reason want to
put some distance between her and the Wagner family? Cosima was at this
time in shock. She wrote that the departure of the Stockers would mean great
changes in their household, and she might have learnt that Vreneli was preg-
nant with Richard’s child. Her diary betrays her mood:

After dinner, R. brought me my workbasket. He sees Loldi [Isolde] and

becomes very melancholy. This wistfulness becomes severe, even harsh,
because I ask him if he is in a bad mood. I say nothing to everything.
What can I say? I was with the child and at seven I wandered on my
own in the garden a little. Deep sadness, should I give up everything
and live only for the children? … On the evening, returning from the
city, R. tells me that he said to himself: he still wanted to believe in
his happiness if I were to meet him halfway. Now he saw how he had
sinned, for I had not come.

He seems to have had a bad conscience, and Cosima too was suffering. For
four days she wrote nothing in her diary, whereas otherwise she wrote every
day. She did not have the strength. She had borne Richard two daughters, the
chambermaid had given birth to a son that was probably his, and now there
was to be another child: that was surely too much for her to bear. Four days
later: ‘He once more discusses the melancholy topic of the other day, I am
unable to answer and can only cry; O star of love, shine brightly on me, lighten
the dark paths for me.’ That evening, there was once more a ‘melancholy con-
versation’ . ‘I want it away from here and kept secret, because of the older chil-
dren. He sees in this a humiliation for himself and is very bitter. I do under-
stand him and feel terribly with him – and yet it seems to me that here there
is a duty to be done, before which the other emotions must remain silent.’ One
 Between Eva and Kundry: ‘… no woman at my side!’ 

explanation for these references may be that Wagner so desired a male heir
that he wanted to acknowledge Vreneli’s son, Wilhelm Richard, as his own,
and this was why Vreneli should not leave. Cosima on the other hand wanted
the child to be brought up ‘away from here’ . She spent the next day ‘in deep
melancholy’ and stayed up all night because she was too anxious to be able to
sleep.
On  June  Wagner’s yearned-for son was born – Siegfried. This was a
great release and prompted Cosima’s decision to end her marriage with Hans,
which she had maintained merely for the sake of appearances. It is hardly a
coincidence that Wagner gave his godson Wilhelm Richard Stocker a valuable
gold watch on the day of Siegfried’s birth (as a consolation prize, perhaps?). It
can still be admired today in the Richard Wagner Museum in Tribschen. In
October, the second child of the Stockers was born. Cosima assisted Vreneli
during the birth. Just two days later, the infant Bernhard was baptized. Cosima
did not go to the service: ‘The children go to church, I stay at home, for it
would not be proper for me to enter church now’ – a telltale sign. There is
no further mention of Bernhard in the rest of her diary. Perhaps he was given
to farmers to bring up, as was later the case with his sister Marie. Wilhelm
Richard, however, is more often mentioned – he liked to play with Wagner’s
children and on his third birthday he was even given a table laden with
presents. After Siegfried’s birth, Wagner considered what kind of relation-
ship he wanted Wilhelm and Siegfried to have. He regretted that he had not
had him named ‘Kurwenal’ , because ‘I would like Wilhelm to be to Siegfried
roughly what Kurwenal is to Tristan.’ He thus established a distance between
the two boys: Siegfried was the legal heir, and thus nobler than Wilhelm. It
sounds strange, however, that Cosima entered into a kind of secret bond with
Vreneli. ‘You, my dear Vreneli, were the first who cried out the news: A son is
here! And thus we are bound together inseparably, and I can think of you only
with the deepest emotion,’ she wrote to her years later.
When Carl von Glasenapp wrote his biography of Wagner after the com-
poser’s death, Cosima sent him information on Vreneli. She praised Vreneli’s
discretion no fewer than three times, insisting that one could rely on it, and
she further praised her intelligence, her faithfulness, her devotion, her natural
wit and ‘a feeling of decency that is rarely found even among the educated. […]
She felt and understood everything without a word escaping her lips.’ If one
remembers that Richard’s first daughter, Isolde, was baptized in Munich in
April  as the child of Hans von Bülow and with Richard as godfather, and
if one considers, further, that in the case of Wilhelm Richard the composer
was presumably once more his own child’s godfather, we can understand why
Cosima prized discretion so much.
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Richard’s love for Cosima, which after endless battles culminated in their
marriage on  August , was from now on the cornerstone of his psycho-
logical well-being. ‘She defied all ignominy and bore all the condemnation,’ he
wrote, full of gratitude. In  Cosima, full of emotion, noted that Heinrich
Porges had told her: Wagner would never have taken up the Ring again ‘if that
great change had not come into his life. This moves me so much that I have
to cry. When I tell this to R. he says: “Nothing, not a note more I would have
written if I had not found you. Now I have a life.” ’ Cosima’s diaries are full
of such hymns of praise, which reveal Wagner’s deep sense of dependence
upon her. Nor are they empty phrases. It is almost nightmarish to observe
how much he restricts Cosima’s living space, how jealous he is when she trav-
els without him, how he dominates her, and how dependent he is on her, at
the same time, in order to bear the oppressive burden of his creative work.
She writes that he offers her assurance: ‘I could not know how much he loves
me; it is always like a dream to him that I am completely here, he thinks he
has only been able to borrow me.’ It sounds as if he worshipped her. But since
this worship was coupled with highly dominant behaviour, it only increased
the pressure on Cosima both to cope with things as they were, and to serve
only Richard. Her feelings of guilt towards her first husband heightened her
psychological burden. ‘Ever deeper insights into my own worthlessness, ever
freer, happier expiation of this worthlessness, more complete breaking of my
own will, averting myself from every one of life’s vanities, withdrawing back
to the One.’ In time, however, Cosima imposed her will on certain matters
that, because of her upbringing, were important to her – such as table man-
ners. The singer Lilli Lehmann was once at a meal in Wahnfried when Cosima
attempted ‘to “discipline” [Wagner] when he used his knife … in a manner that
was not English enough. (He was .) The result was that many a meal came to
a rapid, unexpected conclusion.’
On  February  Vreneli’s third and last child was born, Marie. ‘Suffering
and compassion,’ wrote Cosima. At the age of two months she was given to a
farmer to be raised. A photo of Marie in later years shows clearly that she
could well have been the daughter of Richard, and thus the half-sister of Isolde,
Eva and Siegfried. Marie Köpp – as she was known after marrying – did not
like to talk about her origins. She destroyed several letters that Wagner wrote
to her mother. It remains unclear how much she may have known about her
true paternity.
In the th century much effort was put into keeping private knowledge
secret. As an implicit quid pro quo, the lives of ‘heroes’ were gladly made pub-
lic property. Wagner loved Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and
the Heroic in History, which offers biographies of great men of world history.
 Between Eva and Kundry: ‘… no woman at my side!’ 

Wagner wanted to be counted among them. In contrast, however, the trivial

or erotic matters of the everyday were hidden from public scrutiny. This did
not inevitably lead to hypocrisy. The desire for intimacy that grew during the
th century, coupled with the ideological increase in the value of family life,
left much unexposed. Certain secrets were told only to one’s closest relatives
or friends. Wagner had presumably won a ‘right’ to Vreneli’s body during his
stay in Lucerne, and had coupled this with a warm friendship, the nature of
which was by no means disparaging. Vreneli seems not to have felt exploited,
remaining fond of the composer throughout her life. But when she realized
the impossibility of her situation after her second pregnancy – being now
married – she planned to move away with Jakob. Wagner seems to have pro-
tested energetically and prevented her departure. She does not seem ever to
have told her husband about her relationship with Wagner, and when he was
an old man he said not a word about it. Vreneli’s relationship with her master
must have been one of submission as a matter of course, yet at the same time
one of intimate devotion. She always maintained the distance from him that
their relative positions required, yet her undoubted intelligence and empa-
thy prevented Richard from looking down upon her. She undertook tasks of
considerable responsibility, negotiated with workmen, saw to the greater part
of the family finances, and often fetched her master’s income from the bank
where the king had deposited it.
After Jessie Laussot, Mathilde Wesendonck and Cosima von Bülow, Wagner
fell in love once more with a married woman, towards the end of his life: Judith
Gautier, the daughter of the French poet Théophile Gautier. She was beautiful
and young, she admired Wagner’s music, and she wrote about it for French
journals. Together with her then husband Catulle Mendès, she visited Wagner
in Tribschen, and he became passionately enamoured of her. Besides the eroti-
cism that she exuded, she also particularly fascinated him with her precise
knowledge and love of his music. They would sit hand in hand in the Bayreuth
Festspielhaus. In September  he wrote to her, ‘Dear soul! Sweet friend! I
still love you. Remain for me for ever what you are to me, the only ray of love in
all these so unhappy and so unsatisfying days. But they were for me full of that
tender, calming and ecstatic fire. Oh! How gladly I would embrace you once
more, my love, my dear one!’ This love gave him new zest for life, and he soon
found an erotic substitute for her by having her order perfumes and beautiful
fabrics for him. Now it was Cosima who suffered. ‘The agony of which I was
afraid did not stay distant, but broke in from outside! God help me!’ She bore
the affair with composure, and soon Richard informed Judith that he would
now be making his orders for perfumes and materials via Cosima – meaning
that the erotic aspect of their relationship had come to an end.
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Judith Gautier
 Between Eva and Kundry: ‘… no woman at my side!’ 

Wagner’s love for Cosima occupied him to the end of his life. She remained
a godsend to him, and he was fully aware of it – one could fill whole pages
with his praise of her. With increasing age, his fear grew of being left alone. He
often had ‘terrible dreams’ that Cosima would leave him. Always, whenever
anyone else came close to Cosima and drew her attention away from Richard,
his anger would rise and culminate in furious outbursts that left her helpless.
The longer they were together, the greater his irritability became. While this
may not have been unconnected with his physical deterioration, it took on
inexplicable dimensions. Cosima, on the other hand, compensated for her feel-
ings of guilt about Hans von Bülow by assigning an aura of uniqueness to her
current relationship. Richard always had to come first, even before her father,
and she devoted every fibre of her being to this love that nothing was allowed
to sully. She was, after all, the one who had made it possible for Wagner to
complete Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal. To this end she sacrificed her
reputation, her marriage and all emotional independence, making herself the
‘ideal wife’ of whom Wagner had always dreamed.
Why, then, did Wagner devote himself to Parsifal, an opera from which
women are thoroughly excluded, when he was so dependent on them?
Emotional turbulence robbed the composer of the calm he needed to work on
this opera. It was many years before he was able to complete it. In , twenty
years after making the first prose sketch for it (no longer extant), he took
up the subject once more and made a prose draft. He had in the meantime
fallen in love with Cosima. Their daughter Isolde was born soon afterwards.
According to Egon Voss, Richard felt remorse for the manifold acts of betrayal
that he was committing. He had cheated his friend von Bülow, he was lying to
King Ludwig and also to Minna, to whom he was still married. The feelings
of guilt that were the result, Voss believes, made Wagner no longer a Tristan,
but an Amfortas, who has to be redeemed by Parsifal. For Wagner, the work
was thus an act of redemption. ‘So! That was a help in need!’ he wrote in late
August  as an epilogue to his prose draft; he thus felt liberated from some-
thing. According to Voss, the work represents an act of turning away not from
woman but from sexuality. But isn’t woman herself bound up in a causative
relationship with sexuality? We do not have to imagine Wagner’s sexual frus-
tration as being his reason for excluding women from the opera, but it does
seem here as if the composer wanted to settle accounts with the female sex.
‘Parzival has been occupying me a lot: in particular a peculiar creation, a
wonderful, daemonic woman (the messenger of the Grail) who becomes
ever more alive and more captivating,’ he wrote about Kundry in . This
puzzling, complex character, whom he described as his most original female
creation, was a blank space that he filled with all the traits associated with
 Richard Wagner’s Women

woman at the time. She is maternal but also cursed, a courtesan, a penitent,
a witch, a seductress, a corrupter, the devil’s bride, an ecstatic fury and an
avenger. Wagner admitted that she was an artificial construction when he said:
‘Everything about Kundry is costume – the ugliness, the beauty, everything is
a mask.’ For Thomas Mann, she was a ‘desperate double nature, a corrupter
and a penitent Magdalen’; Jacques Chailly criticizes the ‘sterile world of men
with its enmity towards the sensual and towards women’; the director Götz
Friedrich even describes it as ‘a bad masculine invention, the repression of
patriarchal complexes’; and Constantin Floros sees Kundry as ‘a primordial
picture of the patriarchate’ . The only female character in this late work is
almost impossible to grasp in analytical terms. She seems to have more in
common with Delilah and her later successors Salome and Elektra than with
the religiosity of Parsifal, where the music is otherwise treated as a means of
consecration.
After an intensive study of the subject, it occurred to Wagner to unite the
characters of the messenger of the Grail and the seductress in the next act. He
was influenced by Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, but there the wild mes-
senger (Kundry) and the beautiful seductress (Orgeluse) are different people.
Kundry is a model example for modern deconstruction theory, according to
which identity is comprised of different parts that may be thoroughly con-
tradictory. She is a wild, subhuman woman and is described by Klingsor as
‘Herodias’ because she laughed at the Saviour. He mocks her as ‘Nameless’ ,
‘Primeval devil’ , ‘Gundryggia’ , as a Valkyrie who causes wars, and as a ‘Rose
of hell’ . On the other hand, she is capable of doing good, though she is herself
damned and cannot escape her predestined role.
In his prose draft of  Wagner writes of an ‘ancient curse’ that condemns
Kundry ‘to bring the suffering of seduction to men’ . She cannot come to rest
until a man can resist her. She endeavours to atone for her ancient sins by
living near the Knights of the Grail and by seeking out medicinal cures for
them, though they speak harshly of her and despise her as a slave.
Klingsor has her in his power and uses her to seduce the knights. He does
not compel her to prostitute herself, for of her own volition she ‘offers assist-
ance in her soul’ . In other words, she is also guilty. It is a ‘burning, terrible
hatred that makes her want to corrupt men, but she is also gripped by a wild
desire for love that consumes her in a terrible fire time and again, and goads
her on to ecstatic paroxysms. These allow her to perform magic, but also make
her fall victim to it.’ She hates and loves intensely, though her love arises
from a desire to dominate. She thereby exercises a power that she enjoys but
at the same time deeply regrets. Situated, as she is, in the hellish realm of evil,
she is regarded as an unspiritual creature of nature.
 Between Eva and Kundry: ‘… no woman at my side!’ 

