English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Wagner suspends the Ring in the middle of Siegfried 2:58 Good evening dear friends, I'm very glad to be back with you. I'm sorry to have let you down last week, I had a small health incident, a very short hospitalization which I regret all the less for it having allowed me to have some fundamental checks done, which turned out not to be anything very serious. The most extraordinary thing, and more interesting than talking about myself, is to know that I interrupted the narration of the Ring precisely at the moment in the Ring where Wagner himself suspended his project — not that I'm comparing myself to the composer — but Wagner suspended the elaboration of both the text and the music, the composition of the Ring's score, precisely at the second act of Siegfried.
4:05 That's why I thank Philippe for having managed it in such a short time. He says, as he says in a letter, 'I left my hero in the forest among the birds.' That's the famous scene which, when performed as an excerpt rather than in full, is given a title — it's called the Forest Murmurs.
4:35 Look, this framing is a bit odd. The Forest Murmurs. As you've no doubt noticed, the great forest of tone is somewhat the main character of the affair — I'll tell you the context afterward, all that. What's important to know for now is that, up to this point, those discovering the work only know the few excerpts from the very beginning of The Rhinegold, which we saw at the start of this cycle.
5:10 But what needs — the most important thing to know is that if we take the four main parts — the three plus the prologue, so The Rhinegold as prologue, then the sequel, The Valkyrie, which lasts about four hours like the others, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods — Siegfried occupies a middle position, with Twilight of the Gods being longer than the others. So he abandoned his work in the middle. You know, I'm somewhat fascinated by mediation, by referring back to the middle. If I told you the whole story of the Ring from beginning to end, we'd never finish, there are so many twists and turns.
5:52 That's why, by placing ourselves in the middle, we can talk both about what goes from the middle toward the end, and retroactively recall what happened from the beginning up to the middle. Now, this middle is precisely this forest scene, which coincides with the second act. All of Wagner's great works have three acts. The second act is therefore always the middle act. I'm recalling simple things to remember but fundamental ones for understanding a great deal.
6:23 So the forest scene is located in the second act, thus in the middle of Siegfried, the opera Siegfried — it's a lyric drama, an opera — which is itself in the middle of the tetralogy. Now you'll tell me, it's geometric, it's arithmetic, enough of this business about the middle. But here's the thing, this is where we see that the notion of the middle is always overdetermined. If I bring it in, it's because there are philosophical stakes involved. It's a middle in every sense. Do you know how you say 'middle' in Italian? Mezzo. Now, the forest scene is a marvelous intermezzo.
7:01 You see, in German, Zwischenspiel — Zwischen means 'between,' you see, like 'between' in English. Spiel means 'play' — literally, an 'inter-play,' not an 'inter-crotch' or an 'inter-time,' but an inter-play. I don't quite understand what's happening with my framing.
7:36 What this means is that it's also a moment of relaxation, a pause in the action. Wagner abandoned his work to take it up again 12 years later — between 11 and 12 years later — he himself made a great interlude, a long Zwischenspiel, a long intermezzo, during which he did not remain idle.
8:10 He composed the two works that even those who aren't very Wagnerian place above everything else, and which have nothing to do with the Ring — two works that couldn't be more opposed but which have in common that they mark a turning point in his musical writing, one that would be heavy with consequences for the rest of the history of European music. That's Tristan, one of the most tragic of works, and, by contrast, his only great comic work, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, Meistersinger, for which Nietzsche had a genuine cult.
8:48 These are, moreover, the two works that Nietzsche always set apart from all the criticisms he might level at Wagner. He says in a letter: 'From the moment there was a piano score of Tristan, I became a Wagnerian.' He was quite young at that point, but he always remained faithful to Tristan, even on his hospital bed in the psychiatric asylum toward the end.
9:18 He confides at one point, in a moment of lucidity, that he is still searching for a work of as terrible an infinity as Tristan. So, there you have it. Wagner abandons the Ring. He leaves Siegfried there, in the forest among the birds. I'll come back to how we got there. And he sets about composing something else entirely, because his feeling had evolved. He had a great personal problem with a great love of his life, Mathilde Wesendonck, before he met Cosima, Liszt's daughter, whom he married, you see.
9:56 And at whose side he would die in Venice. Now I understand my framing better. Ah, right, so it's at my place then. I wanted to recall all this because some people were kind and courageous enough to tell me they'd been a bit muddled since the beginning of the Ring — so let them be reassured.
The three worlds and Alberich's theft of the gold 10:27 The Ring confuses a lot of people. And now I'm going to start clarifying. What is Siegfried doing in the middle of the forest? Let's go back to what we already know, to The Rhinegold. Let me briefly recall. At the origin of everything, there is the gold at the bottom of the Rhine. At that time, there are no men. There are gods, giants, dwarves. There is not yet the human race. There's a cosmogonic side to the Ring, as if it were before the appearance of man on earth, the great natural forces. There's no tragedy yet, the gold is at the bottom of the Rhine.
11:13 It can be whatever you like — reflections in the water, glimmers, twilight glows, etc., which suggested part of this mythology. But no matter, these are idle hypotheses of that sort; you know I don't like interpretations, and I prefer things that are more rigorous and more objective. And it is guarded by the three daughters of the Rhine, whom you saw frolicking about. They put on a strange show of coquetry and vamping toward the dwarf Alberich.
11:44 who comes from the depths of the underground world. Let me remind you, three worlds. Underground, the Nibelheim, the world of elves — Albe, Alberich means the king of the elves. The underground world, that's below the earth; on the surface of the earth, the giants; and above, in the heights, in the luminous heights, the gods. That's the division. So the three daughters put on a vamp routine for Alberich — they're as graceful, slender, and playful as the dwarf is deformed and hunchbacked, and considered bad — well, reread Michel Clouscard, Refondation progressiste, you'll find a striking portrait of Alberich there.
12:30 Precisely, who is identified here with the proletariat as seen by the ruling classes. So, quick recap: they guard the gold, but they guard it rather poorly because they chatter. Women at the wash-house, at the Rhine, by the water, on the bank — it's structural. Women are a bit freer outside the village, when they go to the river or the well — I've seen this often in Africa — and away from the matriarchs, the husbands, the brothers watching them, they talk more freely among themselves.
13:17 But here, they talk a bit too much, because after having sent the dwarf packing by making him believe he had a chance — well, he has a rough time of it, you remember, we saw it, so I won't dwell on it, we saw it, we heard it. They talk among themselves about the gold of the Rhine, and one of them says there's only one, the eldest, who is wise and tells them, 'Be careful' — I mean, watch the gold instead of chattering. And they say, 'What do we have to fear?' And here comes the reminder of the algebra that governs the whole Ring. They reply, 'You know the rule well: only he who renounces love can seize the gold.' Now, no being, generally speaking, is ready to renounce love — to renounce anything but love — but especially not that one, right, the one who's been pestering us with his libido this whole time — he's not about to renounce love.
14:13 And the dwarf, hearing all this, suddenly thinks: I have nothing left to lose, I've been sent packing, but I learn that with the gold I might not have love, but I would have power over the world, right. And so he pronounces the terrible theme of the renunciation of love, the leitmotif of renouncing love; he seizes the Rhine gold, the Rhine darkens, it loses its light, its natural state, which was the gold, right? And this is somewhat the original sin that will govern the rest of the work. Well. But still, the dwarf was rather amusing. I mean, he took the gold like that, but he renounced love. There's an algebra to it, I mean. There's a gain, there's a loss.
Valhalla, the giants' wages, and Loge's ruse 14:50 Then we find ourselves among the gods — I'll go quickly — the gods have just finished, not the construction of the palace themselves — the gods don't work, have you ever seen the pharaohs stooping over the sand, as in the poem by Brecht that you've often quoted, have you ever seen kings picking up stones? No, but they commanded the giants, precisely at the lower level — the titans, somewhat like among the Greeks who work for the gods while having conflictual relations with them. And the giants make weapons for the gods, they're the blacksmiths, like Alberich who is a smith.
15:25 And so, what did they command? A dwelling that would shelter them from all the misfortunes of fate, from all the threats of the outside world — Valhalla, the Olympus, the equivalent of Olympus in the Germanic world. The Burg, right? Burg means simply a fortress. All the names ending in -bourg, Sarrebourg, Strasbourg — it's the fortified town into which, in medieval times, historically speaking, the population of the fief takes refuge in case of enemy attack, under the protection of the local lord.
