Die Walküre

An opera about people. When the Mariinsky Theatre decided, at the start of the twentieth century, to stage Russia’s first production of Richard Wagner’s tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, the theatre’s principal conductor Eduard N.pravn.k suggested they start with what he considered the most interesting of the operas, Die Walküre. This was an obvious choice for a man raised on Russian realist art and the Russian writers of the natural school. Die Walküre’s mythological story revolves around mortal characters, and, if we count the fate of the god Wotan, the three fates represented in the opera possess recognisably lifelike forms. Siegmund and Sieglinde enter into a conjugal union in defiance of custom and tradition, Wotan rejects his children, and Bruünnhilde rebels against her father’s will. Several age-old themes are embodied in these fates: the clash between man and woman, between father and child – and in both cases, Wagner presents these as dramas of love – while the rift between gods and heroes takes the form of a metaphysical confrontation. The eminent German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus thought of Die Walku?re as the story of Wotan: the god who does not want to remain a god, preferring liberty to the law, but the price he must pay is to become ‘free of soul’, as Wagner expressed it, and in his final scene he bids the earthly world farewell. Yet Die Walküre remains a lyrical story, a drama about humans; it comes as no surprise that the opera is named after the god’s self-sacrificing daughter, who is stripped of immortality. Not only the mortal characters but also the very spirit of the opera are summed up by Boris Pasternak: “It is man’s first settlement in those worlds discovered by Wagner for fantasies and mastodons”1. Perhaps the poet had in mind Das Rheingold as the prologue to the Ring.