One possible explanation for Wagner’s condemnation of female sexuality

is to be found in the ideology of his time. In the course of the th century,
the essential difference between the sexes was cemented in scientific terms:
authors compared women in all seriousness to apes, while others were con-
vinced that woman was dominated by her body and her reproductive func-
tion. The highly popular book Das Weib als Gattin (‘Woman as wife’) by
Hermann Klencke, first published in  and thereafter in many further
editions, warned wives against showing desire, since that would soon be
‘repulsive’ to their husbands. Kundry tries everything to ‘inflame’ men, which
means nothing more than that she exudes sexual energy. This is how prosti-
tutes were demonized according to a long tradition in the West. In compari-
son to the power-hungry female characters of Wagner’s earlier operas – Venus
and Ortrud – she suffers from her role in her clearer moments. She struggles
against Klingsor’s order to seduce Parsifal, and yet in the end she tries to do it
anyway.
Wagner’s first draft of the libretto was written in August . It was one of
the most difficult years in his life. Cosima had admitted her love for him, but
circumstances prevented their coming together. Her father and her husband
were battling for her. In this situation Richard made the stupidest of mistakes
by letting her read a letter to him from Mathilde. This only inflamed her jeal-
ousy so that he had to pacify her again:

What is then your love if you have so little faith? How you so often
misunderstand my words! […] Oh god, what a heaven I wanted to con-
struct for you and Parzival! […] but then I know that love will help you,
and the superb clarity of your glance will allow you to recognize what
is right. I know that – for I believe. […] And now silence! Silence! Just
as it is calm deep within me, I want this calmness to extend outside me.
I want to, for I must! You will help me and offer Parz. a lovely example,
won’t you? – But this example means not forgiveness – but repentance,
repentance that you should suffer for me. Is that not bold? – But it’s
true! Do not suffer! Do not suffer! – Only love!

So Cosima has to offer Parsifal a good example and not make any more accu-
sations against Richard. The destruction of the unbridled woman in Parsifal is
not derived from any traditional cultural fantasy, but was a result of Wagner’s
personal situation. His unfulfilled love for Mathilde and the great emotional
turbulence he endured from  to  led him to desire freedom from his
compulsive dependence on women. He wanted to retain an interpretative
monopoly and no longer to suffer pain because of women: he did not want
to suffer because of Mathilde or Cosima if it dissipated his creative energy.
 Richard Wagner’s Women

His gratitude to Cosima for her unprecedented readiness to keep him free from
disturbance in his creative work can be seen in the simple words ‘Palermo 
Dec  For You!’ , written at the close of the score of Parsifal. But this dedi-
cation did not hinder him from imagining in Kundry a character laden with
sexual sin, who was destined to die in the presence of a man without it.
Chapter 
‘… the suffering of love’s seduction’:
Kundry and Parsifal

A  Richard Wagner wanted, with Parsifal, to cast off the power
that women held over him, that was only half the story. He also wanted
to expunge a racial Other. The work is laden with other discourses, too, which
deal with its combination of Christian and heathen myths and their ambiguous
symbolism. Much mockery was prompted by this story of a naïve young man,
who resists the charms of easy girls and of a voluptuous seductress (Debussy
spoke of a ‘sentimental streetwalker’). After the world première, for example,
Hermann Kretzschmar wrote as follows of the scene between Klingsor and
Kundry:

Both tell in the harshest, most powerful tones and with heart-rending
cries of their immense woe. One cannot blame anyone whom this
terribly inappropriate alfresco style reminds of the Christmas panto-
mimes of the English stage and of other children’s spectacles, nor can
one be surprised if one laughs instead of being moved. Furthermore,
Wagner has given Kundry a series of ‘the most horrible screams’ and
‘dreadful laughs’ , whose all-too faithful execution we here note with
some horror. It was as if one was in an operating theatre. The brutal
realism of this scene did not just cause real physical suffering to the
ladies, but to strong gentlemen too.

Another review complained of ‘a subtle pseudo-Christianity that uses holy fig-

ures and actions for the purposes of a masquerade. Its sensual gaudiness and
intoxicating mysticism offer a religiosity that is calculated to make dizzy both
hysterical ladies and smug men of the world.’
The complexity of the material was gladly ignored in this, the work of
Wagner’s old age. Yet besides compensating for private conflicts, it does indeed
have a serious background to it. Wagner had been investigating national and
racial ideologies for years. Just a few days after finishing the prose draft of
Parsifal he described himself as the ‘most German man. I am the German spirit.
Ask the incomparable magic of my works, hold them up against all others: You
can for now say nothing other than that they – are German.’ When he put the
finishing touches to the score, his enthusiasm for the racial theoretical writ-
ings of Arthur de Gobineau was at its height. Cosima wrote to Gobineau: ‘My
husband is completely with you [in his thoughts], always reading your Races
 Richard Wagner’s Women

when he is not putting it on stage.’ Richard expanded upon this identification

as follows: ‘Gobineau says that the Teutons were the last card that nature had
to play: Parsifal is my last card.’ Sixteen years lie between these two quota-
tions from Wagner’s writings, and the continuity in their thought is no mat-
ter of chance. The ‘incomparable magic’ reflects Wagner’s world view, though
it is often forgotten that this is not concerned only with establishing sup-
posed Germanic purity, but just as much with idealizing a masculine claim to
leadership.
This significant late work evolved over a time-span of thirty-seven years.
Wagner first delved into the topic in  and in his letters to Mathilde
Wesendonck in the late s he returns to it several times. He contemplated
it as the subject of a stage work only in . The prose draft of  contains
his first thoughts. A second prose draft was made twelve years later, followed
shortly after by the final version, which was published in December .
Wagner completed the composition of the opera in , a year before his
death.
Scholars are divided over whether interpretations of the opera should take
into account Wagner’s late writings. Whereas Susanne Grossmann-Vendrey
describes Wagner’s article ‘Religion and art’ of  as a philosophical com-
mentary to Parsifal, this is called into doubt by Constantin Floros and Ulrike
Kienzle, since Wagner had written the libretto several years before. There is
a similar lack of unanimity regarding the degree of Schopenhauer’s impact on
it. The composer had been strongly influenced by the philosopher since the
mid-s. Many an author, such as Stefan Kunze, has been of the opinion that
Schopenhauer’s influence has been exaggerated. Others are convinced that the
extent to which Wagner appropriated Schopenhauer’s ideas has, in fact, been
too little recognized. The ethics of compassion, the denial of the will, the
rejection of the sexual urge, the conviction that Christianity and Judaism are
fundamentally different, and finally his praise of asceticism are indeed derived
from Schopenhauer’s thought. But it is unlikely that the composer intended to
convince his audience to deny their will or to become ascetics. Is it not more
likely that he wove Schopenhauer’s ideas into a narrative that was of direct
concern to himself? Wagner was a master of eclecticism, taking and using
whatever suited him. Always looking for means of legitimizing his ideas, he
was immediately able to enthuse about a writer, but always at the heart of his
concerns was his own creative work. Jakob Sulzer, who experienced Wagner’s
enthusiasm for the philosopher, wrote: ‘However high his regard was for
Arthur Schopenhauer, he adopted not a comma of his actual philosophy. His
intuition was thus always imaginative, but often devoid of logical structure –
it was an association of ideas, not their reincarnation.’ Here we see that the
 ‘… the suffering of love’s seduction’: Kundry and Parsifal 

composer was first and foremost just that – an artist. Instead of endeavouring
to analyse phenomena in as unprejudiced a manner as possible in order to
reach hypothetical results, as one might in the sciences, he created around his
own work a theoretical structure with a body of thought that seemed suitable
to him.
In Parsifal, the male brotherhood concerns itself with spiritual, intellectual
matters, and is contrasted with a woman driven by her urges, whose behav-
iour is animalistic. The eroticized world of Kundry and the Flower Maidens
is diametrically opposed to that of the pious men. The anti-Semitic diatribes
that fill Cosima’s diary during the composition of Parsifal and make of its
title hero a Teutonic saviour are no mere borrowings from the writings of
the racial theorist Gobineau. Such ideas had occupied Wagner for decades
before he came across Gobineau, beginning, at the latest, after his flight from
Dresden in . But he was not interested in leaving too many traces of this
train of thought. A mythologist of ‘shrewd cunning’ , as he described himself,
he wanted to be one step ahead of his exegetes and critics. The articles that he
wrote during the composition of Parsifal can be read as a commentary on the
content and ideology of the work.
Schopenhauer’s aesthetics made music into an expression of the world’s
inner being. We know that this idea particularly appealed to Wagner, since he
often mentioned it in conversation with Cosima. The philosopher stresses that
the essence of the world remains invisible to scientific and reasoned observa-
tion, but can be comprehended by introspection; music was, for him, the art
form that was best able to achieve this view of the essence of things. Wagner
saw himself as a genius, who through his music came close to this true essence,
and he maintained that the musician is far better equipped by destiny to
recognize the ‘almighty will’ than is the visual artist. He wrote:

The musician does not hold back his view in silence but announces
himself aloud as the conscious idea of the world. Only one state of
being can surpass his own: that of the saint. […] To us, the musician
seems more worthy of veneration than any other artist, indeed almost
possessing a claim to saintliness. For his art in truth stands in relation
to the complex of all other arts as does religion to the church.

However, the composer indulges in a significant shift of emphasis by twisting

Schopenhauer’s insistence that drama is a reflection of the world. Instead, he
places the agency of the ‘Genius’ at the centre. It is from the genius that the
objectivized will of the world is radiated. Wagner thereby accords himself the
prerogative of interpretation over all things.
In , at the time when he was composing Parsifal, Wagner wrote in the
 Richard Wagner’s Women

essay ‘Religion and art’ that it was the preserve of art to save the core of reli-
gion ‘by grasping the mythical symbols … according to their allegorical value,
in order to portray them in an ideal fashion and thereby allow us to recognize
the deep truths hidden within them’ . The art work should function as a kind of
religion of art; in the face of the radical societal changes of the industrial age,
only art seemed to him capable of creating a new moral world order – though
he did not specify what this was to look like. This notion of the composer pos-
sessing the supposed ability to recognize truth brought him into the proximity
of the saints. It allowed Wagner to declare his own ideas as truthful, and to
utilize his own creative artistry to put these ideas into action. Wagner took
Beethoven as an example, dedicating a whole essay to him. His aim was to raise
him up to the same level as authors such as Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, and
to use this genius to prove that through him the German spirit would redeem
the spirit of man from deep dishonour. ‘And only in this fact is grounded the
relationship of the great Beethoven to the German nation.’
Wagner undoubtedly had his own role in mind here. He felt called to show
his people and his nation a world both noble, and purified of all things foreign.
This statement, combined with his conviction that it is in the nature of music
‘that everything the other arts only suggest, through her and in her becomes
the most undoubted certainty, the most immediate, determining truth’ ,
means that certain ideas and notions simply cannot be criticized because, in
fact, they correspond to the ‘world in itself ’ (Schopenhauer). Throughout his
life Wagner was concerned to ‘hide the terms of production so that the prod-
uct appears as nature and at the same time offers itself as something compre-
hensible and available as a commodity’ . By placing the ‘German spirit’ at the
top of his scale of values, he reinterpreted his nationalist-inflected ideology as
the innermost essence of truth itself.
If music depicts the ‘inner view of the world’ – thus objective truth per se –
then it must unfold a mystic–transcendental aural experience, transporting
the listener to that world as effectively as possible. The text has to play its part
too. Cosima reports several times how friends and acquaintances were deeply
moved when they were read the prose draft of Parsifal from . She herself
often broke down in tears when reading it aloud. ‘I felt profoundly how its
sublimity exerted a purifying, ennobling power over us! This was completely
new to Richard, and he listened to it, deeply moved.’ He was presumably sur-
prised himself at the solemn effect he had imparted to his work by means of
its quasi-religious world outlook. It is fitting that the sound of his orchestra,
whose potential to enthral the listener he well knew, was described by him
as ‘the disembodied music that sounds from out of the “mystical abyss” ’ , in
which ‘the scenic picture viewed on stage becomes the truest representation
 ‘… the suffering of love’s seduction’: Kundry and Parsifal 

of life itself ’ . Everything that happened in the opera had to be ‘authentic’ .
But this opens up a deadly trap for woman: in Parsifal, the spiritual is a mas-
culine attribute, and this is presented as being both God-given and part of the
natural order of things. By the same token, the libidinal and animalistic are the
realm of the feminine.
In the last third of the th century the burgeoning bourgeois society was
greatly concerned with the marginalization of what was ‘foreign’ and ‘other’ .
Jews were regarded as inferior, homosexuals as deviant. Woman was indis-
pensable as the child-bearer, lover and pleasure-giving sexual partner. She was
famously allocated the contradictory roles of the ‘good’ (mother, wife) and
the ‘despised’ (prostitute, Jewess, worker). It is one of the contradictions in
Wagner’s character that in his last opera he celebrates the revelation of a vessel
containing the blood of a Jew (Jesus Christ) with a solemn, grave music, but
at the same time, in his writings, reviles the adherents of the Jewish faith as
being inferior. It is just as contradictory that in his spiritual world of knights,
pages, youths and boys he also creates a portrait of an animalistic, libidinous
woman in the form of Kundry – even though, in Cosima, he was married to a
highly educated, well-read woman. While composing this late work, in which
he holds forth about asceticism and the sublimation of urges, the composer
was, in fact, in love with the beautiful French writer Judith Gautier, sending
her kisses, reminding her of their secret meetings, and requesting from her
atomizing flasks for his perfumes and satins embroidered with roses. Such
self-indulgent, sensual accessories were what he needed in order to withstand
the pressures of musical creation.
It is not for posterity to sit in moral judgment on private peccadilloes. But
it is another matter when Wagner weaves outlandish ideological notions into
his work, for these have an impact on succeeding generations. In his essay
‘Modern’ , which was published in the second issue of the Bayreuther Blätter,
a journal that had started in early , Wagner criticized the ‘victory of the
modern Jewish world’ in Germany. Similar sentiments are to be found in his
next article, ‘Do we wish to hope?’ His essay ‘Know thyself ’ complains of the
‘pernicious thinking power’ of the Jews over the Germans, and stokes irrational
fears when he maintains, for example, that ‘whether male or female mixes with
races utterly foreign to them, the result will always be another Jew’ . While he
was busy with the final touches to his third act, he took up this topic once
more. In his article ‘Heroism and Christianity’ he warns of the ‘decay of the
white race’ that will result from its mixing with ‘lower’ races. In order to com-
bat the ‘decay of noble morals’ he desired a hero who, ‘horrified, will raise him-
self up to combat the corruption of his tribe, its morals and its honour in order
to find in himself again a holy, divine hero by means of a miraculous reversal
 Richard Wagner’s Women

of the will of his tribe, which had hitherto been led astray’ . One does not need
to be clairvoyant to imagine that he had Parsifal in mind when describing his
ideal hero here.
The fear of economic catastrophe had a sustained impact on philosophy,
literature and art in the late th century. After a boom time, a harsh reces-
sion followed in  – there was a crash on the Viennese stock market – and
while some became ever richer, the workers descended into misery. Some
of the German middle classes lost economic ground because of rapid indus-
trialization and the onset of the depression. The ‘stock market Jews’ were a
popular focus of blame. Envy and hopelessness together fanned the flames
of an irrational racial hatred. Jews became regarded by some as ‘enemies of
the Reich’ and were made scapegoats, as we find reflected in innumerable
brochures, articles and polemics on the so-called ‘Jewish question’ . Wagner
explained to his children the consequences of the emancipation of the Jews
in terms of the bourgeoisie being ‘oppressed and the lower classes seduced
into corruption’ . At the same time, women were fighting for greater recog-
nition of the interests of female workers and for better school and university
education. This, too, was bound to irritate conservative circles in Germany.
In Kundry, Wagner had the opportunity to unite, in a single character, all the
dangers that he was convinced arose from the Jews, from women and from the
seductive power of the feminine.
But what drove him to invent a figure like Kundry? His writings suggest that
he connected the seductress with Jewishness, which had to be repelled, but it
was about more than this. Four months before he finished the final clean copy
of the score, he wrote:

Mixing the races ruins the blood of the nobler male through the ignoble
feminine. The masculine suffers, his strength of character diminishes,
whereas the women win enough to be able to take man’s place. The
feminine thus remains in need of redemption: here it is in art as it is
there in religion: the immaculate virgin gives birth to the saviour.