16:04 So, they had the palace built and, of course, every labor deserves its wage. The giants didn't work for the gods for nothing. And what had been agreed — we learn this in the discussion between Wotan, king of the gods, and his wife Fricka, between Zeus and Juno, between Jupiter and Juno, between Zeus and Hera, whatever you like, they're all the same functions — was that they would be paid with the goddess of beauty and love.
16:36 These always go together — I won't go back over it, we drew the parallel from Plato onward — a reflection on beauty and a reflection on love, and vice versa. So Freya, whose name has the same radical meaning as Frey, meaning 'free' — had been promised. And when, in The Rhinegold, we go back up to the gods after the scene of the theft of the gold — so back to my thread — we witness a domestic quarrel between the king of the gods and his wife. Here's a king of the gods who seems to have all power over the universe, yet who greatly fears his wife, the guardian of conjugal loyalty.
17:16 Like Jupiter, she has a rather fickle husband who likes to go seduce a few mortal women or a few other divinities behind his wife's back. He is, for example, the father of the Valkyries, whom he obtained by impregnating Erda — Erda, Earth, the earth. We'll see her appear at the end of The Rhinegold. So, there's a domestic scene, because she says, 'You're not going to give my sister to those monsters, those giants, those brutes' — you don't need me to draw you a picture, or to insist, as to why she finds this outrageous.
17:53 And Wotan, who embodies the 'guy' — I had said 'the guy,' meaning man in general, not the human race, I include myself in this, I mean — has a flaw that practically no one escapes, certainly not me — it's weakness of will and cowardice, that is, the trait of men who have this flaw: what they want, they want as quickly as possible, that's weakness of will. And as for worries, unpleasant things, the opposite of what they want, they say, 'We'll sort it out later, I'll find something.' That's exactly what Wotan does.
18:23 He says, 'But I promised that to the giants, we'll work it out' — well, 'if you don't want us to give Freya away.' So very quickly, when the giants arrive to claim Freya, there are two of them, two brothers — you know the problem of siblings in mythology, Romulus and Remus, Cain and Abel. So, Fasolt and Fafner, of the two giants, one is a bit less coarse, a bit gentler than the other, and even more unhappy than the other to see that they won't grant them Freya, who would have brought a bit of tenderness, right, into the Riesenheim, the realm of the giants, where things aren't tender every day, right, it's a toilsome world.
19:12 And the conflict threatens to break out between the two giants and the gods, threatens to come to blows, to arms. And this proves that the giants — one must be careful — I mean, they can threaten the gods. And Wotan actually stops the gods from getting angry and responding to the giants' insolence, because he is the guardian, like Jupiter, of legality. He has the laws of the pacts engraved on his spear — the runes, Nordic writings — exactly like Zeus, who is a god of the city, not a god of chaos, not a primitive divinity — we saw that, if you recall, in the logic of the subject, and in memory and anamnesis, anamnesis and forgetting.
20:01 So Zeus is indeed obliged to take some account, from time to time, of a promise given. If he doesn't want to give up Freya, he has to give an equivalent. But his evil genius, his advisor to enlighten him on this point, is the god of fire, Loge — the Hermes, the Mercury, the clever one, the cunning one, right? Since fire is mobile and constantly travels throughout the world, he's not always there. He's the one most needed, and he isn't there when the scene breaks out. And now he arrives, just in the nick of time — so I'll move quickly — and Wotan says to him, 'Get me out of this, what can I give in exchange for...'
20:40 So fire makes himself a bit sought after, but he knows exactly whom he's dealing with, he says, 'You promised Freya, love, beauty — what do you expect us to give in exchange?' Nothing can replace beauty. 'I know all beings below, above, you know, fire, it's underground too.' Remember this well, he's not a god like the others; he partakes of all the realms. We need fire to smelt metals underground, and it's also fire that lights up the sky, it's not daylight. So he's below, he's above, he's in the middle.
21:13 Fire, which was the fundamental element for Heraclitus, you see — he tells him, I can't give you an equivalent from anyone, except one. Having traveled everywhere, he's aware of the first primal scene — that the dwarf stole the gold, spiteful at seeing that the daughters of the Rhine didn't want him, that he had nothing to regret in renouncing love. Let me recap for those who jumped on board mid-way, I won't dwell too much, we're not going around in circles. He seized the gold and, by renouncing love, was able by magic to forge from the gold a ring that gives power over the world. There are the terms — love, roses, etc., or wealth and worldly power.
The curse of the ring and the end of Das Rheingold 22:01 And before continuing the plot summary, let me clarify, since we're here dealing with fundamental concepts, that Alberich, when he takes the gold, says: to take the gold, I had to renounce love perhaps, but with the gold I can buy pleasure. Do you see this distinction? A fine distinction between love and libertinage. I'm not moralizing. The dwarf, and Wagner's text, show this dichotomy well. With the gold, I won't have love, but I can always buy pleasure.
22:34 That's somewhat the story. All the novels, the millions of novels, the films, revolve around this, right? This ambiguity of not knowing whether one is loved for oneself or for one's fortune — these are banalities. But still, banalities that have been current for some thousands of years. As a result, they decide to go steal — there's no other word — the gold from Alberich, who's going to find himself.
23:04 He renounced love to have the gold, and now they take the gold from him. And it's Wotan who says, 'How do you expect us to seize the gold, the dwarf seems powerful?' There's a terrible cry from Loge, right? For those who want to listen to the audio version, 'Durch Raub' — through theft. Raub is indeed theft, robbery, you see? 'To rob' in English, you see? So he descends into the depths of the dwarves. We saw, you remember, the anvils, we heard the anvils, and taking advantage of the dwarf's vanity, they dare him to transform himself into a small animal, into a toad; they put their foot on him, bring him back up to the surface — if you want to be freed, you must pile up the gold.
23:43 There you go, pile up the gold in front of Freya, because the giants, as long as they don't have the gold, keep their hostage — it's Freya who is terrified. The giants — you'll remember the animated version, which is very evocative. They pile up the gold, but Wotan has kept the ring. There's a whole treasure that's costly. What the giants said: cover it up, pile up the gold until Freya can no longer be seen. Then the sentimental one, you'll recall, that's why I mentioned him.
24:15 Once the gold is piled up, he walks around it to check whether she really can no longer be seen, saying mournfully, 'I renounce Freya the gentle,' and it's hard for him to part with her. And suddenly he sees her eyes through a gap — something's missing, in the pile of treasure, the ring that Wotan has kept on his finger is missing. So the tension resumes, and just as war is about to break out again because Wotan won't let go of the ring that gives power over the world, at that moment the earth opens up, and Erda emerges, the chthonic divinity par excellence, the earth, who, like a prophetess, like a Pythia, says to Wotan: Wotan, let it go, throw away the ring, leave the ring.
25:03 Because meanwhile, Alberich — you can well imagine that, faced with Alberich's total dispossession — people say he's the villain, the wicked one, but I'll defend him on one point: he's amusing, he respected the algebra, either gold or love. Now he has neither gold nor love. And so, the moment the god tore the ring from his finger, he cursed the gold. And this is where the curse of the ring begins. All those through whose hands it passes will come to a bad end, it will always arouse envy, despair, death, etc.
25:38 So Erda says: Wotan, leave it, leave it, leave the ring. All the gods are on edge, because from the beginning we've been wondering whether Fricka will get her sister back, whether the giants will get their payment in gold and leave, whether we'll finally be able to inaugurate our new home, the Valhalla, right. And Wotan, emerging from a meditation, throws down the ring. In the end, the two giants seize it and leave with the treasure in sacks.
26:10 Freya, freed, jumps for joy and happiness into her sister's arms, everything is settled. Except that the two giants — it starts, you've seen this in films, like 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' — as soon as there's loot, they fight over the loot. And Fafner, the less sentimental of the two, kills his brother. The helmet that makes one invisible. He kills him. And it's this Fafner, the only remaining giant, the last survivor of the race of giants, who will transform after the end of The Rhinegold into a dragon and who will watch, like Uncle Scrooge, over the treasure, doing nothing but, as he says, 'I watch and I rest.' All he does is rest on his capital.
