The Royal Ballet and Opera’s new production of Die Walküre opens with the figure of an elderly woman standing naked against a black backdrop. She is rotating in place, her hands, at first, covering her eyes. She looks like Dürer’s The Witch, with sagging breasts and long grey hair. She is Erda, the Earth Mother. One of the few characters not taken from Old Norse myth, she is Wagner’s own invention, extrapolated from the Germanic Volva/Wala into a primordial mother-goddess figure. In Der Ring des Nibelungen as Wagner conceived it, she spends less time on stage than any other character, appearing in one scene in Das Rheingold and one in Siegfried. In both, she speaks only to Wotan; between the events of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, he has returned to her and conceived a daughter, Brünnhilde, the Valkyrie (she is likely the mother of the eight other Valkyries, though this is not made explicit.)
In Barry Kosky’s new production of Die Walküre, however, she becomes the central thread of the Ring cycle, both opening and closing the production and silently present on stage through most of its scenes (in Kosky’s 2023 production of Das Rheingold, she remained on stage throughout.) She presents flowers to brother and sister Siegmund and Sieglinde, Wotan’s mortal children, upon their incestuous betrothal; she chauffeurs Fricka’s chariot (here, a car) in Valhalla; she presents Nothung, the magical sword, to Siegmund in his hour of need. She presides over all events as they unfold with a serene and knowing expression suited to her prophetic role, having identified herself in Das Rheingold as “the endless world’s all-wise one.” As the curtain falls, she returns her hands to her eyes; the mythic narrative is thus reframed as Erda’s own dream, an extension of her primordial consciousness.
As for the set design, Kosky has taken inspiration from bushfires in his native Australia to present a vision of environmental apocalypse. The first act is sparse and bare, with only a few charred wooden chairs and a table against a dark, unadorned wall. Though it begins in a forest, there are no trees. In the second act, Valhalla is a minimal lamp-lit street; the gods wear evening dress. On earth, the action revolves around a charred tree-trunk on an otherwise bare stage, recalling the World Ash Tree which Wotan mutilated to make his spear. Skeletons, crumbling to ash, feature heavily: Erda appears and gives Siegmund a skeleton representing his own corpse, which he dances with and then violently tears apart. In the third act, the grotesque and blood-smeared Valkyries gather the charred remains of corpses; behind them, Erda sits inside a tree, which in the final scene becomes Brünnhilde’s prison and is set alight. Siegmund wears a dirty yellow hoodie over a graphic t-shirt. Hunding is inexplicably dressed as a mall cop waving around a gun.
This is nothing new. The 1976 centenary Bayreuth production, with set design by Patrice Chéreau, set the Ring cycle against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, with Wotan dressed as a banker. Subsequent productions have picked up on the theme of environmental despoilation and climate catastrophe, which seems to accord with the cycle’s apocalyptic ending. Taking aim at such productions, Roger Scruton wrote:
The Ring has been regarded as an opportunity to deconstruct not only Wagner but the whole conception of the human condition that glows so warmly in his music. The Ring is deliberately stripped of its legendary atmosphere and primordial setting, and everything is brought down to the quotidian level, jettisoning the mythical aspect of the story, so as to give us only half of what it means. The symbols of cosmic agency — spear, sword, ring — when wielded by scruffy humans on abandoned city lots, appear like toys in the hands of lunatics.
In his preface to Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner wrote that the various elements of operatic performance should complement each other so that the audience is “confronted by a scenic representation in which music and poetic drama form a whole in every tiny detail”. In a letter of 1872 to Heinrich Porges, he wrote, “I want you to follow all my rehearsals very closely… and to note down everything I say, even to the smallest details, about the interpretation and performance of our work, so that a tradition goes down in writing.” The departure, in modern productions, from the composer’s instruction can only be seen as a gesture of defiance against its father. Given the association between Wagner and antisemitism, German nationalism and the subsequent inspiration taken by the Nazis, who would dare to stage a Wagner production without explicitly distancing themselves from the composer?