So the races have to remain ‘pure’ because otherwise the man will go to ruin;
and art must play its part in achieving this purity. Woman is assigned a double
malignancy, for the man, socially dominant, could lose his purity through a
contaminated female. Here, Wagner’s fears of uncontrollable women – typical
of his century – are fused with his anti-Semitism.
Parsifal is granted the opportunity to develop from a clueless youth into the
anointed King of the Grail, whereas Kundry functions only as Klingsor’s tool.
Even as a naïve fool, Parsifal is something special, and this fact is made evident
at his first appearance. His motif is played by horns and bassoons. With its
 ‘… the suffering of love’s seduction’: Kundry and Parsifal 

dotted rhythm, its triplet and its ascending upbeat fourth, it is reminiscent
of military marches. We find similar traits in the ‘Soldier’s March’ by Robert
Schumann in his Album for the Young, op. . There are also parallels to the
coronation march in Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète. In the course of the
action, Parsifal’s motif is developed further and is used to show his transfor-
mation from a fool into the King of the Grail. Wagner gives his principal char-
acter a potential for development that is expressed in music throughout the
opera. His noble motif is triadic and ascends at the beginning (Example ),
whereas Kundry’s motif shoots downwards and thus, right from the start,
augurs ill (Example ).

Ex. 

Ex. 

As we know, diatonicism has long expressed ‘the beginning of things, that

which is closer to all origins and is harmonically purer [and is related] to the
realm of the divine’ . On the other hand, chromaticism signifies all kinds of
ills, such as guilt and sin. These two worlds are clearly polarized in the music.
The orchestral prelude to the drama begins with the noble-sounding commun-
ion motif in unison in the strings; this is then expanded upon by trombones
and trumpets, and the opening bars end with the ethereal sound of flutes. The
impression of dignity is continued by the Grail motif, in character akin to a
chorale, which is solemnly intoned by the brass and punctuated by mighty
pauses. Both motifs strive upwards, which accords them a semantically posi-
tive meaning. Chorale-like, archaic-sounding, diatonic and homophonically
stable instrumental groups, solemn themes, a clear structure, the frequent use
of the heavy brass and meaningful pauses together depict the world of belief,
power, spirituality and the divine ruler. Although there are no motifs in the
prelude associated with individual characters, Parsifal and Amfortas are in
semantic terms already involved on account of their gender. Amfortas is given
positive connotations from the start, for his suffering is in musico-aesthetic
terms transcendent and is depicted with musical nobility.
In contrast to this, the world of Kundry and Klingsor is depicted with all
possible musical signifiers of evil. When Kundry is announced in the first act,
a harsh, dissonant chord is heard and the tritone – the classical interval of fear
and conflict – is heard ten times, one after another. What is conspicuous about
her theme is a feature that dominates ‘almost all tragic, desperate or conflict-
ridden situations’ , namely a diminished-seventh chord, cast downwards,
 Richard Wagner’s Women

fortissimo, over more than four octaves. It describes her strife-torn character
and has the effect of a scream. Despite certain minor variants and shorten-
ings, it is never substantially altered as are other motifs in the opera. Kundry
is not capable of development. It is noteworthy that the so-called Klingsor
motif (Example ) is also assigned to her too. Already in the first act, before
Klingsor ever appears, it sounds several times in connection with her. She
is thus more closely allied to Klingsor and to evil than even the libretto
suggests.

Ex. 

In her dramatic depiction, too, Kundry comes across in negative fash-

ion. She rides, hurtles, lurches, drags herself along or twists violently on the
ground. She is full of ‘raging turmoil’ , is dressed in snakeskins and has a ‘dark,
brown-red’ skin, which points to her foreignness. When she is not engaged
in excessive motion she lies frozen and lifeless on the ground, as if she were
dead. Wagner employs manifold musical means in order to create harried,
shrill sounds for her appearance. Her vocal line is marked by extreme inter-
vallic leaps and rhythmic disjointedness. The sounds she utters range from a
‘primal scream’ to ‘anxious whimpering’ . She utters a ‘hideous cry’ and ‘howls
of lamentation of the greatest intensity’ , and she sings ‘coarsely and abruptly’ ,
offering barely coherent fragments of language. All this is reminiscent of
Wagner’s fateful article ‘Jewishness in music’ , where he registered his displeas-
ure at the supposed ‘spluttering, shrill, buzzing, grunting sounds with which
the Jewish manner of speaking expresses itself ’ . Both Kundry and the Jews are
hereby subjected to an aggressive act of exclusion.
Despite her endeavours to find balsam to heal Amfortas’s wound, the
music shows Kundry as a destabilizing, evil person. Her motif sounds when
Gurnemanz describes how the spear was lost. Since this is also to be seen as
an act of phallic disempowerment, she is the true enemy. When Gurnemanz
says of Klingsor in the first act that ‘he has ruined many of us’ , the way in
which Klingsor’s motif is connected with Kundry’s makes it clear that she is
involved in that act of ruination. In the first act, too, when the pages scorn her
and she replies ironically ‘Aren’t animals holy here?’ , the Grail motif is com-
bined with the inversion of the Kundry motif, which situates her in the prox-
imity of animals.
The contrasts are striking between the ‘feminine’ world of Klingsor,
Kundry and the Flower Maidens and the ‘masculine’ world of the Grail. The
asceticism of the elite male order stands in opposition to female sexual-
ity, and the Flower Maidens are depicted as prostitutes. The Christian/
 ‘… the suffering of love’s seduction’: Kundry and Parsifal 

Western world of the Grail, a world of the spirit, is contrasted with the
exotic, Arabian world of the senses, in which lurk daemonic sexual urges
and ultimate perdition. Holiness, purity and immortality, attained by view-
ing the Grail, are reserved for men. Kundry has no access to the Grail so
she must die, just as the Flower Maidens must wither away. These differ-
ences are also highly audible in the music. Diatonicism and a lack of orna-
mentation express the simplicity and nobility that are the characteristics of
the hero and leader, while the depravity of the sensual world is expressed by
means of chromaticism and lavish ornamentation. A calm tempo, a consist-
ent rhythm, intimations of church chorales and the major mode of the Grail
motif are contrasted with the frenzy and disjointedness of Kundry’s musical
depiction.
A further motif, generally called the magic motif, is heard in the second act
when Klingsor invokes his own former existence and that of Kundry. Ulrike
Kienzle regards it as ‘a cipher for her will to life, surging into being once again’ .
But Wagner describes the bars in question as a ‘moment of daemonic con-
templation … that accompanies Kundry’s kiss and in which the deadly motif
of love’s yearning – as sinuous as a snake – has a destructive influence’ . He
associates this motif less with Kundry’s yearning for redemption than with
death, destruction and the demonic, and with the danger of being devoured.
In contrast to the opera’s prelude, where we were able to abandon ourselves to
a contemplation of musical solemnities, the prelude to the second act rushes
by at a fast tempo: Kundry’s moment of seduction has arrived. We hear the
Kundry motif and the magic motif six times within the first  bars, which
Hans-Joachim Bauer interprets as ‘hysterical repetitions of a magic spell’ , por-
traying Kundry’s character. Often, both motifs are fused together. The magic
motif, incidentally, includes chains of chords almost all of which feature a tri-
tone, serving to emphasize malignancy several times over. This is reminiscent
of Beethoven’s Fidelio, a work that we know Wagner admired and whose sec-
ond act also begins with a series of diminished-seventh chords, there depict-
ing the horror of the dungeon.
Whereas in Wagner’s sources (Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von
Eschenbach) Parsifal is transformed into a wise man during the course of
the narrative, Wagner concentrates the moment of recognition on the kiss of
woman. Parsifal achieves his developmental leap by rejecting Kundry. What
was supposedly a ‘yearning for love’ was thus really sexual desire and nothing
else. In his libretto, Wagner lists numerous terms with negative sexual conno-
tations. Thus we read of ‘evil desire’ , the ‘horrors of hell’ , ‘temptation’ , ‘corrup-
tion’ , ‘the hellish urge of the most terrible desires’ , ‘sinful desire’ , ‘addiction to
sin’ and ‘ignominious wantonness’ .
 Richard Wagner’s Women

And yet Wagner does not ‘punish’ his only female character solely with a
restricted range of musical expression. She barely sings anything at all in the
first and third acts, but in the second is allotted an immense vocal part. She has
to overcome wide, dissonant intervals, she has to scream, laugh, cry and give
expression to the most varied affects. She sings of Parsifal’s mother, Herzeleide,
in a gentle flowing melody with a simple, lullaby-like / metre, before mov-
ing into a prophetic tone of voice. After Parsifal has rejected her, she trans-
forms into a woman passionately begging for redemption, only to undergo a
complete spiritual dissolution that ends with her uttering a curse of vengeance.
Her power is conquered, she is destroyed, and her last act of defiance is in vain.
The vocal and technical demands made on the singer are immense, and they
undoubtedly impart a certain magnificence to the character.
And how does Klingsor fit into this feminized world? In musical terms,
Wagner shows him as a man not to be taken seriously. His motif, for example,
is never played in combination with a brass instrument. Since he has muti-
lated his own genitals, he is marked as feminine. He wishes to acquire power
by means of the sexual services of his Flower Maidens and Kundry’s erotic
abilities. So the real danger does not exude from him, for the act that will bring
him power belongs to the women – first the Flower Maidens, then Kundry.
Years before Parsifal, when he was planning an opera on Manfred, the son of
King Friedrich II, Wagner was fascinated by a picture of the king, surrounded
by largely Arab courtiers, in which ‘singing and dancing oriental female figures
captured my imagination in lively fashion’ . The Flower Maidens would seem
to be a realization of this picture. As Edward Said has remarked in his much
discussed book Orientalism, the East was, in the th century, a surface on
which fantasies could be projected, with the West seeing itself in the role of
male conqueror and colonizer and the East as a feminine figure of submission
and subordination to him. This interest in the oriental also had an erotic
component. Klingsor’s garden, which is fitted out in an exotic, Arabian style,
introduces a foreign element that was in late th-century Europe the focus
of fascination and horror at the same time. What first appears as a depiction
of feminine naturalness and purity in flowery form could thus be transformed
into the ghoulish fear that the flower’s leaves might entangle man and drag
him down. Wagner, however, knows how to convey overlapping messages in
his music, allowing him to stress the charming, attractive side of his lovely
Maidens (hence, too, his directions as to how they should be costumed). The
prose draft of  states that they should be ‘the prettiest women in the world
of all times’ . In the first act Gurnemanz speaks of ‘devilishly pretty women’
who live in a ‘blissful garden’ , at which he is accompanied by a trill on the flute.
When preparing for the work’s first performance, Wagner wrote to the singer
 ‘… the suffering of love’s seduction’: Kundry and Parsifal 

Lilli Lehmann that he needed ‘pretty, slim women’ for this scene. He was
irritated when the production’s designer ignored his own sketches for robes
depicting simple, poetic flower cups and instead suggested ‘lewd ball dresses’
such as might be ‘created for the demi-monde by the famous lady’s dressmaker
Worth in Paris’ . He did not want any ‘jaded women’ and complained that his
costume designer had made the Flower Maidens look like ‘Valkyrie café sing-
ers’ . This was quite contrary to what he had wanted. He spoke of their ‘child-
like naïvety’ , which had to be wholly divorced from any ‘element of sensual
seduction’ . Time and again he returned to this topic. He did not see the Flower
Maidens as vulgar courtesans, but as ‘tree plants’; it was this idea, he told
Cosima, that had given him the inspiration for the melody of their chorus. He
meant here the beguiling ‘Komm, holder Knabe’ , with its mock oriental orna-
ments that could have come from the world of The Thousand and One Nights.
These twelve intertwined voices, with their chromatically descending melo-
dies and the accompaniment of the harp, convey an ecstatic, sensual impres-
sion. But the simple triple time and the straightforward harmonies that sup-
port the meandering lines symbolize the playful simplicity of these girl–plants.
They ask for nothing in return for their services of love. ‘We don’t play for gold,
we play for love,’ they sing, and as they try to ensnare Parsifal they beg him ‘Let
me blossom for you! Lovely boy, my loving travails are for your pleasure and
balm!’ They squabble over him, each of them wants to kiss his mouth, cool
his brow and stroke his cheek – this is a male wishful fantasy. The image of
the flower makes them into natural, ingenuous creatures, while their refusal to
be paid for their loving hides the ominousness of their offer. Childlike naïvety
should have the upper hand in their portrayal. Wagner did not want to depict
anything openly provocative or sensual, for the music gives sufficient expres-
sion to that. This discrepancy between the Maidens’ girlish demeanour and
their eroticized music creates a tension that intensifies the listener’s pleasure.
At the first performances in Bayreuth in , Wagner often appeared only
for the second act. Cosima wrote: ‘He only listened to the flower scene in its
entirety, because its perfect execution refreshes him every time.’ In fact, it was
probably because of his affection for a particular Flower Maiden, one Carrie
Pringle. But it also shows how much he enjoyed the liveliness and the subtlety
of his twelve-part writing, and suggests that it was the opera’s erotic compo-
nents that he himself preferred. After all, these are composed with greater zest
and delight that the solemn sections dealing with the Grail. Just after writing
‘Komm, holder Knabe’ , he said ‘In the first act I have been very economical
with sensitive intervals, but now I’m dipping into my old colour pot.’
The encounter between Parsifal and Kundry – a callow boy who is told
of his mother’s sufferings and a full-blooded woman who wants to seduce
 Richard Wagner’s Women