26:58 Posterity. Wotan, terrified, sees that the curse is serious — there's already a death. Walking along, his foot strikes against a sword that fell from the treasure Fafner carried off, from the treasure of The Rhinegold. He picks up this sword and makes it the sword of the gods. He says, 'Now I must forge an army to protect me against the vengeance of the underground world.' That's how The Rhinegold ends. The gods return to Valhalla, there's a storm in the air because there's been tension throughout.
27:30 This storm is magnificently illustrated by Donner, the god of thunder — Donner, a storm breaks out, and immediately, a few seconds later, resplendent, a rainbow appears, which will be the bridge allowing the god — the rainbow, the musical contrast between the storm and the rainbow is striking, as you can imagine — which allows the gods to finally enter their palace. Now, this bridge, the rainbow, what does it span? A bridge, it spans a river, a stream, it spans the Rhine. And just as the gods, just as everything is settled, the storm has released the tension that was there, the storm has burst, if you will, the rainbow has made the storm cease, the clearing sky.
28:10 We're about to enter Valhalla, and as they're on the bridge, one hears, far off in the depths of the Rhine, the song of the Rhine daughters mourning the lost gold. And that's how it ends, on an obscene bit of laughter from the gods, where Wotan says to Loge, his evil genius, 'Make them be quiet.' Loge teases them a bit, like girls who are never satisfied, etc. And the gods go in — it's strange, you can sense there will be a sequel, it stays with that. It ends there, with the Rhine daughters mourning the lost gold.
28:45 So much for The Rhinegold. Before continuing with what follows, a little anecdote — of course, given the time allotted to me, if I tell you anecdotes it's because the stake is worth the game, to make a Hegelian pun. The game, Spiel, is worth going through the example, the Beispiel. What is this example? It's Wagner's last seconds, dying in Venice. I told you he died in Venice, and Visconti knows it very well.
29:25 Wagner — it's in Cosima's diary, Wagner's last seconds. He's in the next room, he's already had heart problems, right? He plays on the piano the scene I just told you about, the song of the Rhine maidens mourning the lost gold. He quotes one of the lines to Cosima. She sings the text he had written where they say 'everything that stirs up there is deceitful.' And Wagner adds, 'To think I once managed to express that — I love these simple beings,' speaking of the Rhine maidens, 'these beings of the depths.' And he dies of a heart attack.
Siegmund, Sieglinde, and the sword in the tree 30:08 What is it really? Let me start again, I'll close my anecdote. So what comes next? I told you, there are no men in The Rhinegold, there are giants, gods, and dwarves — there are no men yet. Something that resembles men, but not yet men of history, no kingdoms, no sovereigns, but very historical men appear in The Valkyrie, the next opera. The next one is The Valkyrie. So, very quickly, I have to move fast, which is why I'm lingering on the recapitulative scenes from this session onward, because Wagner, very aware of the length of the thing, very intelligently placed great scenes where a character recounts what has happened up to that point, which allows someone to jump in partway through and still follow fairly well.
31:03 And musical recapitulation too, with the leitmotifs. And so, in The Valkyrie, we see a fugitive in the forest, under a dreadful storm, taking refuge in a house at the heart of the forest — we're somewhat in prehistory here, at the heart of the forest with a tree planted inside the house, and in the tree a sword driven in up to the hilt. You find that in the Arthurian legend, except instead of a rock, it's a tree. And of course no one can pull it out.
31:38 And he takes refuge there, and a woman finds him unconscious, a woman alone in the house — apparently the husband isn't there. She gives him something to drink, well, they look at each other and it's love at first sight — it's all very different from The Rhinegold. I've already told you that Wagner's female audience often prefers The Valkyrie, it's the most overwhelming on a human level, strictly human, not gods or giants. And so they feel drawn to each other, they look at each other — pity for this fugitive, who's a valiant warrior but who never has any luck, whose sword broke just as he was about to defend the widow and the orphan.
32:17 But we learn, through his account — so I'll go quickly — that this fugitive is descended from Wotan. Wotan now knows that if he wants to fight against Alberich's underground work — Alberich who dreams of revenge and is scheming from below with all the power the gold has given him, so that one day the world of the gods will collapse and he'll recover the ring, not to give it back to the Rhine maidens but to keep it for himself — Wotan, to fight this underground danger, needs an elite army, but for that he needs people who act without being commanded by him.
32:52 You see, the whole ambiguity is there — people who act freely, in quotation marks. And it's one of these people who tells the woman his misfortunes, that he's never had any luck, that he'd better leave, that he shouldn't stay in her house. He thanks her for the water, for the comfort, but he must go because he brings only misfortune. And she says, 'Oh, pfft, it's the same for me, I was forced to marry a brute, I live in this house — you're not the one who brought misfortune here, it was already here.'
33:24 There's a kind of complicity between the two. So I'll tell you right away, we'll learn at the end of Act One of The Valkyrie that they'll recognize each other as twin brother and sister. And yes, they are the future parents of Siegfried, the next ones — because by the end of the act, Siegfried is conceived, it's a scandalous story. Siegfried's parents are twin brother and sister, and Siegfried's father is Siegmund. When the husband comes back, he sees his wife talking with a stranger.
34:02 So he tells him, well, hospitality is sacred, so tonight we'll shelter you, but tomorrow, a fight to the death. Because he also recognizes an enemy of his clan. And with strange totemic details, I can't tell you everything, but you see, Siegmund belongs, through Wotan, to the totem of the wolf, Wolf, while the husband is named Hunding — Hound, you see, in English, Hound, the dog, right? Needless to say, they really are enemies.
34:33 And so the husband comes back and takes his wife, goes into the bedroom — very well, the other one will have to fight to the death tomorrow, and he finds himself all alone in the house at night, unarmed, with a duel to the death looming the next day. But as she's going, while the husband is leading her by the hand, she has time to signal to Siegmund, pointing at the tree where the sword is. And there — there's something. It's a very beautiful solo of Siegmund, saying that his father, whom he never really knew, had promised his mother that a sword was destined for him, by which he would become invincible.
35:16 He's lost in his thoughts when the woman appears, having put her husband to sleep with potions and herbs, whatever you like, and she tells him that this sword was planted by a stranger. A man with a monocle — we recognize Wotan, Wotan who has become a Wanderer, someone traveling, wandering the earth to see how things will unfold, observing.
35:46 I came to see, not to act. And so — but for now, the name isn't spoken — she says, 'I felt irresistibly drawn to him, this stranger who planted the sword in there, and since then no one has managed to pull it out.' She doesn't know, of course, that it's her own lineage, since she's the twin sister of Siegmund, whose father it is. So, I'll move quickly — there's a magnificent love duet, one of the most beautiful in the history of opera. I say this for those who know the history of twentieth-century music — there are passages that strikingly foreshadow Schoenberg's Transfigured Night.
36:35 It's a string sextet, a haunted and haunting work, Transfigured Night. So at the end of this duet, just as they recognize each other as twin brother and sister, with tremendous effort Siegmund pulls the sword from the tree, and in such a way — the music is suggestive — that it's as laborious as a childbirth.
37:05 One could say that this way of pulling the sword is a way of enacting the phallic act. Siegmund can now, so to speak, engender Siegfried. So that's the first act, which ends with this magnificent love duet on a spring night. Second act, same as always, as in The Rhinegold — Wotan's wife, among the gods, at Valhalla. We go back up. She says, what is this, a brother and a twin sister? Where are we headed? What is this story? It's scandalous.
Fricka, Brünnhilde, and Wotan's tragedy 37:40 As for the murder, it's still your scheming, she says to her royal husband. You say he acts freely, but behind the scenes you arrange for him to have a sword that makes him invincible. These stories are never clear. There was, on France Musique, about twenty years ago, a whole series of programs on the Ring, titled 'The Tetralogy: the Tragedy of Wotan' — not of Siegfried — even though it's the death of Siegfried that is the tragic act with which Wagner began everything, the core of the work. But when you look closely, Wotan, with his constant contradictions, his unkept promises, his grand designs, is the true hero of the tetralogy, present or absent. So Wotan tells her, 'You don't understand the young — twin brother and sister, what does that matter?'
