Gods, Myths and Heroes - Part 14

 Siegfried

Germanic gods and myths are closely related to Norse gods and myths, much as the Greek and Roman gods correspond.  The best known Germanic myth is the plot of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), a cycle of four operas: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.

Wagner based the plot on far older Norse and Germanic legends such as the Völsunga saga and Das Nibelungenlied, which we might look at in a later post.  Wagner made changes to the earlier myths, but we won't get into that here.  For now, we're going with Wagner's version.  The four operas take at least 15 hours to perform, so I won't give the detailed plot, just the briefest summary.

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In opera #1, Das Rheingold, suffice it to say that there are gods, dwarfs, giants, and a magic cursed Ring of Power that ends up being guarded by a dragon.  All this was written long before Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

In opera #2, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), we meet Brünnhilde, the head Valkyrie, daughter of the head god Wotan.  The video above shows the painting Ride of the Valkyries by Herrmann Hendrich, 1906, accompanied by a brief excerpt of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.  You probably associate this music with helicopters in the movie Apocalypse Now, but originally it depicted Brünnhilde and the Valkyries on their flying horses.

Brünnhilde disobeys Wotan, and at the end of the opera, he puts her into a magic sleep surrounded by magic fire that will let only the bravest of heroes through to awaken her, as depicted in the painting above, Wotan and Brünnhilde by Koloman Moser, c. 1916.  

Wotan calls on the fire god Loge to create the magic fire around Brünnhilde, as portrayed above by Arthur Rackham, 1910.  Rackham drew a marvelous series of illustrations of the Ring story, but I'm not using the rest of them here, because all the male characters are fully clothed except for the partially nude Loge above.  (There are some nude Rhinemaidens, but we'll skip over them.)

The accompanying music is an excerpt from Wagner's Magic Fire Music.  Wagner was masterful at weaving together multiple musical themes (leitmotifs).  This excerpt starts with Loge's theme, depicting flickering fire, then Wagner adds the theme of Brünnhilde's magic sleep, and finally on top of all of that, the brass plays the theme of Siegfried, who is destined to rescue Brünnhilde.

Like the Norse gods, and unlike the Greek and Roman ones, there are very few nude representations of Germanic gods and heroes, but artists being what they are, I did find a few.

In opera #3, Siegfried, we finally meet our hero Siegfried, young, strong, handsome and fearless.  The character above, a 1914 painting by Koloman Moser, looks like he could be Siegfried.  There's no indication that Moser intended this to be Siegfried, but there is a connection.  The painting is called Der Wanderer.

In the opera Siegfried, the god Wotan appears disguised as a character called the Wanderer.  Could Moser be depicting him?  He could and did in another painting.  Moser painted several versions of Der Wanderer, and the one above, where he looks older, is explicitly labeled Wotan.  We'll see more art by Koloman Moser in a future post.

Siegfried finds Fafner, the dragon that is guarding the Ring.  Above is the painting Siegfried and Fafner by Hermann Hendrich, 1906, accompanied by Wagner's sinister theme for Fafner.

Siegfried slays the dragon and takes the Ring.  Above, Siegfried by Osmar Schindler, c. 1900 depicts the hero and dead dragon.  Then Siegfried finds Brünnhilde surrounded by the magic fire.  He walks through the fire and awakens her with a kiss.

In opera #4, Götterdämmerung, Siegfried gives the magic ring to Brünnhilde as a token of love and heads off to do heroic deeds accompanied by music called Siegfried's Rhine Journey.  At the end of this excerpt, the brass plays the theme of the river Rhine.  In this drawing by Karl Philipp Fohr, Siegfried stops to take a drink.

There have been very few performances of the Ring operas with nudity.  In the Melbourne Ring cycle performed by Opera Australia in 2013, the audience was surprised when the mortally wounded dragon Fafner emerged from his cave not as a dragon but as a naked man played by Jud Arthur, above.  You see, Fafner was originally a giant, and he turned into a dragon through a magic shape-shifting device, and ... oh, never mind.

There was considerably more nudity in a theatrical adaptation combining Siegfried and Götterdämmerung at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany in 2015.  It was loosely based on Wagner's plot but not his music, and it wasn't an opera.  This is Philipp Hochmair as Siegfried.

Here he is again, presumably after killing the dragon.

Götterdämmerung means "twilight of the gods."  At the end, Siegfried is betrayed, is stabbed in the back, and dies.  Brünnhilde rides into the flames of Siegfried's funeral pyre and dies.  The flames spread to Valhalla, which burns up, and all the gods die.  Well, Wagnerian opera is nothing if not dramatic.