him – is one of the core scenes of the work. At this point, Parsifal’s fate turns.
He is transformed from a pure fool into a compassionate leader. Kundry
should look as seductive as possible. The stage directions have her dressed in
Arabian fashion, underlining her proximity to the Flower Maidens. Wagner
described her as ‘a woman of a dreadful [“furchtbar”] beauty’ , and although
the adjective can also mean ‘inspiring fear’ , the word here seems rather to
mean ‘magnificent’ , affording the role a convincing sense of strength. The dia-
logue begins with a depiction of the sufferings of Parsifal’s mother. Her highest
duty was to protect her son. Kundry describes her condition at length: she
suffered ‘woe, lamentation and sorrows’ until her death. The image conjured
up of the mother, as is usual with Wagner, is in musical terms emotional to
the point of sentimentality, but also luminous and warm. He uses a reduced
orchestration here, and his strings and woodwind radiate a sense of care and
affection.
Kundry believes that a sexual union can redeem her from the curse of the
Saviour whom once she mocked. But Parsifal – after a long kiss – resists her,
and bewails the ‘agony of love’ (a concept we know from Tristan und Isolde).
‘How everything trembles, quakes and quivers in sinful desire!’ This is a phal-
lic fantasy, whose ‘agony’ is comprehensible, since Parsifal has to defend him-
self with all his might against ‘sin’ , while Kundry continues to desire him and
to do everything she can to seduce him. Her lips ‘tremble’ , her locks of hair
‘flutter’ , she wraps her arm around his neck and ‘caresses’ his cheek. When
Parsifal pushes her away with the words ‘Oh! Sorrow! Sorrow! Terrible sor-
row!’ , her theme follows him in the strings and she does not let him go. He
calls her a corrupter and a blasphemer and resists her several times, for it
becomes clear to him that he belongs to the male order and can lead it only if
he remains abstinent. It is not just her sexuality that endangers him, for she is
sinful in her very being and has to be ‘redeemed’ . The fact that Parsifal cannot
serve the pure blood of Jesus unless he rejects the kiss of a woman (implic-
itly a Jewish woman) shows the aforementioned dual act of exclusion of both
woman and those of another race. As a symbol of the Wandering Jew, but also
of the stereotypical femme fatale, who knows how to draw men down into the
abyss, Kundry finds redemption only in death. This occurs after her baptism
and is accompanied by a ‘sound of extermination’ (‘Vernichtungsklang’) on the
timpani. This explanation of Kundry – as a prototype of the woman who
gains power over men and thereby humiliates them – is already to be found
in Richard’s letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of , in which he compares
Amfortas’s inability to attain redemption with his own, unredeemed love for
Mathilde: ‘The wound from the spear, and no doubt one other wound too –
in his heart – mean that the poor man in his terrible pain knows no other
 ‘… the suffering of love’s seduction’: Kundry and Parsifal 

yearning than the yearning for death.’ He thus equates the wound from the
spear with the ‘wound’ caused by a woman. Because of her power over sexual
fulfilment, Kundry has to be punished.
In the last act, Kundry falls silent. Apart from one word, sung twice
(‘Dienen … dienen’ – ‘to serve’) she says nothing more. After her cry at the
beginning, her dissonant diminished-seventh chord also disappears, for she
has transformed herself into a contrite penitent. She washes Parsifal’s feet,
anoints them and dries them with her hair – in other words, she has to bow
down low. Gurnemanz, on the other hand, is allowed to anoint Parsifal’s head.
The noble fluidity of the accompaniment at this point serves to confirm that
the evil, magic world of Klingsor and Kundry has been banished. Parsifal
remembers the Flower Maidens, who ‘avidly entwined’ him, conforming to
tradition by assigning the potential for seduction solely to woman. The erotic,
attractive woman is now lying on the ground, transfixed. It is rare in art that
the feminine is dispatched so radically. In contrast to her, Parsifal now enters
a charming, springtime world: ‘How lovely the meadow seems to me today!’
A long passage (the ‘Good Friday Magic’) is now heard, offering a transfigured,
intimate beauty, and depicting the loveliness of sun-drenched nature with a
carpet of strings and woodwind ornamentation. It is with such instruments
that Wagner always characterizes ‘good’ women (that is, those ready to sac-
rifice themselves for their men). The disappearance of the sultry, exotic gar-
den and the sight of the lovely, flowery meadow remind us of the emergence
of Tannhäuser out of the sensuous, erotic grotto of Venus into the luminous
world of nature and into (masculine) normality. But whereas Tannhäuser
happily remembers his time in the underworld, that world has here been
irrevocably destroyed.
Parsifal is given a knight’s robes and sets out for the Grail. The march that
accompanies him, with its heavy brass and its process of constant, grandiose
intensification, is his victory procession in a world where only men live. When
he is anointed King of the Grail, his dignified motif is expanded over  bars
and accorded all possible dynamic shadings. Thus the development of the
young, inexperienced boy into a legitimate ruler is traced out before us and
loaded with positive connotations. After Parsifal has assumed leadership at
the close, the communion theme that is particularly associated with him leads
to a climax. The cellos and trombones join in, adding their own sonority. His
assumption of power is signified by numerous ascending musical phrases – for
the hero has arrived at his rightful place of glory. Such ascent not only signifies
an affirmation of life, but stands in crass contrast to Kundry’s chromatic motif
that tumbles down into the abyss. The orchestration is also gender-specific
here. Whereas Kundry is largely assigned the strings, the Parsifal motif is
 Richard Wagner’s Women

generally given to the brilliant sound of the brass, exuding solemn majesty and
pacing forth with unctuous pathos.
There could hardly be any greater contrast than that between Kundry –
whose destructive power threatened to ensnare and engulf the male subject –
and the male world of the Order of the Grail, wrestling for spiritual supremacy.
The humble, acquiescent woman is allowed access to the temple, but her act
of submission has broken her will and banished the danger that she earlier
embodied. With this ‘extinction’ of her soul, Wagner confirms the old equa-
tion of the feminine with death and suffering that has long been an integral
aspect of Western culture, dominating art, literature and film to the present
day. She becomes ‘an endless object of projection, by means of which the male
subject can both repress death and articulate it’ . But there is more to it than
this, for Wagner here allocates ‘sin’ itself to a whole gender. Parsifal experi-
ences his sexual drive as something destructive and kills it off by projecting it
onto Kundry, equating the urge itself with woman. Thus he can win back the
phallic spear, man is confirmed as the advocate of the spiritual and woman is
consigned to the realm of instinct.
To treat women and Jews both as outsiders was a strategy that was an act
of self-exoneration for the bourgeoisie in the th century and intensified its
feelings of superiority. Kundry’s death is meant to fulfil the dream of renew-
ing one’s own purity, though this is won at the cost of woman. Jost Hermand
even interprets the obsessive striving for purity as a fundamental aspect of
the opera, suggesting that Wagner’s vegetarianism played a significant role in
it. Wagner regarded eating meat as something unclean, and in ‘Religion and
art’ he made it guilty of the downfall of the Christian religion and the church.
We see this in the character of Parsifal, who takes up the function of a priest.
Above all, purity is to be maintained in sexual matters. Parsifal’s refusal to
engage in sexual congress with Kundry is the result of the notion of a sexu-
ally ‘pure’ body, which was to be found in numerous scientific books of the
day. Sexual abstinence would protect one from racial contamination by Jews
and from the sexual potency of women. But the supposition is not without
foundation that the rampant spread of syphilis in Wagner’s time might also
have prompted him to demonize sexual activity. In either case, sexuality is
condemned.
In the discourses of the th century, such concerns were extended to fears
for the body politic. Parsifal’s asceticism was intended to demonstrate how one
might free oneself from the dangers of illness and degeneration. At that time
it was maintained among the bourgeoisie that woman was controlled by her
womb – this being supposedly the central organ of the female body. Thanks to
his intellectual abilities, man was predestined to tame woman’s neural stimuli
 ‘… the suffering of love’s seduction’: Kundry and Parsifal 

and lead her to reason. Prostitutes were feared because of their supposedly
destructive erotic energies and were thus banished into brothels and carefully
controlled. The Grail, the refuge of the male order of knights, is thus simulta-
neously the refuge of the healthy and the pure. It is by this means that Wagner
once more confirms the superiority of the male gender at the expense of the
woman. It is a matter of course that woman is regarded as a ‘wild animal’ by
the knights and is the representative of all that is deviant.
‘Only he who has stayed aloof from the temptations of sensual desire will
gain the power of the blessing of the Grail. The blessed power of the sanctuary
will only be revealed to him who is chaste,’ wrote Wagner in his prose draft.
And yet the composer himself held asceticism in low esteem. When reading
William Lecky’s History of European Morals, he was full of sympathy for the
author’s belief that enforced chastity leads to barbaric excess. Even Cosima
was prompted to wit by it. When Richard asked her once in jest if she would
not like to try a little asceticism (‘Askese’), she answered that she’d ‘rather
have cheese’ (‘Käse’), as she was at the time hunting for a good one for him.
And he once joked that Cosima would gladly establish an ‘ascetic household’
(‘Askese’) in Tribschen. He himself had no desire to live as an ascetic, but
nevertheless fantasized about asexual women. Christ’s mother Mary seemed
to him an example of the ideal woman, for as he explains in ‘Religion and art’
she ‘became divine in that she went wholly against nature and bore a son as a
virgin, without conceiving by a man’ . She was for him the paragon of ‘spiritual
beauty, without any sensuality’ , and he saw in her ‘divine love devoid of every
possibility of unchastity’ . Since he was not concerned with a general call to
abstinence but rather with the victory of the male order, he dreamt up chaste
women who would not endanger man.
Since its world première in  the solemn, religious element of Parsifal’s
poetic atmosphere has received repeated attention – the sacred pomp that
Wagner conjures up with subtly simple means. In the first performances, the
Festspielhaus was compared to a temple of the Grail. The fervour of the knights
kneeling before the Grail, the mixing of the distant boys’ voices with the peal-
ing of the bells – all this has a moving, affecting impact. This music exists on
its own terms and is thus far removed from commercially minded ventures,
whose purpose is merely to entertain. It gives the audience the impression
that it is participating in a solemn ceremony through which it might attain
higher things. The score is complex, remarkable for the manner in which it
fragments the music into the smallest motifs and then weaves them together
with the greatest possible variation. Then there is the sophisticated orches-
tration and the magical aural experience it affords. The result is an engaging,
even overwhelming experience. And we easily suppress any realization that
 Richard Wagner’s Women

we are gazing enraptured at a stage full of men – men who determine all spir-
itual principles, who dare to reach for the divine, who engage by right in ritual
acts, and from whom flow devotion, augustness and exaltation. These are men
who can evade the sinfulness of their own desires by assigning them to woman.
Cosima even believed it herself. After a rehearsal of Parsifal, she wrote, deeply
moved: ‘I believe it was the divine will that he [Richard] should transfigure his
art to this point of expression.’ This notion of having attained a higher level
of being was not just the preserve of the composer, but is expressly applied to
the entire world of men that we find in Parsifal. They are intended there to
receive legitimacy for their spiritual and worldly dominance.
The secondary literature around Parsifal has not recognized this ‘side effect’ ,
which even today is either denied or avoided. Wieland Wagner maintained
that Parsifal would enter into the ‘motherly community of the Grail’ – an
odd belief, given that there is not a woman to be found there. In the picture
of a cross that he designed in preparation for a production of the opera, he
depicted the ‘sinful nature’ of woman as opposed to the ‘fallen spirit’ of man,
thus reproducing the old model instead of abolishing it. Nature is depicted
as unalterable, whereas a spirit, once fallen, can stand up again. Apologetic
interpretations even insist that the contrast between Kundry and the chaste
knights excludes any enmity towards either women or the world of the senses.
Udo Bermbach sees here rather an endorsement of the theory of civilization
according to which the sublimation of urges is ‘an indispensable prerequisite
per se for culture’ and signifies ‘high cultural achievements’ . This theory,
developed by Freud, might otherwise have a certain justification. But when it
is applied here it can only strike one as ironic. Almost all the works created by
men come into being with the help of a woman in the background, who sees to
the material basics, stills sexual needs, and in her role as conversation partner
is also involved intellectually and creatively in the work’s conception.
A further theory sees the ban on sexual pleasure in the Grail community as
the individual’s noble refusal to satisfy egotistical desires so as to fight for a
better society. Such an interpretation might allow one to transfer the opera’s
ethical meaning to our present times, but ignores the fact that women are
ostracized on account both of this vow of chastity and of the demonization of
their sexuality. Amfortas bears a severe wound as a result of sexual congress,
Klingsor has castrated himself out of fear of his unbridled sexual urges, and
the knights are in constant danger of being lost to Klingsor’s realm through
seduction by the Flower Maidens. Female sexuality thus serves here as a meta-
phor for the worst evils in the world.
Nor is there any illumination to be had from the view that ‘sin, which runs
through the work as a metaphor for abandonment to one’s sexual urge, does
 ‘… the suffering of love’s seduction’: Kundry and Parsifal 

not thrive on prudery but on the pessimist’s denial of the will’ . Why, then,
would Wagner have chosen sexual abstinence as an example of the denial of
the will? After all, he was a sexually active husband himself. Cosima admit-
ted in , shortly after their marriage, that ‘all passion in love has left me;
it still prevails in R.’ When others suggest that the denial of sexual love is
at the very core of Parsifal, then we must remember that Wagner declares
war primarily on a sexuality that is exuded by woman alone. Men may be the
victims of female seduction, though their suffering can be healed, as Amfortas
finds. Woman, however, being the origin of the wrong, must be punished.
Simon Williams is one of the few to have admitted this:

In Wagner’s previous dramas, with the exception of Die Meistersinger,

the utopian unity of the individual with the world occurred as a result
of the death of the hero and the self-sacrifice of the redeeming woman.
Now, in his last work, the woman dies but the hero lives. The woman’s
role as one who loves and is compassionate is dispensable, and the male
hero, now a messiah, is absolute to himself.

Wagner makes three large-scale statements in this work, though we are not
supposed to notice that they really reflect his own personal goals. Woman
must serve man (namely, Wagner the artist); art is to acquire the aura of the
sacred (that is, Wagner’s art); and finally, the artist himself (again, Wagner) is a
kind of Messiah. It would have been not a little indecorous to announce these
three things out loud, for Wagner knew they would be controversial, but they
were his goals and the plan worked. He ‘consecrated’ his opera by giving it the
ennobling title of Bühnenweihfestspiel (‘stage-consecrating festival play’). This
affords it a higher aura, promoting it above the common or garden in opera.
Wagner decreed that the work should only be performed in Bayreuth, as it
must not be allowed to become ‘mere entertainment’ on the stage of any other
theatre. Even if Wagner – taking his cue from Schelling – really did believe
in the pure truth of art, we can with confidence assume that personal motives
also played a role here.
Shortly before his death, Wagner busied himself once more with the ‘decline
of the human races’ . He described monogamy as a cultural achievement
and marriage as the ‘creator of noble races’ . He insisted that the races could
be purified only through child-bearing in marriage and argued in favour of
monogamy in order for there to be no ‘mixing’ . This would ensure that ‘signifi-
cant individuals might arise’ . He was concerned about the future of the heroic,
brilliant man. Besides his fear of the Jews, it was again his fear of promiscuity
and of female desire that drove him on. ‘It is certain that the noblest white race,
in both myth and history, was from the very start monogamous. But when
 Richard Wagner’s Women

it conquers others and indulges in polygamous mixing with its subjects, it

immediately veers towards its own doom’ . In a footnote we find the following:
‘Ideality of man – naturalness of woman – (Buddha) – now – degeneracy of
man’ . For him, woman remained a force of nature, whereas man strove for
the ideal. It was precisely these two great topics – the purity of race and the
condemnation of promiscuous woman – to which he dedicated his last written
words. He was satisfied that his opera perfectly suited the convictions of the
Bayreuth ideologues, and said: ‘It is very curious that I should have saved up
this work for my greatest maturity; I know what I know and what is in it; and
the new school, Wolzogen and others, can abide by it.’ From here we find a
direct line to the National Socialists. The Nazi renegade Hermann Rauschning
claimed to have heard Adolf Hitler speak the following words:

It is not the Christian, Schopenhauerian religion of pity that is glorified

[in Parsifal] but the pure, noble blood whose purity the brotherhood
of the adept have gathered together to protect and glorify. […] We all
suffer from the sickness of mixed, corrupted blood. How can we purify
ourselves and atone? Note that the pity through which one becomes
knowing is only for him who is inwardly corrupted and ambivalent.
And this pity knows only one action: to let the sick die. The eternal
life that the Grail bestows is meant only for him who is truly pure and
noble! […] Only what is tough and masculine will endure.