38:40 They love each other, don't they? So he goes along with it. It's not a matter of 'always the same' anymore. And once again, as in The Rhinegold, he gives in. He is, after all, guardian of the laws. He gives in, and he summons the Valkyrie. Who is the Valkyrie? One of the nine Valkyries. Just as Zeus had, remember, the nine Muses with Mnemosyne — very important.
39:14 Among all these Valkyries — divine beings, warrior maidens whose mission is to go and gather from the battlefields the bodies of heroes who died bravely, courageously, in order to form, at Valhalla, among the gods, an elite army. Still to fight against the underground world, don't lose sight of what's at stake. So, the Valkyrie…
39:45 The Valkyrie, in the singular, is Brünnhilde, that's her name, she's Wotan's favorite daughter. Of the nine, she's the one who loves him, to whom he says, 'When I speak to you, it's as if I were speaking to myself, you are my innermost thought.' And she replies, 'What am I, if not your will?' There's a complicity between the two that irritates the wife, moreover. When she has obtained from Wotan that he give up supporting the duel that is to take place in the morning, Wotan was reassured — he had managed to pull out the sword, the sword that makes one invincible, he's going to defeat the husband and thus create a race of heroes, which is what he needs.
40:23 And there, once again, he finds himself outmaneuvered by his wife and forced to tell the Valkyrie, 'I had told you to go and make triumph…' You know, as with the Greeks, the gods in battle invisibly favor one side or the other in close combat. And I had told you to make Siegmund triumph over the horrible husband, over Hunding, over Orhan.
40:54 There it is — Fricka has decided, so you do it. And here there's one of the longest recapitulative scenes, which I recommend to you. And here, I'd like to show you a document, for those who can get hold of it, because it's a bit expensive, but otherwise, consult it in a library. I'll find it for you.
41:27 There it is — I showed it briefly last time, but look, I'm showing it here, it's published by Fayard, and it's called 'Guide to Wagner's Operas.' Here you have everything, everything — a long introduction, Wagner's way of composing, and it's by far the best of its kind, I mean, a discography at the end, all the texts, right, the leitmotifs, for those who can read scores, a list of the leitmotifs — you see, for example, the moment they appear, you just have to let yourself be guided.
42:09 Like here, you have leitmotifs of the sword, of the bird, etc. The problem is it's very expensive, between 40 and 55 euros, I checked online, because it's out of print. So there you are, consult it in a library if you can, but you'll have everything there. Otherwise on Wikipedia you have everything about the Ring, the summaries, but you don't have the full text in detail.
42:43 So he tells the Valkyrie, you're going to make him triumph, and in this scene — I'll read a few excerpts anyway, right — to show the strange relationship between Wotan and his daughter. Yes, so it's…
Reading of Wotan's recapitulatory monologue 43:15 The recapitulative scenes — those that allow, if you've gotten lost, and here I'm answering those who were kind enough, who told me they felt a bit lost, to put it more colloquially, in the Ring — refer to these recapitulative scenes. It's the recapitulative, the first of its chronological kind. The Rhinegold doesn't yet have enough material, it's a prologue for the recapitulation, but in The Valkyrie, right from the second act, as I told you, there's a great dialogue between Wotan and his daughter, right? She finds him in a dreadful state — the triumphant wife has left the hall, and Brünnhilde arrives fully armed, warrior maiden that she is, and sees her father in such a state that he says, 'I, the king of the gods, am the most constrained, the most wretched, I mean, the most enslaved.'
44:01 And then, what is it? What's put you in this state? He tells her, and look how he sums up what we haven't seen ourselves — just as in Star Wars, but also in The Lord of the Rings, you have parts that, chronologically, come later but are meant to tell what happened before the beginning. You see, that's exactly the kind of encyclical at play here. So when she asks, 'What's happening to you?' before he sits down, so to speak, and tells everything that's happened, even what predates the scene of The Rhinegold, he says, 'But I can't tell you, these are things no one is supposed to know.'
44:55 And that's when he says, 'Trust me, I'll be faithful to you — look, Brünnhilde implores you.' Trusting and fearful, she lays her head and hands on Wotan's chest and knees. Wotan gazes at her for a long time, straight in the eyes — these are Wagner's stage directions — then he strokes her curls with an involuntary tenderness, as if returning to himself after coming out of a deep meditation. He begins in a low, monotone voice. 'To reveal the secret — is that not to undo the bond that holds my will?' And Brünnhilde answers him, 'You are speaking to your own will. In telling me what you want, what am I, if not your will?'
45:41 In a very low voice — 'let it remain eternally unspoken, what I keep silent from all — I only debate with myself in speaking to you. In speaking to you, I speak only to myself.' And there the recapitulation begins. 'When faded — pardon me, when it faded, when the pleasure of youthful loves faded' — there, it's everyone's story all of a sudden, right? 'I was madly in love.'
46:11 Like everyone, and then it passes. 'When the pleasure of youthful loves faded, my soul aspired to power.' So already the dichotomy — Eros or power. As with the gold. 'My soul aspired to power. Driven by the fury of impulsive desires, I conquered the world. Through ignorance I was disloyal, faithless. I concluded treaties that led to misfortune. Loge, the god of fire, drew me into his tricks. Then this wanderer fled. But I did not want to renounce love. Having power, I demanded passion.'
46:52 'The son of the night, the anxious Nibelung' — here he's speaking of Alberich, not the underground kingdom — 'the son of the night, the anxious Nibelung, Alberich, broke the pact and cursed love.' He recapitulates what you know. 'And cursed love. In cursing it, he conquered the shining gold of the Rhine and, through it, immense power. I took that gold from him by trickery, I took from him the ring he forged, but I did not return it to the Rhine at all.' That's what he should have done — return it rightfully to the depths of the Rhine. That way, everyone would be at peace, right? 'But I did not return it to the Rhine at all. With it, I paid for the battlements of the Valhal, of the palace.'
47:35 'The stronghold built by the giants' — you go into debt to pay off a debt, very topical. 'With it, I paid for the battlements of Valhalla, the stronghold built by the giants, from where I then ruled the world. She who knows all' — the earth, the earth, which is the oldest thing there is, right? — 'she who knows all that once was, Erda, the holy and most wise goddess, made me renounce the ring' — what I told you earlier — 'and warned me of the eternal end of the gods.' The twilight of the gods is announced as early as the end of The Rhinegold and is recalled here in The Valkyrie, announced by Erda the prophetess.
48:13 'Concerning this end, I wanted to know more, but the woman vanished without a word into the bowels of the earth. Then I lost my carefree spirit.' So here begins, no longer the triumphant god in his palace, but the wanderer that Wotan becomes, as the Ring continues, right, the Wanderer — 'to wander' in English, to roam like that, adrift. 'Then I lost my carefree spirit, the god desired his own death. I rushed into the depths of the earth, I subdued the Wala' — that's the earth, Erda — 'with the charm of love. I troubled her proud knowledge, forcing her to answer. I gained knowledge, and from me she received a pledge.'
48:55 'She received a pledge' — meaning he impregnated her — 'and from me she received a pledge, the wisest, the one who knows most among women, she conceived you, Brünnhilde. I raised you with your eight sisters, through you, the Valkyries. I wanted to avoid what the Wala had made me fear, the fall of the gods. I wanted to avoid a shameful end for the immortals, so that the enemy would find us prepared. I ordered you to bring me heroes, those whom we once held under our laws — men whose courage we had suppressed, who were forced into blind obedience by the deceptive bonds of obscure pacts. You were now to drive them to fight, to spur their strength through fierce wars, so as to gather at Valhalla legions of bold warriors.'
49:44 You see, two things — this incredible dialogue, on the margin of the universe, on the margin of the world, 'I speak to you when I speak to myself,' and 'what am I if not your will,' this strange dialogue. So we learn about the very special bond between them, but also everything that has happened, and the reasons why they now find themselves rather embarrassed about having to countermand her, and tell her, well. And at the end, I didn't want to read it to you because…
Das Ende: the desire for the end and Freud's death drive 50:15 He ends this immense recapitulative scene, this monologue, by saying that what he desires now, what he desires above all else, is das Ende. I mentioned it four years ago in a workshop, a little Ring allusion like that. Das Ende. The end. The end, as in the ending of English-language films. The end. This is a generation and a half before Freud. The death drive, late Freud, at its embryonic stage, says that what all drives aim at is the extinction of the drives.