To depart from Wagner’s instructions, however, also means abandoning the aesthetic philosophy underlying the work. Wagner’s intense involvement with the production of his great Bühnenfestspiel (stage-festival-play) was an attempt to create a new art form, distinct from opera — he theorised the need for a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total-artwork, which would become the art of the future. Following his reading of Schopenhauer, he embraced the philosopher’s view that music was unique among the arts in being a direct expression of the Will. As a non-conceptual artform, music alone could show the inner working of the Will, getting behind mere phenomena to the essence of reality itself. But Wagner thought it necessary that the other aspects of the performance support the music, so that the overall impression is coherent; in this way, the total-artwork can communicate things which words alone cannot.
Hearing the music of Die Walküre, conducted by Antonio Pappano, is an extraordinary experience. The emotional range and set of values expressed are so different to those of French or Italian opera, so alien, that one has the impression of being granted access to an entirely different sort of culture. Having only encountered Old Norse and Germanic myths in written form, where they were recorded by Christians and already parsed through a Christian lens, Die Walküre feels like experiencing something new; the form of myth presented by Wagner evokes a moral world stripped of its Christian accretions. Like other figures associated with the counter-enlightenment, however, Wagner was concerned not with returning to a pre-Christian culture but with moving forward. He understood himself as a rare genius capable of creating an artform which could birth a new culture, a new age of humanity.
In the Ring cycle, the twilight of the gods is necessary because their justice has become incoherent — their laws conflict with their desires; their means of governance restrain them from the full attainment of power. The music conjures the possibility of a new type of life where the moral law has no conflict with the insistent hum of the will. The new humanity is initiated by Siegmund and Sieglinde and by Brünnhilde, whose disobedience effects a break with the gods and reduces her (or, in Wagner’s schema, elevates her) to mortality; it is finally achieved by Siegfried, the as-yet-unborn son of the Völsungs’ incestuous union.
The reinterpretation of Erda, which can be considered through a feminist lens as denying the patriarchal supremacy of the All-Father, in fact cheapens the role of the eponymous Valkyrie. Brünnhilde becomes merely a character in Erda’s dream, her act of rebellion returned to the determined order of her mother’s creation. When, in Siegfried, Erda is awakened from her sleep by Wotan, the once-prophetic goddess is unaware of Brünnhilde’s disobedience — as if the Valkyrie’s act has overturned the wisdom of the primordial mother and set the world on a new course. In this scene, Erda is confused and no longer capable of prophecy; as Wotan returns her to endless sleep and announces that he has found freedom in accepting the necessity of his own annihilation, the age of the gods has reached its end. With Kosky directing next season’s production of Siegfried, it will be interesting to see how he balances Erda’s supersession with the omniscient, transcendent place he has given her in Die Walküre.
The production … seems at war with itself — its music and set design contradict each other
In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote that “physiologically speaking, everything ugly weakens and oppresses human beings. It reminds them of decline, danger, powerlessness; it actually makes them lose strength.” It’s difficult to resist the conclusion that modern productions of Wagner use ugliness as a containment strategy, a way of neutralising the dangerous and suspect values conveyed by the music. Die Walküre revolves around the question of human freedom — Wagner suggests that there is no justification for man’s obedience to the gods or to the moral law; the gods, in seeking to govern, have created institutions which restrict their natural freedom, and in so doing have willed their own extinction. The age of the gods must necessarily pass into an age of truly human freedom — power which springs naturally from instinct. But the glorification of man as man is a dangerous idea — too close to the Nietzschean superman or the “new man” of fascism and Nazism. It becomes necessary, then, to defang the work.
By elevating Erda above the pantheon of gods, Kosky denies the future-orientation of Wagner’s artform. In myth, the progression is from a primordial matriarchy — the cult of the Earth Mother — to civilised patriarchy, the Sky Father, where authority is codified and asserted through law. Wagner’s aesthetic and philosophical vision points forward to a new age with new values, entirely distinct from the moral world of Christian civilisation. The music, the mythic structure, the set design, the costumes — all of these, Wagner believed, worked together to convey the whole spirit of the work. By altering the structure of the myth, Kosky has also altered its emotional resonances. The production, as a consequence, seems at war with itself — its music and set design contradict each other, and the overall impression is of confusion. One leaves with the frustrating impression of having been affected by the music despite the production’s best efforts to limit its power.