Rauschning thereby acknowledged an ideological connection between the

elimination of the corrupt and the continued existence of the ‘tough and
masculine’ .
One could easily descend into pointless debates as to whether or not anti-
Semitism was only a sideshow for Wagner – as many a Bayreuth apologist has
tirelessly insisted – or whether, as those of radically opposing views maintain,
he was in fact obsessed by the topic. But it would make more sense to ask how
we today, in the st century, can deal with a work such as Parsifal, with its
unique sound-world. Its spiritually charged music is a joy to hear, but the com-
poser demands a high price for the glorification of his white hero. Even today,
it is to the realm of woman that the responsibility for providing affectionate
love is assigned, for since the beginnings of time it has been her task to give
birth and rear children. This is no longer in Kundry’s servile sense of ‘dienen’ ,
to be sure, but as a human being with equal rights. Voluntary asceticism –
whether sexual or in any other aspect of our existence – should not lead to
the exclusion of women nor to their demonization as guilt-laden beings. Nor
is Wagner’s ethos of pity reasonable – he who once expressed the desire to
burn down opera houses but would burst into tears if he saw an animal in
 ‘… the suffering of love’s seduction’: Kundry and Parsifal 

pain. In Die Meistersinger, Beckmesser experiences a thoroughly nightmarish,

traumatic defeat, for which the composer displays not one whit of pity. Instead,
his pen drips with malice. Mime in the Ring adopts and brings up a young
boy, yet is depicted as revolting and repellent. As mothers, women learn to
practise empathy, and in this role they are the object of Wagner’s veneration.
But he removes them from any kind of spiritual or intellectual environment
and demotes them to the status of dangerous creatures of instinct. Parsifal
becomes knowing, but Kundry remains a servant, subordinate and inferior.
It would be more forward-looking to propagate a spirituality that incorpo-
rates the sensuous, as it has been achieved in art – for example, by women
painters such as Georgia O’Keefe, Niki de Saint Phalle, Frida Kahlo, Louise
Bourgeois and others. It is surely no coincidence that many female artists have
a positive regard for physicality, rejecting the Christian/Platonic dualism of
spirit and body. Without wishing to advocate a specifically female aesthetic,
there can be no doubt that the artificial antagonism of spirit and body has
long served male interests, and does so still. Ideologies comprise a one-sided
perception or impression of reality, and this particular ideology is still largely
directed against the needs of women. The dualistic, authoritarian thought that
characterizes Wagner’s work leads us into a power discourse, which is deter-
mined by mutually exclusive antimonies that can offer us no way forward. His
music plays its own subliminal part in legitimizing this impasse.
Postlude

T    that there is no such thing as a static gender identity.

Instead it is largely derived from the gender roles that girls and boys are
assigned at birth and according to which their behaviour is determined. In
Wagner’s world of ideas, however, gender was something fixed, ontologically
predetermined and possessed of a stable centre (the ‘ego’). Thus it seemed to
him logical to assign specific characteristics to men and women. These binary
images and concepts permeate his thinking, his writings and his music. Nor
are they mere superficial manifestations. These fixed gender characteristics
and separate fields of activity are so deeply rooted in his compositions that
they are of great significance for Western music in general, but especially for
the reception of Wagner’s own work. His musical language, however, is still
perceived as being free from gender-codes, while his idea of ‘love’ is regarded
as being equally applicable to both sexes.
Throughout his work, the male principle possesses an elevated status. Men
are responsible for matters of state and for societal spheres of influence. As
arbiter, thinker and humane mediator, Hans Sachs is declared a hero on
the festive meadow – and this is as much on account of his gender as of his
actions. Wagner confirms and expands upon the paradigm of the artist as the
epitome of masculine authority, the leading figure and the benevolent chief of
his people. Wotan’s spear is the symbol of his power and authority and thus
at the same time of his masculinity. He rules as a god over the gods and is
depicted with nobility in music, as are Lohengrin and Parsifal. Siegfried is
allocated numerous motifs that are all connoted positively. Men represent the
public sphere from the ruler’s viewpoint, and this prompts grandiose musical
pageantry. The use of chorale-like passages, brass instruments and large-scale
orchestration signify their world, as do diatonic harmonies and triads. The
bombastic battle scenes in Rienzi, the band of brothers who are the Knights of
the Grail in Parsifal, Tannhäuser’s equally knightly friends, with their spiritual
ideals, the exclusively male troop of pilgrims, busy with their religious/moral
issues, and the guild of the Mastersingers – the music rubber-stamps them
all, affording them probity and prestige, even when their actions on stage end
in failure. The world of counts, nobles and soldiers in Lohengrin, framed by
trumpet fanfares and the festive sound of horns and trombones, demonstrates
a space in which men have authority, acting as surrogates for the patriarchal
order, whose legitimacy is taken as a virtual law of nature. The representatives
of this order do not even have to be rulers and heroes. This is proven by the
 Postlude 

sound of trumpets that ennobles Walther in Die Meistersinger when he steps

forward to sing his Prize Song. The attributes of ‘natural’ dominance are thus
in time transferred to the bourgeois man too.
Time and again, diatonicism is assigned to what is closer to the origins of
things, to what is purer, to the realm of the divine – especially in Wagner’s
last work, Parsifal, in which the protagonist is raised to the level of a Messiah.
Man is deemed to possess intellect, rationality and the ability for conscious
action. In this regard, the music at times even superimposes meaning on the
action. Thus Wagner may have a critical attitude towards Wotan, but the music
assigned to the character never calls into question his natural dominance. This
is shown, above all, by the noble, monumental Valhalla motif, which Wagner
chooses to assign to stately-sounding trombones, and which describes not
only the mighty castle of Valhalla but also the god Wotan himself. This fact has
never yet been properly considered by Wagner commentators, proceeding as
they do in a more selective fashion. Wagner’s female characters offer a reverse
example: they are branded with deficiencies. Wagner accomplishes this in an
unexpected manner by a quite specific application of the old tradition of the
affects. Decades later, when the composers of film music adopted the same
methods, they could rely on the fact that audiences would comprehend the
significance of this traditional musical language.
There are, however, exceptions to this pattern. In these cases, the biologi-
cal facts of gender stand in contradiction to the musical depiction and to the
trend towards character polarization: Erik in Der fliegende Holländer, for
example, has little in common with the typical image of masculinity. Nor does
Siegmund, who might be assigned the insignia of great strength by his father,
but at the close decides against life as a hero and in favour of death with his
beloved. Both Erik and Siegmund are punished for rejecting traditional, robust
manliness and for embracing alternatives that bring them close to ‘feminine’
modes of being.
In the musical portrayal of the sexes, the orchestration has a supporting
function. Whereas the sound of trumpets signifies dynamic action, decisive-
ness, the creative spirit and the world of ideas, violins impart human warmth
and emotion. The woodwind are regarded as an expression of female inferior-
ity. The oboe describes Elisabeth’s characteristics and is also assigned to Elsa:
in both cases Wagner uses his choice of instrument to stress the virtue, grace
and modesty of women. Senta, too, with her preparedness for self-sacrifice,
is often characterized by the oboe. The clarinet, with its ability to execute a
crescendo and decrescendo on a single note, is the instrument of intuition and
eroticism (as it already was for Mozart), and also the instrument of the libidi-
nal urge. Thus it is used to accentuate the seductive arts of Venus. Wagner
 Richard Wagner’s Women

pursues a feminization of the woodwind instruments. He assigns the oboe and

the cor anglais to the expressive realm of suffering. And by employing them
often to describe women, he introduces characteristics that were typical of the
accepted view of woman at the time. Together with the harp, these classical
‘instruments of love’ demonstrate what a woman’s raison d’être was supposed
to be. It is therefore nothing out of the ordinary that Sieglinde is character-
ized by the clarinet, Siegmund by the cello, or that Eva is assigned the oboe
and clarinet during the pauses in Die Meistersinger’s opening chorale while
her lover-to-be Walther is given the viola and cello. After all, in painting, too,
the use of different colour shadings for the male and female bodies was part
and parcel of a long tradition. The melodic realm allows for an even clearer
assessment: it is not by chance that Eva’s two motifs descend, for they signalize
female weakness in contrast to the motif of the Mastersingers, which (despite
its opening downward leap of a fourth) strives upwards and is pregnant with
signification. Its impact is intensified by the sumptuous orchestration and its
solemn aura. In Der Ring des Nibelungen, the descending seventh in motifs for
redemption, for Brünnhilde and for Freia, is used to depict the female capac-
ity for love. Such downward leaps are in the tradition of the affects semanti-
cally charged with suffering. ‘Women is in health terms “sick”’ – this state-
ment from a th-century doctor, with its stigmatization of women in general,
would not be out of place here.
According to Wagner, woman embodies love per se, but she also signifies
the danger of perdition. What happens in the Venusberg is just as female in
connotation as is Isolde’s underworld of sexuality: the luminescence of sound,
the luscious orchestration and the dissonant harmonies all make evident that
when man plunges into the boundless world of the erotic, he must abandon
values such as fidelity, honour and virtue, and it can end in his death. It cannot
be reconciled with his identity. The world of night belongs to woman. Ortrud’s
malice is marked by diminished-seventh chords, string tremolandi, muted
brass and the use of the lowest bass instruments. In the case of the Flower
Maidens in Klingsor’s magic garden – related as they are to the nymphs and
sirens of the Venusberg – their sensuality is expressed by a winding, snakelike
chromaticism that oozes downwards. Carnal desire, which remained for ever
a prime characteristic of Wagner’s own biography, is here demonized as some-
thing sinful. This in turn brings about a demonization of the feminine itself as
the agent that constantly excites and inflames the male.
Wagner’s image of women encompasses much that is contradictory. On
the one hand, conflict is interpreted empathetically from the viewpoint of
the woman – as, for example, when he shows us Sieglinde’s failed marriage
and her despair, or when he depicts Brünnhilde’s abasement; he comes down
 Postlude 

firmly on their side. On the other hand, he takes pleasure in having women
bind themselves exclusively to their man and giving up all independent life of
their own, as is the case with Senta, Elisabeth and Elsa. With the character of
Ortrud, he denounces women who follow their own interests, and in Fricka
he criticizes those who insist that their husbands follow a moral code. With
Kundry, he adopts the division of woman into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that was propa-
gated in his time. These contrasts can be observed most clearly by compar-
ing Brünnhilde with Kundry. The former recognizes what selfless love means,
while the latter is excluded from holy ritual in an act legitimized by the male
order of knights – the guardians of intellect and of the spirit.
Wagner’s alterations to his sources also allow one to draw conclusions
regarding his image of the sexes. Thus in Parsifal the celibacy of the Knights
of the Grail, and the suffering that Amfortas endures on account of his sex-
ual activity, are expanded by Wagner to become the opera’s central topic. As
a result, the supposed danger posed by female sexuality is shifted into the
foreground. Wagner focuses Parsifal’s moment of revelation on his kiss with
Kundry. His claim to leadership and his strength are thus founded directly
on his rejection of sinful woman. In Tannhäuser, Wagner diverges from the
sources to make Elisabeth both the adversary of Venus and a personification
of ‘pure love’ . This simply serves to clarify further the danger that Venus poses
and the sacrificial role that Elisabeth fulfils. And in Lohengrin the character of
Ortrud is largely his own invention, independent of the sources. By making
her Lohengrin’s antagonist Wagner transforms her into an incarnation of evil.
Even this crass contrast between Ortrud and the Knight of the Grail shows
how, subliminally, Wagner implies that danger lurks in woman: in Ortrud, all
the negative functions are united that Wagner found in his source in the fig-
ure of Matabrune. Tannhäuser is redeemed by a Good Woman, while Parsifal
himself becomes the redeemer, but in both cases it is the evil lusts of the flesh
that threaten them – thus the feminine itself. As for Senta, Wagner dropped
the ironic treatment of female fidelity that is found in Heine’s original. The
singularization of woman’s eternal love and constancy was more important to
him than any erotic dalliances.
The relationship between the sexes undergoes a further hierarchization in
that the connection of woman with death, dying, suffering and sexual desire
is expressed in musical terms, as in the cases of Venus, Isolde and Kundry.
The musical means employed also signalize aversion and other discomforting
emotions. Since in his opera plots Wagner allows women such as Erda and
Fricka to be dominated by feelings of fear, resistance, unhappiness and pes-
simism far more often than are their men, the depiction of these emotions
in music also rubs off onto the female characters themselves. The division of
 Richard Wagner’s Women

woman into ‘whore’ and ‘saint’, manifested in the contrasting pairs of Venus
and Elisabeth, Ortrud and Elsa, results in a further weakening of woman in
comparison to man, for he is unequivocal, mundane and thoroughly worldly.
This division also offered Wagner certain opportunities, for it meant that eve-
rything fascinating, forbidden and non-bourgeois could be loaded onto the
‘whore’ . And yet there are still strong women in Wagner too: these radiate a
positive charisma, but only when they place their power and strength at the
service of a man.
Alongside this clear polarization of man and woman, Wagner’s work is also
determined by his personal search for a ‘true’ female partner. If one wishes
to, one can interpret Wagner’s weakness for men-redeeming women as being
influenced by the ‘French social-utopian philosophy of history in the first half
of the th century’ . His concern with the subject of redemption, however, is
too emphatic – too much an obsession – to be explained away adequately thus.
It threads its way through all his work right to the very end. In his creative life,
Wagner passed through various stages that correlate to his personal develop-
ment. But we have to differentiate here between the influence of real women
on his work and his wishful fantasies. His early happiness in his union with
Minna is demonstrated in Das Liebesverbot, which celebrates a strong woman.
Never again did he allow a female character such freedom of decision as he
does here. All the same, the military band on stage at the close of the work
points to a subsequent need on the composer’s part to upgrade the mascu-
line element. Minna’s criticism of his lifestyle hardened after he lost his job
as Kapellmeister in Dresden and they fled to Zürich, making their relation-
ship more fragile. A five-year hiatus in composing (if one disregards the brief,
discarded fragments written for Siegfrieds Tod and Der junge Siegfried) reflect
this watershed in his relations with Minna and his lack of a sympathetic part-
ner. It is not by chance that Wagner fell in love with Jessie Laussot in –,
just after his inner alienation from Minna. After this adventure failed, he met
Mathilde Wesendonck. She brought him just what he yearned for: unending
sympathy, deep emotion upon hearing his music and the desire to understand
his work.
‘My intense, unassuaged need for love is poured into my art, and if I am
lucky I will be regarded as an energetic – opera reformer!’ These words are
from the composer’s most productive years. Between  and , when
his relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck was a source of both torture and
delight to him, he conceived or composed his most important works. These
included the completion of the Walküre libretto, the revision of the libretti for
Der junge Siegfried and Siegfrieds Tod, the composition of Das Rheingold, Die
Walküre, the first act and much of the second act of Siegfried, the libretto and
 Postlude 