50:56 What all living matter aims at — here it's a man of science speaking, Freud was raised in physico-chemical, biological positivism, it's not a matter of medical training to begin with, it's information. He makes this extremely bold hypothesis, but extremely coherent on a purely logical level. It is that if every drive consists in restoring an earlier state — I recall the logic of the death drive, not the psychology of it, we're not in the psychological field, it's more serious than that.
51:34 If every being — for example, a lion devours a gazelle in order to return to the state of satiety it was in before hunger woke it and forced it to go in search of prey, or of a female, or both. So, if every drive consists in returning to an earlier state, you remember Plato, for whom all knowledge is recollection. There's nothing…
52:04 …older, more prior than inert matter. Freud places himself within a hypothesis — I'm not imposing it on you, nor does he impose it, but well, it's a consensus in the scientific world — that the inert world preceded the living world, unless one takes a religious view, where someone says 'let there be light.' But otherwise, from the strictly secular scientific point of view, there were galaxies, clouds of ammonia and gravitational effects billions of years before the slightest living being, and well before man especially, who comes quite late in all this.
52:42 So in a sense, returning to what came before — the living is driven toward inertness. To the point that Freud says, contrary to what many people think, it is not excitation that desire aims at, sexual libido, but on the contrary the release of drives, ridding oneself of the drive. I'm showing you the logic of the thing. And often, the mechanism by which the subject partly obtains satisfaction grants partial satisfaction to the death drive, through repetition.
53:26 Repetition being the mechanical, inertial effect — inert matter — in which death manifests itself within the living. Remember Ulysses — the Odyssey begins with the sack of Troy, with a massacre, and he repeats the massacre ten years later, when he returns, and bang. The massacre catches up with him.
53:56 The repetition compulsion. We did seminars on this, I'll refer you to those. So, what I want, is the end. So, go make the other fool triumph, the husband, since that's what my wife wants. You'd better not disobey me — he is, after all, the king of the gods. Do not disobey me. He's right to threaten her, because Brünnhilde is a warrior maiden, she doesn't know love.
Brünnhilde's disobedience and her sleep 54:28 And as for the second act, she is going to announce to the warrior that he must die in battle, she appears to him as an apparition. And she says, the Valkyries can only appear to a warrior when he is about to die. It's not like a vision just before death. If she appears, it's because... it has already been decided that he must perish in combat. And the other one, courageously, it's not death that frightens him, he asks — because he is with the woman he has just taken from her husband, in the heart of the forest, he is awaiting the duel, he is with her, pregnant with the future Siegfried since their very first night of love — he says "I am willing to follow you to Valhalla," because she says "come, come, come to Valhalla, you will be among the elite warriors and Wotan's daughters will serve you mead."
55:18 He says, yes, all that sounds wonderful, but could I bring Sieglinde? She tells him, no, her hour has not come. So he says, then I'm not coming. There's an extraordinary scene, it's not... Brünnhilde — I'll go quickly to the essential — Brünnhilde discovers for the first time, in the way he speaks, in his behavior, she discovers what the power of love is, she who is a warrior virgin. She is so overwhelmed that she decides to make him triumph, she disobeys. And it is this disobedience that is the tragic and dramatic, essential act of the opera The Valkyrie. Wotan's favorite daughter who disobeys Wotan, but disobeys in order to do what, deep down, he would have wanted, what she thinks he would have wanted.
56:06 So the battle begins, and at the last second, Wotan bursts out of a cloud like in the Iliad, the gods, you know? And with his spear, shatters into a thousand pieces the sword of Siegmund, who is slain by the husband. Brünnhilde barely has time to seize Sieglinde, who is terrified, you know — Siegfried's mother — and to carry her far away into the forest. And she leaves her, you see how destiny is fulfilled, right near the cave where the giant Fafner the dragon sleeps, guarding the gold. And there she gives birth and dies bringing Siegfried into the world in the middle of the forest.
56:47 He has left, fleeing the wrath of Wotan, who is looking for how to avenge his daughter's disobedience. Well, I'm going a bit quickly — it ends, at the end, in the third act of the Valkyrie, with Wotan catching up with Brünnhilde, furious — Wotan's wrath: you made a fool of me, you think you did what I wanted, none of your business, etc. And since it was love that made you waver, you shall perish through love. Your punishment consists — I am going to plunge you into a deep sleep, and the first one to wake you shall be your master. I mentioned this in a video some time ago, when I spoke precisely about a chapter of Lacan's Écrits called "The Function and Field of Speech and Language," filmed at Philippe's home, whom I thank.
57:35 It's an excellent performance, thanks to his goodwill, his relevance, but also to his equipment. And so, a terrible and humiliating punishment, the first one who finds her shall be her master — she who has never known either submission or virile domination. And she puts on, well, there's no other word for it, a vamp act for her father, he says, you can't, you know I'm your favorite daughter.
58:08 Well, she... she puts on such an act for him that he finally relents a little and softens the punishment, and that's the end of the Valkyrie. To raise a circle of flames, he forces Loge, with the point of his spear, to stop wandering and come make a circle of flames around the Valkyrie, who will sleep for millennia, until someone dares and has the courage to cross the impassable circle of flames.
58:39 That's how the Valkyrie ends. I remind you, I pointed this out at the time, that it's not a cataclysmic ending like so many opera endings, including in Wagner, with the curtain falling abruptly. No, it's a soothing ending. He puts her to sleep, we hear the theme of eternal sleep, which is the extinguishing of all drives. There, the music says exactly what Freud says, but to such a degree — a chromatic slide.
59:13 That's what chromaticism is, the smallest intervals chained together harmonically. And I did it quickly there, it's much slower, it slides toward a bottom that never arrives. Well, at some point we must have reached the bottom because we hear another sleep theme. Much more peaceful, not as deathly as the eternal sleep called the Valkyrie's sleep — a healthy, biological sleep, like this, a chest rising and falling at the rhythm of sleep and rest.
Mime and the sword the dwarf cannot forge 59:56 And so the curtain falls slowly — that's the instruction given by the author, by the composer, the curtain falls very slowly, while the flames crackle and Wotan remains gazing at the being who was dearest to him in the world, and so they come to be separated. We're going to get to Siegfried. Siegfried was taken in by someone you know, the one who had made the helmet, you know, Mime, Alberich's brother — a hostile brother, of course — whom Alberich whipped terrifyingly in the Rhinegold, so that he wouldn't steal the helmet from him.
1:00:39 which allows you to take on any appearance — remember this well, for later, for the Twilight of the Gods. The helmet that either makes you invisible, or turns me into a mosquito, an elephant, whatever I want. Mime has become a freelancer, as we'd say today. He escaped from Nibelheim, from his brother's domination, he set up on his own in the forest, he lives in fear. That's why he's deep in the forest where there's no one. He has a great plan, to recover the treasure, since he's not far from the dragon's lair. But of course he doesn't have the strength. Now, he found little Siegfried, just like that, and he senses that he will be a great hero.
1:01:27 He is waiting for Siegfried to become an adult so as to kill the dragon through him. The gold will have no guardian left, and the dwarf will just have to pour Siegfried a poisoned drink, since he'll surely be tired after such a feat. That's his plan. And the cunning smith Mime the dwarf will just have to recover the ring. The gold and the ring. But for that, he needs the sword.
1:01:58 Now the sword, remember, is shattered into a thousand pieces. But Mime has gathered up — he's the good smith — he has gathered up all the pieces. There's a brilliant idea in Chéreau's staging, the Chéreau-Boulez production, where he shows him the pieces wrapped in scraps of newspaper. And for years he has been trying to forge, forge, forge. The sword — he can't manage it, and there's a whole symbolism there, I told you earlier that swords are an obvious phallic symbol, but it's strength, virility, power, everyone agrees on that, on that symbolic axis.
1:02:33 Kings have scepters, gods are given bell towers, minarets — the god of transcendence in any case. In Africa, traditional chiefs all have a chief's staff. One must find the symbol congruent with mastery. He can't manage to forge the sword, a sign of impotence, both in the erotic and the technical sense.
