About this Piece

Synopsis:

Chased by attackers, Siegmund finds shelter from a raging storm and his pursuers and collapses. Inside her home, which encircles a tree, Sieglinde finds him lying on the floor. She offers him something to drink. The return of Sieglinde’s husband, Hunding, interrupts them. Siegmund recounts his sorrowful past: the death of his mother, the abduction of a twin sister, and a youth of wandering with his father, whom he calls Wolf, until his disappearance. Siegmund has come to call himself Wehwalt (Woeful). It becomes apparent that Hunding is kin to Siegmund’s pursuers, and the two agree to a duel to the death in the morning.

Siegmund pleads for his father to help him find the sword that was promised for his time of need. Sieglinde reappears, having given Hunding a sleeping draught. She shows Siegmund the sword that a stranger embedded into the tree on her wedding day. She tells Siegmund of her sorrows, and he promises to free her. With thoughts of marriage, Siegmund sings of spring with “tender radiance” and “balmy breezes.” Sieglinde asks if Siegmund’s father was truly named wolf, and Siegmund admits that he was known as Wälse; the two realize they are the Wälsung twins. Siegmund triumphantly pulls the sword, Nothung, out of the tree and promises victory against Hunding.

Program Note:

The enveloping, exotic, menacing alternative universe that Richard Wagner created in Die Walküre had just one dependable means of creation: Orchestral sound was expanded to give the illusion of three dimensions, becoming a platform for exterior weather, interior thoughts, even more elusive telepathy, plus an untamed landscape that could never be surveyed or silenced. That orchestra, with its ability to focus, select, and magnify elements of this mythical landscape—created when cinema was barely imagined—generates the same effects as camera close-ups and wide-screen master shots. 

“The music shall sound in such a fashion that people shall hear what they cannot see,” wrote Wagner in a letter to Franz Liszt. But he needed an enlarged orchestra—all that could fit in a theater pit—including six harps (in the case of Das Rheingold) and newly invented Wagner tubas, adding a baritone voice between horns and regular tubas. 

Stage machinery in Wagner’s time could only sketch this Nordic netherworld with its undercurrent of Greek tragedy and reverberations of his own era, the increasingly industrialized 1850s. Wagner was also after something that challenges current cinematic storytellers: touching the unconscious minds of the audience in ways that allow personal relationships with the characters. Wagner’s stealth tool for commanding attention was what is vaguely termed “tonal planning.” He set up foundational networks of key changes—musical architecture, so to speak—that act like carrots on a stick, urging listeners forward in the narrative without their knowing why. Listen closely and plot spoilers abound in the score. The events of Die Walküre are more like objects in a great painting that can be first discovered viscerally and then revisited with new meaning—aided by leitmotifs, those short orchestral themes that act like signposts assigned to people, places, and things. 

The four-part, 16-hour Der Ring des Nibelungen contains an estimated 178 leitmotifs (according to scholar Allen B. Dunning). In the introductory Ring segment, Das Rheingold, leitmotifs are almost navigational tools, like GPS. But the second installment, Die Walküre, finds us in a different, less orderly world. The Rhine River gold—whose theft puts this epic tale into motion—has passed through several greedy hands but, due to laws of Wagner’s universe, must be returned to its rightful place not by gods but by mortals. Leitmotifs become less faithful to their original purpose. Or so playwright George Bernard Shaw thought in his often-insightful book The Perfect Wagnerite. His ears heard the system unraveling; others hear leitmotifs employed more for their dramatic impact than for what they signify. Meaning lies in the ear of the beholder and can change from one hearing to the next. Beyond the leitmotifs as spelled out in Das Rheingold, Die Walküre adds a good deal of psychology embodied by the orchestra. The story can’t be told without it. 

The opening prelude is unlike anything else in Wagner. The repeated, high-momentum gestures seem to simultaneously ascend and descend, running backward and forward like an M.C. Escher print, as the key character Siegmund flees warring clansmen, sprinting toward an unknown refuge. Falling exhausted into a household that is both hostile and welcoming, he is exactly where he is destined to be. The woman inside this paradoxical refuge and trap, Sieglinde, turns out to be Sigmund’s long-lost twin sister, from whom he was separated at an early age. Her husband, Hunding, leads the party in search of Siegmund. Neither knows that yet, but the music suggests nascent awareness. The orchestra has them reading each other’s minds regarding a sword buried in a tree by a disguised stranger for Siegmund to discover. 

Such coincidences are an ulterior plan, a chess game of sorts, contrived by a god with multiple names and identities. Thoughts and even eye movements are indicated by the orchestra as the characters senses tune in to this anything-but-happenstance meeting. Woodwind solos question and probe, often alone, often with other solo instruments, coming to understand the unthinkable: Brother and sister fall immediately and deeply in love. The orchestra passes no judgment on this impending incest, but ambivalence is audible. Is the composer endorsing this taboo? Not likely, because the couple is also on a world-saving mission they have yet to understand. 

The orchestra delivers the highest tension as Siegmund cries out for help from “Wälse,” his absent father, while extracting the sword, Nothung. Only Wagner’s orchestra can convey the depths of Siegmund’s rootlessness. Both he and Sieglinde are freed from their confines—she from Hunding, he from his defenselessness—and taboos imposed by the outside world. Unknowingly, they are guided toward recovering the all-powerful ring for the god, who happens also to be the disguised stranger and the absent father Wälse. 

With characters guided by such extra-worldly logic, Wagner’s orchestra drew from the increasingly substantial symphonic practices of Haydn, Mozart, and Wagner’s idol Beethoven. Thanks also to the operas of Gluck, singers were no longer asked to warble but to intone vocal lines that spoke of philosophical truths over substantial accompaniment. Wagner’s greatest precedent came from Carl Maria von Weber’s 1821 masterwork Der Freischütz. In its supernatural climax, magic bullets are cast with satanic forces—and unrelieved dissonant chords, the orchestra playing splinters and fragments of ideas, and spoken (often shouted) dialogue—all suggesting a world seen through a mirror of many cracks and forever changing opera with this single scene. 

This radical harmonic change—dictated by subject matter that glimpses the fires of hell—threw open the door to a world Wagner came to envision. If the magic bullets in Der Freischütz could be musical characters, Siegmund’s sword in Die Walküre could be a plot point with a name—Nothung. Coming out of the composing of Das Rheingold from 1852 to 1856, Wagner‘s enriched orchestra concentrated on fewer characters (the god count is much lower in Die Walküre) with deepened personalities and a greater sense of discovery. Siegmund and Sieglinde claim agency they never knew could be theirs. But where, one must ask, are the Valkyries in Die Walküre? They’re on the horizon. Each act is its own world that builds upon the last, achieving unity, through Wagner’s cinematic orchestra.

—David Patrick Stearns

Read about the other acts of Die Walküre:

Die Walküre Act II

Die Walküre Act III