music of Tristan and the prose sketch for Die Sieger. Time and again we read
that the operas of Wagner’s ‘middle’ period are the works in which we see the
composer’s conflict with the traditional notions of morality, art and life that
were the norm in contemporary society. Yet Wagner himself made a yearning
for the ideal woman the focal point of his work. His ‘intense, unassuaged need
for love’ thus seems to have determined his creative work to a high degree.
Every artist strives for recognition in society; but in order to be creative at all,
Wagner needed a loving woman. Mathilde became the source of a tremendous
creative urge. And he himself often stressed that his second wife, Cosima, was
responsible for the completion of his late works.
The plot of Tristan was altered on account of his experiences with Mathilde.
Wagner’s original intention to create a ‘monument’ to love ‘as the loveliest
of all dreams’ altered in the course of their increasingly frustrated relation-
ship to become a portrayal of ‘love as terrible suffering’ . In the first sketches
for Die Meistersinger, Sachs’s love for Eva is absent. Only after Mathilde had
entered his life – but had refused to leave her family for him – did Wagner
incorporate the topic of renunciation; in correspondence with her, he referred
to himself at times as ‘Hans Sachs’ . There followed years of extreme suffer-
ing in the struggle for Cosima that took him to the very limits of his mental
strength. He closed the orchestral draft of the last act of Götterdämmerung
with the words ‘!Finished! Everything to please Cosel.  July  R.W. ’ , which
say more than any lengthy explanation could. Without Cosima’s readiness to
defy all resistance and become his lover, friend and helper, he would hardly
have achieved the gigantic creative feat of completing his Ring des Nibelungen.
Finally, in Parsifal he undertook a complete renunciation of sexuality, depicted
it as reprehensible and abjured the feminine. This transformation can only be
explained if one takes into account the immense mental strain that he endured
in the s. Even the flowering of his passion for Judith Gautier several years
later did not hinder his imagining a sexually purified male society in which
objects of erotic fascination are devalued. His search for the self-sacrificing
woman was of no interest any more, for he had already found her in Cosima.
Wagner’s concept of love has attracted the most varied interpretations.
Many an author has subscribed to the notion of an equality in ‘the union of
two perfect beings’ in Siegfried and Brünnhilde, as does Jean-Jacques Nattiez,
who sees the plot as a metaphorical history of music. Music – in the form of
woman – has to be impregnated by poetry, and Nattiez transfers this metaphor
to the love scene in Siegfried, which in turn conveys an impression of equality
between the partners. Placing the male as the subject, however, functions only
if one delegates the capability of love to the female. From her, the male expects
a never-ending source of love. This is a one-sided sentimental view that allows
 Richard Wagner’s Women

Wagner to apply tried and tested musical topoi: trills, chains of parallel thirds,
the use of woodwind, reduced orchestration and a legato carpet of sound in
the strings. Wagner criticized purely sensual love often enough in his writings,
contrasting it with ‘true’ love. But on the other hand he regarded sensual love –
as in the Venusberg – as an indispensable experience in the life of the up-and-
coming male. In Tristan, he explores to the full the power of sexuality, even
to the point of a musical depiction of coitus. Throughout his life he despised
moral boundaries and argued for freedom in erotic matters – though this was
(nota bene) only for men. While he admitted the existence of sexual desire in
woman, he rejected any sexual autonomy on her part. Elisabeth’s moving con-
fession of love is the climax of Tannhäuser, just as Senta’s Ballad has a central
role in Der fliegende Holländer. Both women place their love for a man at the
centre of their life – a life that has no meaning if they cannot be united with
their chosen partner. Women with a claim to sexual power, on the other hand,
are punished. Kundry’s death in Parsifal is a warning to women who desire
men and threaten to draw them into their realm. So is the downfall of Ortrud,
a woman who gains power over her husband and must pay for her transgres-
sion with her death. The dreadful destruction of Elsa’s happiness is her bitter
punishment for disobeying a ban imposed by her husband. In the th century,
women could not ignore these repeated warnings for they are unmistakably
visible and audible in every plot; the music essentially consummates this judg-
mental polarization of the gender roles.
Whereas love is meant to stream forth from woman, it is dangerous for
man to abandon himself to it, for he risks losing the upper hand. Tristan and
Siegmund are the two male characters in Wagner’s œuvre who place love
above everything. Tristan enters into the night with its feminine connotations
and Siegmund abandons his heroic status out of love. We can regard this as
a feminization of both of them, which is punished by death. Woman on the
other hand has the duty to integrate love into her life as its focal power. The
heroic may serve as an ideal for the man upon whom the female capacity for
love bestows strength and joy in life. For woman, the ideal was lovingkindness
towards her one and only partner, coupled with a readiness to fulfil his sexual
needs.
Wagner’s absolute need for a partner was in his later years joined by a ten-
dency to misogyny and racist sophistry, of the kind he had acquired from
reading Gobineau and others. His glorification of the Teutonic in Lohengrin
and Die Meistersinger is both affirmatory and historically comprehensible.
But he obviously also needed objects of aggression. His hatred for everything
French, for example, is in  particularly noticeable. The battling bands of
knightly brothers that surface in his operas, which we have described above,
 Postlude 

are reminiscent of the ‘model of the inner strife that serves as a fountain of
youth for the nations’ . At the close of the th century and in the early th,
the heroic deeds of the Germanic forefathers were regularly celebrated and the
Germanic tribes seen as the fount of civilization. This racist ideology is aggres-
sively masculine in nature, and it also influenced Wagner’s thinking. It was no
coincidence that the concept of race as a scientific category that evolved in the
late th century found a parallel in the contemporary theory of the inequality
of the sexes, based on the perception of character differences between man
and woman. A reality was concocted that accorded the ‘Teutonic’ man in each
case a natural-born right of dominance.
Wagner liked to see his own ideas as natural laws, and in his writings he con-
tinually insisted that art must take on the role of religion. The latter, he main-
tained, had forfeited its authenticity. By transferring the meaningful function
of religion to art, his ideas and convictions were concentrated into what he
regarded as an ‘ideal truth’ . When this is applied to the relations between the
sexes, it means that Wagner aimed at cementing societal relations that were by
their nature, in fact, alterable. For him, woman possessed an ‘eternal nature’ .
The eternal feminine was not explicitly placed on the same level as contempo-
rary notions of the ‘black soul’ or the ‘Jewish character’, but these were all part
and parcel of the same conception. This cleared a way for his interpretation
of female sexuality as a general threat to man, which was then mingled with a
hatred of everything Jewish. Kundry thus acquires a ‘double’ negativity as both
Jewess and woman.
Wagner became entangled in theories that ‘the Jews’ somehow possessed
character deficiencies on grounds of their race. Whereas his contemporary
Karl Marx rightly gave economic–historical reasons for numerous Jews being
involved in the financial world, the composer sought his reasons in race. In
a similar way he was unwilling to admit any capacity for independent intel-
lectual ability in women; numerous passages in Cosima’s diaries prove how
displeased he was at the ‘unfeminine’ aspect of women who pursued a career.
Although slavery was abolished in France in  and the slave trade out-
lawed in Britain in , the th century was still the age of colonialism. The
notion that certain races were ‘naturally’ inferior long remained current in the
West. We are justified in deploring Wagner’s racism – and, indeed, his preju-
dices were nothing if not aggressive – but it hardly takes us any further. It is
thus all the more important to investigate both hidden and open racism and
sexism in his work. It would be unfair and unhistorical to criticize him for
not abandoning the phallocentric matrix. His life, his experiences and views
are one aspect of a whole constellation of masculinity that was typical for the
late th century. But nor can any interpretation of his work today simply
 Richard Wagner’s Women

ignore its immanent racism and sexism. It is high time to develop a gender-
specific sensibility for his work in order finally to bid farewell to essentialist,
naturalized notions of femininity. We must question how such clichéd, tradi-
tional ideas have been used to fabricate gender in so well-nigh performative
a fashion; and then we must examine the traces they have left down to the
present day.
There remains the question: are Wagner’s women strong women? This must
be answered in the negative if one takes a closer look at the female characters
that he created. Whereas man stands as a mediator between god and mankind
and has access to religion, even a reformed Kundry can do nothing other than
serve men. She remains excluded from mystic transcendence. Her redemp-
tion at the close of Parsifal revokes this exclusion but at the cost of her death,
meaning that she has no personal profit from it. Her basic conflict is between
her yearning for spiritual redemption and her sensual desires. However one
looks at it, there is no escape for her, and since Wagner’s starting point was
‘female nature’ it is logical to assume that in the figure of Kundry he intended
a depiction of woman per se. He insisted upon a male right of disposal over
the female, and that cannot result in any equal partnership. His concern with
love in many forms also led Wagner to reflect the social reality of his times. He
dwelt on matters of morals and sexuality and wove his criticism of them into
his works. His description of physical, sexual processes, such as he achieves so
graphically in Tannhäuser and above all in Tristan und Isolde, was in the th
century as much a taboo as were topics such as incest. He criticized marriage
in his presentation of Wotan and Fricka, and he showed clear sympathy for
characters who choose their partners beyond all bourgeois norms of behaviour,
thereby denouncing the strict moral codes of middle-class society that also
bothered him personally. This was a courageous step that deserves recogni-
tion. On the other hand, his excessive idealization of certain female characters,
robbing them of any needs of their own, was in line with the bourgeois notions
of the day. The figure of Brünnhilde is ascribed courage and inner strength, as
is demonstrated above all in her vocality, which bursts all hitherto accepted
norms. This character allows Wagner to posit the existence of a woman who
might break through conventional gender identity. To be sure, she pays a high
price for it. ‘Siegfried’s establishment of his heroic identity [is] counterpointed
with Brünnhilde’s loss of identity as Valkyrie.’ The strength that she possessed
as a virgin and as a Valkyrie is lost after she meets Siegfried. The musical motif
that replaces her heroic Valkyrie theme is witness to it. After she has experi-
enced both betrayal and violence to her person, she rises up to an act of venge-
ance that ends with the triumphant expression of an idealized, all-encompass-
ing love. We thus find in Wagner’s work both a normative understanding of
 Postlude 

the sexes as was usual for his day, but also evidence of a desire to subvert the
same – if only occasionally.
It is the music that time and again enchants and delights us with its endless
variety and beauty. It touches us deeply in a manner that exceeds any rational
comprehension. It gives Brünnhilde the strength to act and shows her rebel-
lion. Above and beyond Wagner’s own limited notions of the selfless, loving
woman, his music creates a character who breaks through her de facto clas-
sification as a mere appendage of man, even if she does this only briefly, for at
the end, she embraces death on account of her love. Thus even in Brünnhilde,
the ‘feminized’ ability to love selflessly and truly is victorious, and this abil-
ity is here accorded a music of boundless sweetness. In Wotan’s farewell to
Brünnhilde at the close of the final act of Die Walküre (this being, notably, a
loving relationship without sexual undertones), the father has to punish his
daughter by revoking her divinity – and all because she placed love above duty.
He laments the loss and remembers, deeply grieving, all that they have done
together. For the first time we hear a melody – superfluously labelled the ‘ring
of fire’ motif – that seems to embody the humanizing power and ennobling
beauty of love, more than words could express (Example ). The ascending
sixth, denoting love, has a long tradition in operatic history – a tradition that
has continued into the film music of today and thus still prompts the appropri-
ate emotional response from many people in the Western world. When Wotan
kisses his daughter’s eyes, the melody is altered, in that its descending section
now encompasses a seventh – the interval that, in the Ring, is bound up with
woman’s love, but which here reveals the suffering caused by the separation
between father and daughter. Wagner had filled his composition sketch for
the first act with abbreviated messages of love to Mathilde Wesendonck, in
particular choosing those passages that dealt with eye contact. Thus ‘this radi-
ant pair of eyes that I often caressed with smiles’ will have been understood as
a subjective confession of love, just as an act of renunciation would have been
understood by ‘may their star shine for that happier man; for this unhappy
immortal they must close in parting!’ Life and art, as always with Wagner, are
interwoven.

Ex. 

Besides this motif of love, the so-called ‘redemption’ motif from the close of
Götterdämmerung is deserving of particular mention. It was originally associ-
ated with Brünnhilde’s love for Siegfried (see Example , p. ). The fact that
this melody leaps downwards at the close signifies weakness on the part of
Brünnhilde, but it is precisely this weakness that makes her so significant and
 Richard Wagner’s Women

at the same time moves us. Here, too, Wagner uses a descending seventh to
describe woman’s love, showing it to be a true strength that does not have to
achieve hegemony in order to be convincing. True beauty is reserved for love:
for a few moments, it allows a glimpse to shine through of a utopian world
at peace. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s claim that the invention of a great melody is
one of the ‘mysteries of humanity’ is here proven true. Perhaps Wagner was
not aware that at this point he places the burden of human hopes on woman’s
shoulders – but it is a burden that cannot be borne for long without the ener-
getic assistance of the opposite sex.
‘The emancipation of woman proceeds in ecstatic convulsions’, wrote
Wagner, and the painful sea-change in thought to which he refers has to be
borne by the masculine half of humanity. But women would do well to avoid
imagining that their widespread marginalization has already been consigned
to history, for it continues today. And they should bear in mind that deep-
seated cultural structures will be reproduced incessantly if we fail to bring
them to the level of general awareness.
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Notes