1:03:07 So, since he is pressed with questions by Siegfried, who has been raised like a wild child in the forest, who has never seen any other being than this fellow, who passes himself off as his father. And now, I'm in Siegfried, in the approach to the forest scene you saw, with the murmurs and the birds, Siegfried says, you are not my father. I've seen that the fawn resembles the doe, the young boar resembles the wild boar. I looked at myself one day in the river. I saw that I didn't resemble you. And pressed like this by the threatening and boiling-tempered Siegfried, as boiling as Achilles. Finally the dwarf, under the threat, ends up admitting to him that he isn't really his father, that he found him wailing as a baby — he tells the truth.
The forest murmurs, a noon duet 1:04:02 Siegfried learns that his mother is dead, and so he finds himself alone in the forest, and it's at that moment that, commissioned by the dwarf, Siegfried learns that his mission is to kill the dragon, but before that there is this passage which — I'll come back to it, I began with the interlude — we take a break from all these dreadful stories, and Siegfried, for the first time and away from the smith's lair, has just learned that he has a different lineage than the one they had tried to convince him of until now — true parents, false parents, these are very important complexes within families, I'll come back to that for the last part.
1:04:57 And so he relaxes. The forest relaxes too, murmuring from all sides. It's exactly the opposite of Tristan. In Tristan there is the most beautiful of love duets, the most nocturnal, the most paroxysmal, that anyone has ever dared to conceive, let alone realize. And here, it's not a midnight duet, it's a midday duet in solar ecstasy. You saw the rays in the opening image, like the sun filtering through and penetrating the depths of the dunkle Wald, the dark forest.
1:05:33 On this note of freshness, of youth, and at the same time, musically, Siegfried's rhythm is much more bouncing than the other parts of the tetralogy. It is often said, I've already told you, that if the Ring were an immense symphony, Siegfried would be the scherzo — scherzare, to joke, in Italian. This is a bit the intermezzo part. A bit of a diversion, an interlude, of the kind you insert in a sonata form, in a concerto, a symphony, before bringing on the grand finale. That's Siegfried, I'll come back to it — a bit of an intermezzo, outside of time. Yes, I seem, every time I talk to you about it, to regret that there is a sequel — we should just stay here, shouldn't we?
1:06:15 It would be nice to stay at the bird act. So, let's be precise now. Let's stay always with the signifier. He hears, not a voice, he hears the birds just like you and me. There's no language, it's chirping, but there are no words. He's drawn to the bird and immediately says, "Is he talking to me about my mother?" You see? Because the dwarf told him she died giving birth to him. He's a bit sad, he says, "Men's mothers die giving birth to their children. If that's the rule, it would really be sad." And at that moment, with his sorrow, he almost falls asleep, he dozes off because the morning heat is starting to rise. He falls asleep at the foot of an enormous linden tree, you see?
1:07:07 It's at that moment that he's woken by the rustling of the forest. As if it were a bit like a reverie, you see? Is he awake or is it really happening? In any case, he's woken by the birds chirping all around, one of which stands out. That's the bird theme, well, its short form. That's the original key of E major.
1:07:44 You see, a question theme and an answer theme. Answer. All of that is the theme, the thematic field of the bird. When there's a shorthand version, a fleeting allusion, a leitmotif. There. So he hears the birds and thinks they're talking about his mother, but he's not sure. He wants to imitate it.
The dragon, the language of the birds, and the broken spear 1:08:18 It's almost a comic passage, which is rare in the tetralogy. He cuts a reed with his sword, tries it, makes a terrible squawk, says to himself, "I'm an idiot, my poor bird, I don't have your talent." And he takes out his horn that he carries on his chest — there he's in his element — he blows the horn, makes his fanfare, and of course that draws the dragon out of its lair, the fight begins — I'll go quickly — he pierces the dragon, and as it dies, in a recapitulating scene, the dragon tells him also what he's doing, he's completely unaware of all the stakes going on behind his back.
1:08:52 He says he is not at all conscious of it. I am dying, but because of a great vengeance between the world above and the world below. And this vengeance is being wrought upon you, for you have the ring. But tell me your name, hero with the clear eyes. He barely has time to say, Siegfried, you are — and he says to the dragon, you are valiant in death. And the dragon says Siegfried and falls lifeless. And Siegfried finds himself alone.
1:09:22 For once he had someone — the bird of course disappeared as soon as the dragon appeared, there's a silence in the forest, the dragon is dead, it's noon, he's hot, there's a moment of discouragement and he says: the only sympathetic being I've seen in this whole story is the bird. If only it could come flitting back, I don't know. And then he goes into the cave, sees the treasure, has no awareness of the importance of these things. He picks up a large topaz, whatever's at hand, not aware that it grants power over the world.
1:09:55 But when he pushes the dragon's corpse, his hand comes into contact with the dragon's blood, the blood burns him. And coming out of the cave — you see this alternation of inside, outside, of shadow and light — coming out of the cave and finding the luminous forest again, suddenly we hear the bird theme, but this time it's no longer a flute, an oboe, or a clarinet, it's a soprano voice. Listen to that, these are marvelous passages, this is the second act of Siegfried, the intermediary act, the Zwischenspiel, the great interlude.
1:10:29 I'm going to ask Philippe what time it is, since I've been talking so much about being outside of time. All right. So I'm nearing the end of my talk. I'll ask right away if there are any questions before... Well, so I can add this: he understands the language of the birds because of the dragon's blood. We'll come back to this later when we sum up — remember, we're in the process of showing that there can be a rigor, that there can be a rigor in the sciences of history, in the cultural sciences, just as there is in the natural sciences.
1:11:15 So, answers. There are strange lines of descent. I recall in passing, a small step back, that the Valkyries, in Germanic legend, originally, are birds, they are swans — exactly, with a Y of course — they are swans who from time to time leave their wings on the riverbank to go bathe, being both creatures of earth and of water, a bit like the figures.
1:11:50 And afterward, like swans, they fly — they came to represent the Valkyries who fly through the air, the ride, the Valkyries who ride through the clouds to go gather up the bodies of warriors valiantly killed in battle — I won't go back over that. So he understands, and what does the bird tell him? The bird tells him first that he must beware of Mime, because Siegfried doesn't know that Mime is preparing a poison to make him drink after his fight, supposedly, since he'll have gotten him to drink it.
1:12:20 You need to refresh yourself in order to recover the gold. Beware of Mime, firstly. Secondly, he says, Siegfried has killed the dragon. Siegfried is the master of the ring. So now I can tell him that I know the most beautiful of women. Let me translate live: she sleeps on a rock surrounded by flames. Only the one who can cross the flames will possess Brünnhilde.
1:13:04 So Siegfried is all excited, he's a hot-blooded young man, isn't he? The first time he hears talk of a woman, a woman sleeping on a rock surrounded by flames. He says, how do I cross the flames? And the bird tells him, only the one who has never known fear can cross the flames. And that's a bit the end of the act — Siegfried tells him, but the fool who has never known fear, that's me, bird. And the bird leads him, the bird flits ahead of him, and the curtain falls amid a kind of solar apogee of gaiety and enthusiasm from Siegfried. He must set off — end of the second act — to conquer the maiden sleeping on the rock. The maiden who saw him born, remember, who snatched him from oblivion, and who was able to shield his mother from her husband's vengeance, even though she couldn't stop her from dying in childbirth.
1:14:06 So, while Siegfried is on his way, we find ourselves, quite naturally, in the third act, at the foot of the Valkyrie's rock, except that this time Wotan is standing guard. A second dialogue between Wotan and Erda, the earth, you remember, at the end of the Rhinegold — the goddess, the prophetess, his former lover with whom he fathered the Valkyries — and he is more and more worried, Wotan, about how all this is going to turn out. And she — she's in a sleep, the earth is dozing. She says, stop, you're contradicting yourself, you make treaties, you break your oaths.
1:14:42 Go ask such-and-such a deity this or that, and finally, she says, go ask the Valkyrie. Wotan says, no, she disobeyed me. You see, there's a great dialogue at the end of which she sinks back underground, without telling him anything very precise. And Wotan decides to bequeath the whole inheritance of the world to the Wälsung, to the young man, to Siegfried, who inherits power over the world, you see. Hardly...
1:15:12 He has barely pronounced this kind of legacy, giving up all his power to entrust it to young Siegfried, when Siegfried appears, guided by the enthusiastic bird, surprised to find someone on his path. He speaks to him as to someone he's asking for directions: do you know the way that leads to Brünnhilde? Who told you about her? The one who is going to heal — sleeping on the rock. It's the bird. Birds, they chatter, they tease him. Yes, he's unaware. Wotan, at the very moment he entrusts Siegfried with the inheritance of the world — yes, but not his daughter. At the moment Siegfried arrives to take possession of the Valkyrie again, Wotan opposes it.
1:15:57 You know, birds — schwatzen, as they say in German, they chatter away. You shouldn't believe everything they say. Birds — Siegfried, it takes so little to make him boil over, I'll spare you the details and the transition — flies into a rage, draws his sword and shatters Wotan's spear to pieces. Wotan's spear, which had once shattered the sword that Siegfried now holds in his hands and which he has reforged, reconstituted. He wasn't dealing with the dwarf this time. And now this same sword pulverizes the spear on which the gods' pacts are inscribed.
1:16:34 And Wotan will now be nothing but a wanderer, watching everything that happens and unable to intervene anymore. And he says, if he passes, I cannot hold him back. And Siegfried crosses the flames, and there, the opera Siegfried ends with the most solar love duet ever seen — about which Nietzsche, who was already in full rupture with Wagner at that point, says, I quote, "I admit that in this scene, the sphere of storms and of the sublime is itself surpassed." There is a kind of hymn to light and to the sun regained, because the Valkyrie opens her eyes after a thousand-year sleep, and recognizes that the one who has come to wake her is the most valiant of heroes.
Götterdämmerung: the Norns and Hagen's scheme 1:17:19 That's where I wanted to bring you, to this recapitulating scene. And the piece that was programmed for tonight, a year in the planning, is an excerpt from the Twilight of the Gods — that's what comes next. And in what follows, you already know part of it. There's a prologue in the Twilight of the Gods, the scene of the Norns, which we saw briefly once, the three women who spin the cable of destinies. And remember that the cable breaks because Siegfried's action, human freedom, comes to thwart the predictability of events, mechanical determination. After this prologue, there's an extraordinary recapitulating scene, and I'll stop there for today.
1:18:09 It's the one between Alberich and his son, for Alberich has meanwhile managed to force himself on a woman with the power of the gold, and has fathered a son of darkness, Hagen, who is the advisor — here we're among men, in the kingdoms — the advisor to Gunther, king of the first kingdom we see in the tetralogy, the Burgundian kingdom roughly speaking, said to reign at Worms on the Rhine.
1:18:40 And I'm going to make a little historical aside — scholars say that Wagner's Nibelung saga drew on two major sources of inspiration: the Scandinavian myths, which is what I've just been telling you — the gold, love, the twilight of the gods, Ragnarök as it's called in Norwegian, the end of the gods — but also the legend, which is different, the Nibelungenlied, the Song of the Nibelungs, written around the 12th century, roughly, by monks. The manuscript is piously preserved at the monastery of Saint Gall, and some say that the monks may have wanted, through the character of Hagen — that's why I'm making this little aside — to warn sovereigns, lords, the feudal order, against bad advisors, bad consultants.
1:19:29 That's not out of date, bad consultants. There, so I've given a piece of advice, it's a swindler's trick. And like the sophists, you know, any argument is good as long as it convinces the opponent, like a dishonest lawyer. What matters isn't whether my client is guilty or innocent, it's that the jury believes he's innocent.
1:20:02 So then, Hagen was fathered by Alberich, and there's a dialogue. Hagen is there in front of Gunther's palace, and we come into contact with them right from the start of the Twilight of the Gods. Who is Gunther? He's the king, the first kingdom that appears in this story, powerless. The word isn't said, but it's obvious. When he wants to show off, he says to his advisor Hagen, who is his half-brother — there are always kinship ties — his half-brother, a bastard. He says to him, so, am I not a prestigious king of the Gibichungs? The other says, yes, yes, it's majestic and all, but you have no wife.
1:20:53 Gutrune, literally the good runes, Gutrune, the good sacred writings. And your sister Gutrune has no man. For a ruling family, that looks a bit cheap. Speak quickly, right? So the other is alarmed, desperate, and says when you tell me that, you demoralize me. He says because there's a solution. There is a woman worthy of a sovereign like you.
1:21:23 She is on a rock surrounded by flames, but he won't have the strength to cross those flames, only a chosen being, a Wälsung, Siegfried, the one who killed the dragon. And that's how fate links together, and Hagen schemes — let me sum up the whole tetralogy for you up to the end — a dark plot: he says, we'll get Siegfried, who's about to arrive, to drink something. He's been travelling since he spent his first night of love with Brünnhilde on the rock. Like all men, after love, he likes to get away a bit, to travel. He's on his boat, on the Rhine, he'll soon arrive at your dock, your kingdom. We'll make him drink a potion. Remember the helmet that will make him invisible. He has it, doesn't he? So with that helmet, first we'll make him drink a drink.
1:22:21 The potion where he will forget he's in love with Brünnhilde, the Valkyrie. And we'll make a pact with you, he'll make a pact of friendship. And you'll tell him, I would love to win the Valkyrie, but she's unattainable. In his generosity, Siegfried will offer her to you. And with the helmet, he'll take on your appearance and go get the Valkyrie. And we'll give him Gutrune. A double marriage.
Announcements and Wagner's true or false fathers 1:22:52 So there's this betrayal, I'll tell you the rest next time, this betrayal that's being plotted in the last act of the tetralogy, Twilight of the Gods. I wanted to be more narrative this time so as not to keep making fleeting allusions to isolated scenes each time. But there are no comments, Philippe.
1:23:22 Thank you very much. We'll meet again next time for the continuation and end of the Ring's action. Afterward we'll need to draw up the symbolic balance sheet. We've only just skimmed the surface. But it won't be next week, since I've had excellent advice from all sides, including from Philippe — I greet him in passing and thank him — who joined us here among the 25, I mustn't overdo it either. We'll meet every two weeks rather than once a week.
1:23:56 And I'll take the opportunity to tell those who are loyal followers of the other series I do with Aymeric Monville, and which I know some of you are very attached to, I'm thinking of Musicosophie — I greet Inès in Brussels in passing, who would like me to play the piano during the session, wouldn't she? I can't impose that on you, but I thank them for suggesting it — likewise for the Musicosophie interviews, it will no longer be twice a week but once a week. So I'll have one per week of Musicosophie and one every two weeks for the continuation of the feasibility of the sciences of history.
1:24:36 I also thank you for all the encouragement I received from those who heard I'd had a slight health scare, and so I'm very touched by their support, or simply by those who worried when it was announced that the session was cancelled and thought something serious had happened — so let me reassure you, that's not the case. So I'll finish anyway on this curious coincidence. I left you hanging just as I was about to bring in the scene of the forest birds' interlude. That is to say, I suspended — because of the illness and the fainting spell — I suspended the narration of the Ring at the very point where Wagner suspended the Ring for twelve years to work on Tristan.
1:25:21 And then, because we should end on a happier note, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg — two scores I recommend to you. You can find all this either in a staged version — there's a beautiful version of Tristan streaming on YouTube conducted by Daniel Barenboim, a great conductor of Jewish origin, and it's true that Wagner is banned because of his virulently antisemitic ideas. Let me open a small parenthesis here, which will perhaps become an appendix to my conclusion. The matter — we won't settle it today — the matter of Wagner's obsessive antisemitism.
1:26:04 The whole German bourgeoisie, broadly speaking, was antisemitic at the time, but he was more combative about it, though not always. And I want to come back to real parents, false parents, Siegfried. As if it were something working within Wagner, that he conceived that for his character. Because he never knew his father, who was a police official in Leipzig, and he was raised by a Jew — not by Geyer, wait, remember this: Geier means vulture in German. Adler means eagle, Adler. And vulture, Geier, is the vulture.
1:26:38 He was raised — his mother remarried this Geyer, who was a charming fellow, whom Richard adored before he became antisemitic; he adored his Jewish stepfather, who was a man of the theatre. So the young Wagner grew up — he was never a child prodigy like most great composers, you see, Mozart is the exception, the rule is the child prodigy. And to truly master an instrument, you have to start very young, eight hours a day for years.