/ Prelude / Chapter 
 McGlathery , p. .  SB VI, p.  (..).
 Gregor-Dellin , p. .  Kesting , pp. ff.; Friedrich
 SB III, p.  (..); CW II, p.  Nietzsche, ‘War Wagner überhaupt ein
(..). Musiker?’ , in N. Wagner , p. .
 See Sigrid Nieberle and Eva Rieger,  SB IV p.  (..–..).
‘Gender Studies am Beispiel “Mozart”’ ,  We can see this at its most obvious in
in Annette Kreutziger-Herr, ed., Mozart slow-motion film of tennis players after
im Blick: Inszenierungen, Bilder und they have won or lost a point.
Diskurse. Cologne, Weimar and Vienna:  See Corinna Herr, Medeas Zorn: Eine
Böhlau, , pp. –. ‘starke Frau’ in Opern des . und .
 Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Jahrhunderts. Herbolzheim: Centaurus,
Weiblichkeit: Exemplarische , esp. chapter ., ‘Die Affektenlehre’ .
Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen  Quoted in Kramer , p. .
und literarischen Präsentationsformen  See Bruno Flögel, ‘Studien zur
des Weiblichen. Frankfurt am Main: Arientechnik in den Opern Händels’ ,
Suhrkamp, . Händel-Jahrbuch (), pp. –. Flögel
 Sabine Zurmühl, ‘Visionen und also offers a typology of the intervals.
Ideologien von Weiblichkeit in Wagners  See CW I, p.  (..).
Frauengestalten’ , in Vill , pp. –.
 Henning Ferdinand, ‘Die musikalische
 The way in which Wagner’s musical Darstellung der Affekte in den Opernarien
language was negated throughout G. F. Händels’ (doctoral thesis, Bonn
the  Bayreuth production of Die ).
Meistersinger by Katharina Wagner is
 Adorno , p. .
noteworthy.
 CW I, p.  (..).
 Rieger , p. .
 When naming motifs in this book, I refer
 La Mara, Durch Musik und Leben im
(unless otherwise stated) to the names
Dienste des Ideals,  vols. (Leipzig:
invented by Wolzogen, though I am aware
Breitkopf & Härtel, ), vol. , pp. ,
of the problematical nature of his project.
.
 CW I, p.  (..).
 SB IV, p.  (..).
 Egon Voss, ‘Versagt die
 Drüner , p. .
Musikwissenschaft vor der Musik
 T. W. Adorno, Über Walter Benjamin. Richard Wagners?’ , in Ulrich Konrad
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, , p. . and Egon Voss, eds., Der ‘Komponist’
Richard Wagner im Blick der aktuellen
Musikwissenschaft. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf
& Härtel, , p. .
 Helmut Rösing, ‘Auf der Suche nach
Männlichkeitssymbolen: Beethoven und
die Sonaten(hauptsatz)form’ , in Cornelia
Bartsch, Beatrix Borchard et al., eds., Der
‘männliche’ und der ‘weibliche’ Beethoven.
Bonn: Verlag Beethoven-Haus, , p. .
 Overhoff , p. .
 Quoted in Krones , p. .
 Notes to pp. –
 See, for example, Cesare Lombroso and
G. Ferrero, Das Weib als Verbrecherin
und Prostituirte: Anthropologische
Studien, gegründet auf eine Darstellung
der Biologie und Psychologie des normalen
Weibes. Hamburg: Verlagsanstalt und
Druckerei, ; E. F. W. Eberhard:
Feminismus und Kulturuntergang:
Die erotischen Grundlagen der
Frauenemanzipation. Vienna and Leipzig:
Braumüller, .
 Egon Voss, Richard Wagner: Eine Faust-
Ouvertüre. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, ,
p. .
 Hans Joachim Kreutzer, Faust: Mythos
und Musik. Munich: Beck, , p. .
 Voss , p. .
 SB IX, pp. ff. (..).
 SB XI, p.  (..).
/ Chapter 
 SSD IV, p. .
 SB I, p.  (..), pp. f.
(/..).
 SSD IV, p. .
 ML I, p. .
 SB I, p.  (..).
 SSD IV, p. .
 See Gabriele Busch-Salmen, ‘“… eine
reiche und vornehme Wiege …”: Pompöse
Wohnansprüche Richard Wagners’ , in
Monika Fink et al., eds., Musica Privata:
Die Rolle der Musik im privaten Leben.
Innsbruck: Helbling, , p. .
 Burk , p. ; ML I, pp. f.
 ML I, p. .
 SSD IV, p. .
 ML I, pp. f.
 Quoted in Bermbach , p. .
 SB I, p.  (January ).
 Adriano is intended to be sung by a
mezzo-soprano.
 SB I, p.  (late January ).
 SB III, p.  (..).
 SB III, p.  (..).
 SB II, p.  (..).
 CW I, p.  (..).
 Burk , p. .
 SSD V, p.  (‘Bemerkungen zur
Aufführung der Oper: Der fliegende
Holländer’).
 Heinrich Heine, ‘Die Fabel von dem
fliegenden Holländer’ , in Laroche ,
pp. ff.
 Elisabeth Gössmann, ‘Philosophie am
Spinnrock: Spinnen und Weben als
weibliches Wirken, ein ambivalentes
Thema’ , in Gössmann, Weisheit: Eine
schöne Rose auf dem Dornenstrauche.
Munich: Iudicum, , pp. –.
Incidentally, in  the administrators
of the spa in Gersfeld (Rhön) invited
the visiting gentlemen to fly kites, while
their female partners were put to work at
spinning wheels. ‘Thus, even on holiday,
just as in real life, everyone is assigned his
or her proper place’ remarked Die Zeit
(..).
 Voss , p. .
 ML I, pp. , , .

 See, for example, ‘[Senta] erschafft sich
den Holländer selbst, als Traumbild’ ,
by the director Harry Kupfer, in the
programme book for Der fliegende
Holländer. Berlin: Staatsoper Unter den
Linden, , p. .
 See Ortrud Gutjahr, ‘Sentas erkennender
Schrei und Kundrys kastrierendes
Gelächter’ , in Kronberger and Müller
, p. .
 This biographical situation had obviously
stuck in his memory far more vividly than
the fact that he was on his way towards
the ‘artwork of the future’ when he wrote
Der fliegende Holländer.
 CW II, p.  (..); CW I, p. 
(..).
 Franz Liszt, ‘Wagner’s Fliegender
Holländer’ , in Sämtliche Schriften,
ed. Dorothea Redepenning and Britta
Schilling, vol. . Wiesbaden: Breitkopf &
Härtel, , pp. –.
 Quoted in Alice Sokoloff, Cosima Wagner.
Hamburg: Schröder, , p. .
 N. Wagner , p. .
 SB IV, p.  (..).
 SB V, p.  (..); p.  (..);
p.  (..).
 SB IX, p.  (..).
Notes to pp. – 
/ Chapter 
 N. Wagner , p. ; Vaget , p. ;
Bloch quoted in Gregor-Dellin ,
p. .
 CW II, p.  (..); see also SB XIII,
pp. f. (..).
 SSD IV, pp. f. The following quotations
are also from SSD IV, pp. ff. (Eine
Mitteilung an meine Freunde).
 Claire Glümer, Erinnerungen an
Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient. Leipzig:
Barth, , pp. f.
 SB V, p.  (..).
 See Rieger , pp. ff.
 Letter to Mathilde Schiffner, ..,
RWA.
 Csampai and Holland , p. .
 SB XII, p.  (..), p. 
(..).
 Csampai and Holland , p. .
 SSD V, p. .
 SSD V, p. .
 A preghiera does not have to be sung
to a reduced musical accompaniment.
Thus in Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda a
large, forte chorus accompanies Maria in
her prayer. Wagner, on the other hand,
uses a simplicity of means to underline
Elisabeth’s purity.
 Regarding this prayer, see Döhring
, pp. –; see also Stefan
Kunze, ‘Dramatische Konzeption und
Szenenbezug in Wagners “Tannhäuser”’ ,
in Dahlhaus and Voss , pp. –.
 SB II, p.  (..).
 Ida Magli, Die Madonna: Die Entstehung
eines weiblichen Idols aus der männlichen
Phantasie. Munich and Zürich: Piper,
, p. .
 In Csampai and Holland , p. .
 SB V, p.  (..).
 Notes to pp. –
/ Chapter 
 SSD IV, pp. f. (Eine Mitteilung an
meine Freunde).
 SB VI, p.  (..).
 SB II, p.  (..). Udo Bermbach,
instead, sees Lohengrin as the central
stage figure (, p. ).
 SB II, p.  (..).
 SSD IV, pp. f.
 SSD V, p. .
 See SSD IV, pp. f.
 Voss , p. .
 Overhoff , p. .
 Voss , p. .
 Voss , p. .
 SB II, p.  (..).
 SB II, p.  (..).
 CW I, p.  (..).
 CW II, p.  (..).
 SB IV, pp. f. (..).
 In her reminiscences of Wagner, Judith
Gautier wishes she were a soldier and
would gladly fall in battle to serve his
greater fame (Gautier , repr. n.d.,
p. ); this is a masculinized form of
feminine readiness for self-sacrifice.
 See Ingenschay-Goch , p. .
 See Rosemary Hilmar, ‘Brünnhilde stellt
sich vor: Erinnerungen von Amalie
Friedrich Materna’ , Mitteilungen
der Österreichischen Gesellschaft fur
Musikwissenschaft, vol.  (), p. .
With thanks to Rosemary Hilmar for
drawing my attention to this.
 CW I, p.  (..).
 SB II, p.  (..).
 Mayer , p. .
 SSD IV, p. .
 Gottfried Wagner, in Programmheft
Lohengrin. Dessau, , p. .
 Adorno , p. .
 CW II, p.  (..).
/ Chapter 
 SB XI, p.  (April ).
 CW II, p.  (..).
 Vaget , p. .
 Remark of Cosima Wagner, in Mack ,
p. .
 See Mathilde Wesendonck’s written
confirmation of this, quoted in Martha
Schad, ‘Meine erste und einzige
Liebe’: Richard Wagner und Mathilde
Wesendonck. Munich: Langen Müller,
, p. .
 According to Cosima, Richard remarked
in  on Mathilde’s pregnancy as
follows: ‘That was not how he had
interpreted “continence”’ . See Mack ,
p. .
 www.intelligenzblatt.unibe.ch (..),
accessed February .
 Vaget , p. .
 N. Wagner , pp. , , f.
 Bekker , p. ; Heinrich Dorn, Aus
meinem Leben: Musikalische Skizzen.
Berlin: Behr, , pp. , , ; Magee
, p. .
 Letter (..) in Max Kalbeck, ed.,
Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit
Heinrich und Elisabet von Herzogenberg,
rd edn, vol. . Berlin: Verlag der
Deutschen Brahms-Gesellschaft, ,
p. ; Liza Lehmann, The Life of Liza
Lehmann. London: T. Fisher Unwin, ,
pp. –.
 SB VI, p.  (..).
 See Mathilde’s poem ‘Habe oft dich bitten
wollen um den höchsten Augenblick’ , in
Rieger , p. .
 CW II, p.  (..). It is not true
that Richard left his home voluntarily, as
Mathilde maintained.
 Golther , pp. , .
 Mack , p. .
 Wapnewski , p. .
 Mayer , p. ; Mayer , pp. f.
 Gregor-Dellin , p. .
 Allgemeine Musikzeitung (
February), and Golther , p. .
 SB X, p.  (..).
 Kesting , p.  (..).
 CW I, p.  (..).

 SB XI, p. .
 ‘Epilogischer Bericht uber die Umstände
und Schicksale, welche die Aufführung
des Bühnenfestspieles Der Ring des
Nibelungen … begleiteten ()’ , in SSD
VI, pp. f.
 Wille , p. .
 Elisabeth Bronfen, Liebestod und femme
fatale: Der Austausch sozialer Energien
zwischen Oper, Literatur und Film.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ,
pp. f. Bronfen refers to the lovers, but
her statement could just as well be applied
to Wagner himself. Despite certain small
errors (it is not Marke who commands
Tristan to find Isolde, but Tristan who
convinces him to take her for his wife; and
the couple is already in love before they
drink the potion), Bronfen’s comparison
with ‘film noir’ is a refreshing one.
 SSD XII, p. .
 One thinks here of Ilsa in the cult film
Casablanca (), who points a revolver
at Rick and only lets it fall when Rick
looks at her fearlessly and she confesses
her love for him.
 SB X, p.  (..).
 Vaget , p. .
 SB XI, p.  (..).
 CW I, pp. f. (..).
 Thomas Mann, Tristan. , pp. –.
 My upper-middle-class grandmother
(born in ) forbade me from laughing
with an open mouth when I was a child.
One had to hold one’s hand in front of
one’s mouth and utter merely ‘hm hm’ .
 Fehr, vol. , p.  (..).
 SB XIII, p.  (..).
 CW II, p.  (..).
 CW I, p.  (..).
 SB XIII, p.  (..).
Notes to pp. – 
/ Chapter 
 SB XIII, pp. f. (late December ).
 SB XIII, p.  (..).
 Burk , p.  (..).
 Kurt Malisch, ‘“Ein heiteres
Satyrspiel”, oder “Stahlbad in C-Dur”?
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
im discographischen Vergleich’ ,
Wagnerspectrum, vol.  (), p. .
 SB XIV, pp. f. (..).
 Michael Tanner, ‘Richard Wagner and
Hans Sachs’ , in Warrack , p. .
 ML II, p. . Wagner did not see the
painting in the doge’s hall, but in the
church. He did not mention this source
of inspiration to Mathilde. Even if this is
a retrospective act of mystification, the
reference to the picture is a noteworthy
one.
 CW II, pp. f. (..); CW II, p. 
(..).
 See Michael Puri, ‘The ecstasy and the
agony: Exploring the nexus of music and
message in the Act III prelude to Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg’ , Nineteenth-
Century Music, vol. , nos. – (–),
pp. –.
 ‘Beethovens Cis moll-Quartett (op. )’ ,
in SSD XII, p. . Ludwig Finscher,
on the other hand, sees op.  as a
direct model; see Finscher, ‘Über den
Kontrapunkt der Meistersinger’ , in
Dahlhaus , p. .
 See Egon Voss in Csampai and Holland
, p. .
 See Schering . Although this study
was written in Nazi Germany and bears
traces of that fact, it nevertheless reflects
a general tendency.
 Voss , pp. , .
 Overhoff , p. .
 Weiner , p.  (in contrast to other
authors, it is here meant ironically).
 Beer ; Broesel .
 SB XIV, p.  (..).
 Golther , p.  (..), p. 
(..).
 Overhoff , p. .
 Mayer , p. .
 Notes to pp. –

 Csampai and Holland , pp. f.; also / Chapter 

(complete) in Gautier , repr. n.d.,  SB V, p.  (..).
pp. ff. The original is in French.
 SSD IV, p. .
 Borchmeyer , p. .
 SB V, p.  (..).
 SB VIII, pp. f. (May ).
 Bermbach , p. .
 Golther , pp. f.,  (..).
 ML I, p. .
 Peter Wapnewski, ‘Vom mehrfachen
 SSD II, p. .
Grund der Meistersinger’ , in the
programme book for Die Meistersinger  CW II, pp. f. (..).
von Nürnberg. Munich: Bayerische  SSB IV p. .
Staatsoper, , p. .  CW II, p.  (..).
 See Tambling , p. .  SB IV, p.  (..).
 See Sigrid Nieberle,  Golther , p.  (..). See also
FrauenMusikLiteratur: Deutschsprachige the repetition in SB X, p. .
Schriftstellerinnen im . Jahrhundert.  SB VIII, p.  (..).
Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, .
 See McCreless , pp. f.
 See Mary Cicora, ‘“Eva im Paradies”: An
 Magee , p. . Cooke is also of this
approach to Wagner’s Meistersinger’ ,
opinion (Cooke ).
German Studies Review, vol. , no. 
(), pp. –.  See Corse .
 Constantin Frantz, Die Naturlehre  SB VIII, p.  (..). Brünnhilde’s
des Staates als Grundlage aller characterization is similar to Wagner’s
Staatswissenschaft. Leipzig and conception of Antigone at almost exactly
Heidelberg: C. F. Winter, , pp. –; the same time; see SSD IV pp. f.
CW I, p.  (..).  SB VI, pp. , ,  (..).
 SSD X, p. .  SB V, p.  (..).
 CW II, p.  (..).  See Wapnewski , p. .
 Golther , pp. f. (..).  See Friedrich Rühs, Die Edda
 CW II, p.  (..); CW I, p.  nebst einer Einleitung. Berlin:
(..). Realschulbuchhandlung, .
 Quoted in Beidler , p. .  Wapnewski , p. .
 CW I, p.  (..). This refers to the  SB VI, p.  (..).
passionate encounter of Eva and Walther,  In one well-meaning moment, Wagner
‘Ja, Ihr seid es!’ , Act , scene v. CW I, p.  refers to him as a ‘thinker’; see CW II,
(..), p.  (..). p.  (..).
 See Golther , p. .
 Tietz , p. .
 SB VI, pp. f. (..); SB V, pp.  f.
(..).
 SB VI, p.  (..); SB X, p. 
(..).
 Minna Wagner, .., RWA.
 Grimm /, vol. I, p. .
 It is named thus in Julius Burghold, ed.,
Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen:
Vollständiger Text mit Notentafeln der
Leitmotive (). Munich: Goldmann,
.