1:27:08 Well. And yes, these aren't pieces of music where there's just one and a half chords over fifty hours. Let me calm down. And so Wagner hesitated for a long time between a career as a playwright, composer, conductor — Rachmaninoff too, yes, Rachmaninoff hesitated, the Russian composer, between a career as a composer or as a virtuoso pianist — the Russians are the cream of piano or violin virtuosity, by the way — and between a career as a virtuoso, a career as a conductor, a career as a composer.
1:27:44 And so, and... And his stepfather Geyer was very fond of Richard. Some say it was a way of admitting his paternity, because there's a strong chance — it's not established, it's not certain — that Wagner was Geyer's natural son. So he, a virulent antisemite — I'll come back to it right away, I'll come back to it right away — would be the son. And Nietzsche, who knew all these family stories well, having been close to the Wagner family, says somewhere, in this treacherous allusion — I think I gave you the words in German — when one is not capable of being an Adler, one can always try to be a Geier: when one cannot be an eagle, he says of Wagner, one can always try to be a vulture — an allusion also to the vulture's beak and to the imagery of the Jew in Germany.
Wagner's antisemitism and Wiesenthal's defense 1:28:36 So, Wagner's antisemitism — I won't say much for now, except two very important things. He became a virulent antisemite in Paris, whereas he had been steeped in the average antisemitism of the German bourgeoisie. In German cities there were ghettos; they were emptied of their substance in the atrocious way we know. But there were — you see, even in Strasbourg, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire at the time — there's still the Judengasse, the street of the Jews.
1:29:11 And so there was a ghetto in every German city, which was a bit like an apartheid situation. And so it was in Paris — because he wanted to break through as the great composer of the age on the whole opera scene. If you're not performed at the Paris Opera, you've missed your shot. It's like the Rolex watch. Proof of this is that the Opera is on the Boulevard des Italiens. It's called that because four-fifths of the operas performed there had Italian composers, to the point that the boulevard became the Boulevard des Italiens.
1:29:45 Going to the Italiens, going to the Opera — people said 'going to the Italiens' at the beginning of the nineteenth century. So Wagner wants to triumph in Paris. Just as Verdi had Don Carlos performed in Paris, as he wrote La Traviata, which is an adaptation of Dumas's play, La Dame aux Camélias, you see, from the novel. Now, in Paris, the man who made the rain and the sunshine in showbiz was the Jew Meyerbeer, who composed for the Grand Opera.
1:30:17 His success — Proust often talks about Les Huguenots, for instance — it's the tradition of the great historical opera, a huge machine in five interminable acts, on historical rather than mythical subjects. But anyway, he must have been irritated by Wagner's rather talkative, theorizing side, and Wagner became a virulent antisemite out of resentment, in the least noble sense.
1:30:48 He was furious with this Jew Meyerbeer who had dared block his career. So it was in Paris that he became antisemitic and anti-French. Paris became for him the capital of fashion. He even wrote a study on Beethoven, you know, the Ode to Joy. Deine Zauber binden wieder, was die Mode streng geteilt.
1:31:19 Beethoven recalls, in his text — Schiller, the text he used for the Ode to Joy — Schiller says, speaking to Joy, 'your magic reunites what fashion has sternly divided.' Fashion, the bling-bling. Well, for Wagner, that wasn't entirely wrong, except that I myself have nothing against it. Lightness, grace, and surface bling-bling — there I'm closer to Nietzsche than to Wagner. Paris undeniably remains the capital.
1:31:52 In German they say 'happy as God in France.' They don't say 'happy as God in paradise.' He's as happy as God in France. The bigoted cliché — he takes the nativity scene. So that was my first point. He became antisemitic following his failure, which excuses nothing. But the greatest defense of Wagner today comes from a Jew who is the least suspect politically, since it's none other than Mr. Wiesenthal, the well-known Nazi hunter.
1:32:27 Search 'Wiesenthal Wagner' on any search engine and you'll come across this extraordinary text where he says, alongside unspeakable statements, Wagner has immense generosity and his genius goes far beyond that. Now, to be a bit more precise, he has very few far-right themes — he has this one, nationalism and antisemitism, but not all the others. Nietzsche, on the other hand, has almost all the Nazi themes — eugenics, slavery — but he does not have antisemitism.
1:33:07 And be careful, my story is a bit complicated, but it's true, verified — really verified, don't take my word for it. Nietzsche was antisemitic like everyone else, like all Germans, and he wrote in '72 the letter on tragedy, as it's called, a long letter to Cosima, to Madame Wagner, at the time when he used to visit them, when he would wait for the weekend to go to Wagner's, when he was a professor in Basel and Wagner was a refugee in Switzerland, not far away, in Lucerne, on the shore of the most beautiful lake in Switzerland. And so Nietzsche writes a letter depicting all the misfortunes of Germany, and he ends, of course, like every reactionary, by blaming the Jewish press.
1:33:51 I say this because people tell you Wagner is the antisemite and Nietzsche, on the contrary, was philo-Semitic. Yes, the late Nietzsche becomes philo-Semitic, to the point of saying, in Beyond Good and Evil — philo-Semitic to a certain degree — he actually goes so far, which is scandalous, as to say German blood should be 'sullied.' He goes very far and says pure-blooded Prussians should be mated with Jewish mares, that it would give German blood a bit of a boost. Yes, but that's late. He became philo-Semitic once he broke with Wagner.
The "Song of the Grave" from Zarathustra 1:34:22 On the other hand, in order to contradict Wagner and to distance himself from everything hanging around Wagner for dubious reasons, he holds Bayreuth much more against him than Wagner himself. And I'll finish there — this time it's my real closing point. You have the clarification of the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship magnificently expressed symbolically in Zarathustra. It's an immense poem, not in a prophetic, biblical tone, etc. It's anti-Christian on Nietzsche's part, isn't it — the Christians to the very marrow, culturally.
1:34:55 So in Zarathustra, in the second part, at the end of the second part, there's a song called 'The Tomb Song,' or 'The Song of the Tomb,' depending on the translation, in which the narrator Zarathustra says, 'Over there on that island are the tombs of my youth.' A magnificent image to say everything I believed in, the ideals I've lost, as everyone does — one no longer believes in Father Christmas, for example. So over there are the tombs of my youth.
1:35:26 And the rhythm — a bit like a prophetic litany — the rhythm of this chapter is: one day I wanted to be generous, to come to the aid of the unfortunate, but you, my enemies, sowed ulcers, sufferings, beneath my feet, you disgusted me with generosity. Each time he was disappointed, he had to abandon his dearest ideals. He says, 'that is what has made me suffer most in my life.' And one day, in this elimination, we get to Wagner — one day, without naming him, he says, 'I wanted to dance as no being has ever danced.'
1:36:05 You know that Nietzsche always contrasts the lightness of Dionysus, the dancer, with the spirit of gravity that marks the Germans, romanticism, Christianity, and, well, democracy — for him all that is the same thing. But you need only check. And slave morality. And so, 'I wanted to dance as no being had ever danced.' To dance you need music — that's me adding a voice-over to help understand what follows — you need a musician. And here Nietzsche takes up the words again: 'but you bribed my favorite singer.'
1:36:38 'And he played on his horn' — and here we find Wagner again, the horn is the Wagnerian instrument, for example it's Siegfried's horn. 'And he played on his horn a mournful air.' And indeed, that's why I wanted this contrast today. That's why I'm ending on this. How can one go from Siegfried — bounding youth, enthusiasm, liberation, the birds, the forest, the warmth of midday, the ascent toward the maiden sleeping on the rock, the fabulous love duet with the most glorious of women — and end up with the somber twilight of the gods?
1:37:21 From Dionysus to Schopenhauer. How did the happiest of works become the most tragic? There's a mystery there, but 'you bribed my favorite singer, and on his horn he played a mournful air.' It's not over. Here is the fall of this passage: 'Yet be blessed, you, the most innocent,' as if he were forgiving Wagner from a distance. He had written unspeakable things about Wagner, sometimes deserved, because the man had off-putting sides too.
1:37:55 'But you bribed my favorite singer, he played on his horn a mournful air. Yet rest in peace, be blessed, you the most innocent.' So the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner is a bit more complicated than what you hear here and there from rather hasty people who don't know much about music. I'll see you next time for this story, which is truly worth a closer look, both for the eye and for the ear. Thank you so much for being here, and thanks to life.