 SB IV p. . Klaus Kropfinger has
investigated the connection between
these two motifs but not the ‘why’ of it.
See Kropfinger, ‘Wagners “Entsagungs”-
Motiv’ , in Hermann Danuser et al., eds.,
Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Geschichte,
Ästhetik, Theorie: Festschrift Carl
Dahlhaus zum . Geburtstag. Laaber:
Laaber, pp. –.
 Grimm /, vol. I, p. .
Notes to pp. – 
/ Chapter 
 SB V, p.  (..).
 ML II, p. ; SB VI, p.  (..).
 SB VI, pp.  (..),  (..).
 CW I, p.  (..).
 ‘Only as man and woman are we human
beings able to love truly.’ SB VI, p. 
(..).
 Ingenschay-Goch , p. .
 Adorno , quoted in Ackermann ,
p. .
 Zuber , p. . Fricka speaks of
Siegmund’s status only at the close; before
this, she voices numerous other caveats.
 For more on this performance, see Hanke
, p. .
 Richard Fricke, Bayreuth vor dreissig
Jahren. Dresden: Bertling, , p. .
Fricke was an assistant at Bayreuth in 
and kept a diary.
 Porges –, vol. , pp. –.
 Humburg , p. .
 This is also confirmed by Frauer, though
he offers the example of a Valkyrie who
contradicts Odhin.
 Quoted in Karoline von Günderrode, Der
Schatten eines Traumes, ed. Christa Wolf.
Darmstadt: Luchterhand, , p. .
 See Daniel E. Freeman, ‘La guerriera
amante: Representations of Amazons
and warrior queens in Venetian Baroque
opera’ , Musical Quarterly, vol.  (),
pp. –.
 Grimm /, vol. , p. .
 McGlathery , p. .
 Humburg , p. .
 SB VI, p.  (..).
 SB VI, p.  (/..).
 Notes to pp. –

/ Chapter   CW I, p.  (..).

 CW I, pp. f. (..).  See Porges –, vol. , p. .
 See Wille , p. .  See Corse , p. .
 CW I, pp. , , , , , , ,  SB VI, p.  (..).
, , , , .  SB VIII, p.  (..).
 Williams , p. .  SSD XII, p.  (Metaphysik der
 The Edda is an exception. Geschlechtsliebe).
 SB VI, pp. f.; SSD IV p. .  Golther , p.  (..); see also
 Wapnewski , pp. f. Drüner regards Voss , pp. f.
Siegfried both as a ‘boorish ruffian’ and as  This is the proportion in Georg Solti’s
a hero; see Drüner , pp. , . See recording of :  minutes as against
also Voss , p. . .
 See Kitcher and Schacht , p. .  Frauer , pp. f.
 SB XVI, p.  (..).  Bauer , p.  (..).
 Mack and Gregor-Dellin are misleading  CW I, p.  (..).
when they say that we get a different,  It is incomprehensible that some
less heroic, view of Siegfried through commentators here detect a reference to
the comparison with the ‘Kasperl’ figure Brünnhilde’s mother, Erda, just because
in CW I, p. . Richard at one point Brünnhilde at one point calls Siegfried
compared the characters in Goethe’s ‘the life of the earth’ (Wapnewski ,
Faust with a ‘Kasperletheater’ – that is, p. ). It is expressly only Siegfried’s
a puppet theatre (CW I, p. ) – and mother who is celebrated.
describes this as ‘the whole development  CW I, p.  (..).
of humankind’ . He thus sees Siegfried
 Donington , p. : ‘We take this […]
as a representative of human culture in
for that other death which is the name
general.
poets have so often and so justly given to
 Porges –, vol. , p. . Elsewhere, love’s consummation …’
he demands that Siegfried’s moments of
 Bauer , p. .
bravado should never cause us ‘to fail to
recognize the nobility of a nature that is  SB IV, p.  (..).
heroic in its core’ (ibid., p. .).
 See Porges –, vol. , p. .
 Voss , p. .
 Drüner , p. .
 See Reinhold Brinkmann in Danuser and
Münkler , p. .
 See Nattiez , p. . For more on
Mime’s anti-Semitic connotations,
see Thomas S. Grey, ‘Music as natural
language in the moral order of Wagner’s
Ring: Siegfried, Act , Scene ’ , in
Jim Samson and Bennett Zon, eds.,
Nineteenth-Century Music. Aldershot:
Ashgate, , pp. –.
 Porges –, vol. , p. .
 Westernhagen , pp. –.
 Scholz , p. .
 See Scholz , p. .
 Porges –, vol. , p. .
 Schickling , p. .

/ Chapter 
 Wagner uses the horn (an instrument with
masculine connotations) only once for
Brünnhilde’s new motif and this is specific
to the situation – namely, when Siegfried
rides off on her horse in the prelude to
Götterdämmerung.
 See Overhoff , pp. f.
 SB VI, pp. f.
 SSD II, p.  (Der Nibelungen-Mythus).
 See Angela Koch in Monika Schneikart,
ed., Sex/ismus in den Medien.
Herbolzheim: Centaurus, .
 CW I, p.  (..).
 CW I, p.  (..).
 Wapnewski , p. .
 CW I, p.  (..).
 SSD V, p.  (Beethovens ‘heroische
Symphonie’).
 Grey , p. .
 Peter Mussbach in conversation with Jürg
Stenzl: ‘Vielleicht ist Bayreuth ja schon ein
Museum?’ , in Storch , p. .
 Quoted in John Deathridge, ‘Collected
reviews’ , Nineteenth Century Music, vol. 
(), p.  (..).
 CW I, p.  (..); CW I, p. 
(..). The mention of ‘heroes’ in the
edition of the diaries is a transcription
error. See Voss , p. ; Storch ,
p. .
 SSD VI, p. .
 See Westernhagen , p.  (with
music examples).
 See Kienzle , p. .
 See Schickling , p. .
 Nelly Furman, ‘Opera or the staging of the
voice’ , Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 
(), p. .
 See Manfred H. Schmid, Musik als Abbild.
Tutzing: Schneider, , pp. f.
 Friedrich , p. .
 Otto , p. .
 SB IV, p.  (..).
Notes to pp. – 
/ Chapter 
 Photos of Verena Weidmann’s daughter
and grandson show a remarkable
resemblance to Wagner. Nevertheless, the
ideas mooted here are only hypothetical.
 Scholz , p.  (..). See also
Wagner’s letter to Ferdinand Praeger: ‘Just
don’t bring any English ideas back about
being reserved […] in matters of decency
and bourgeois virtue!’ SB VIII, p.  (May
).
 SB XI, p.  (..); SB XV, p. 
(..); SB XI, p.  (..).
 SB XI, p.  (..); p.  (..).
 Quoted in Kronenberg –, p. .
 Quoted in Rieger , p. .
 SB XIV, p.  (..). Although this
plan came to nothing, Wagner continued
to correspond with Seraphine Mauro for
several years.
 SB XIII, pp. f. (..).
 SB XV, p.  (..); SB XV, p. 
(..).
 SB XV, pp. , ,  (May–June );
SB XVI, p.  (commentary).
 SB XV, pp. f. (..); SB XVI, p. 
(no precise date, ).
 ML II, p. ; SB XVI, p.  (..).
 See Joachim Kohler, Friedrich Nietzsche
und Cosima Wagner: Die Schule der
Unterwerfung. Reinbek: Rowohlt, ,
pp. ff.
 See SB XVI, p. . The lack of
punctuation is a feature of the original
German.
 SB XVI, pp.  and  ( and
..).
 SB XVI, p.  (..).
 SB XVI, pp.  and  ( and ..).
 BB, p.  (..). The next quotations
are from the ensuing pages.
 Waldberg , p. .
 See Fehr –, vol. , p. .
 Quoted in Kronenberg –, p. .
 CW I, pp. f. (.., ..).
 CW I, p.  (..).
 CW I, p.  (..).
 Letter from Cosima Wagner to Verena
Stocker, .., Zinsstag, n.d. [],
p. .
 Notes to pp. –
 Mack , pp.  and .
 Wille , p.  (..).
 CW I, pp. , , .
 Lilli Lehmann, Mein Weg. Leipzig ,
p. .
 See Zimmermann , p. .
 CW II, p.  (..).
 In one of the newer biographies of Cosima
we learn little about her inner struggle,
but rather how successful she was in her
‘stylization as Wagner’s mouthpiece’ .
See Oliver Hilmes, Herrin des Hügels:
Das Leben der Cosima Wagner. Munich:
Siedler, , pp. f.
 See Voss , pp. –. This interesting
hypothesis is seen to rest on shaky
ground, however, if one considers that
Wagner desired a new woman (Judith
Gautier) during the composition of the
work.
 See Herbert Rosendorfer, ‘Richard
Wagner, der fröhliche Heide’ , in Silvia
Kronberger and Ulrich Müller, eds.,
Kundry & Elektra und ihre leidenden
Schwestern. Anif, Salzburg: Müller-
Speiser, , p. .
 SB X, p.  (December ); CW II,
p.  (..); pp. f. (..).
 Mann quoted in Vaget , p. ; Chailly
quoted in Ulrich Schreiber, Opernführer
für Fortgeschrittene: Das . Jahrhundert.
Kassel and Basel: Bärenreiter, , p. ;
Friedrich , p. ; Floros , p. .
 SSD XI, p.  (‘Parzival’).
 See Sarasin , pp. f.
 BB, pp. f.
/ Chapter 
 N. Wagner , p. ; Grossmann-
Vendrey , documentation, vol. ,
pp. f., .
 BB, p.  (..).
 Quoted in Hein , p. .
 CW II, p.  (..). It is surprising
that Dieter Scholz – in Rondo, no. 
(), pp. – – states that Wagner
regarded Gobineau’s teachings as
‘rubbish’ . His articles and open letters
(SSD, vol. X, pp. ff., f., , , ,
and many more) are full of praise.
 Grossmann-Vendrey ,
documentation, vol. , p. ; Floros ;
Kienzle .
 The problem of interpreting the plot
merely through Schopenhauer’s ideas is
evident in obscure statements such as ‘the
jealous dispute of the Flower Maidens in
Parsifal reflects the will’s fragmentation
into innumerable objectifications that
are continually at war with each other’
(Kienzle , p. ).
 Otto , p. .
 SB XI, p.  (..).
 SSD IX, p.  (‘Beethoven’).
 SSD V, p.  (‘Über Franz Liszt’s
symphonische Dichtungen’).
 Neuwirth , p. . See also Tibor
Kneif, ‘Die Idee des Organischen bei
Richard Wagner’ , in Dahlhaus ,
pp. –, where examples are offered of
Wagner’s ability ‘to obscure conscious
structural acts and to awaken the illusion
of their being, as it were, a product of
nature’ . Ibid., p. .
 CW , p.  (..).
 Quoted in Bauer , p. . Since
Wagner also describes the music as
feminine when comparing it to the text,
this image is very suitable.
 In his reminiscences, Wagner’s son
Siegfried described the Jewish artist
Josef Rubinstein as someone ‘possessing
the nature of a Kundry’ who ‘suffered
on account of his race’ and ‘yearned
for redemption’ . See S. Wagner,
Erinnerungen. Stuttgart: Engelhorns
Nachfolger, , p. .
 CW II, p.  (..).
 Bauer , p. .
 Notes to pp. – 

 Bauer , p. .  Kienzle , p. .

 Kienzle , p. ; CW II, p.   Williams , p. .
(..).  Letter to Ludwig II, .., quoted in
 Bauer , pp. , . Gregor-Dellin , p. .
 See Ingenschay-Goch , p. .  SSD XII, pp. – (‘Über das Weibliche
 SSD IV, p. . im Menschlichen’).
 Said ; see also Annette Kreutziger-  CW II, p.  (..).
Herr, ‘Oper als Diskursfeld: Edward Saids  Hermann Rauschning, Gespräche mit
Kultur und Imperialismus und Giuseppe Hitler. New York: Europa Verlag, ,
Verdis Aida’ , in Corinna Herr and Monika pp. ff. According to more recent
Woitas, eds., Musik mit Methode: Neue investigations, these statements were
Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven. not made by Hitler himself (see Roman
Cologne: Böhlau, , pp. –. Dziergwa in Quatuor-Coronati, vol. ,
 BB, p. . ), though this does not alter their
historical significance.
 Otto , p.  (..).
 CW II, p.  (.., ..);
Bayreuther Blätter Nov.–Dec. , p. ;
CW I, p.  (..).
 CW II, p.  (..).
 Schuh , p. .
 CW II, p.  (..); see also Waldberg
, p.  (..).
 SB XI, pp. , f. (/..).
 Rita Morrien, Sinn und Sinnlichkeit:
Der weibliche Körper in der deutschen
Literatur der Bürgerzeit. Cologne, Weimar
and Vienna: Böhlau, , p. .
 See Hermand in Grimm and Hermand
, pp.  ff.; see also Linda Hutcheon
and Michael Hutcheon, Opera: Desire,
Disease, Death. Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, ,
pp. –.
 BB, p. .
 CW II, p.  (..).
 CW II, p.  (..); CW I, p. .
 CW II, p.  (..).
 See Floros , pp. f. Slavoj Zizek is
also of the opinion that the Grail at the
close ‘opens itself to the feminine’; see
Zizek, Der zweite Tod der Oper. Berlin:
Kulturverlag Kadmos, , p. .
 Bermbach , p. .
 This is how male authors like to thank
their spouses in the forewords to their
books.
 See the ‘Parsifal’ chapter in Bermbach
.
 Kienzle , p. .
 CW I, p.  (..).
 Notes to pp. –

/ Postlude
 See Bauer , p. .
 Döhring , p. .
 SB V, p.  (..).
 See Nattiez .
 Christian Geulen, Wahlverwandte:
Rassendiskurs und Nationalismus
im späten . Jahrhundert. Hamburg:
Hamburger Edition, , p. .
 Ingenschay-Goch , p. .
 Quoted in Jürgen Kesting, ‘Die ewige
Flamme: zum . Todestag der Diva Maria
Callas’ , Der Spiegel, vol.  (), p. .
 SSD XII, p.  (‘Über das Weibliche im
Menschlichen’).