Ed. Note: The author has discussed other aspects of Wagner’s Siegfried in The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) and The Ring of Truth and Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); see also Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes (New York: Macmillan, 1988).  ​

On November 3, Lyric Opera of Chicago presented the first of several performances of Richard Wagner’s Siegfried, the third part of his Der Ring des Nibelungen. As the libretto is based upon Norse mythology, and draws upon several medieval German revisions of the myth, the opera is usually staged in a vaguely “medieval” and “mythological” manner, everyone in tights and helmets or long trains and fancy headdresses, the set awash in castles and flying things. But from time to time, someone decides to make it all more “relevant” and “contemporary” by staging it in modern times, with everyone in Armani suits and driving around in Porsches—or, more to the point, in jackboots and swastikas.

The swastika path was taken by Barrie Kosky’s new production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Bayreuth this past August. Now, Meistersinger has a nationalist German agenda that has often proved problematic; it ends with an aria in which the protagonist, Hans Sachs, warns Nuremberg against foreign influences that might pollute its pure German culture, and the villain evokes unmistakably anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Nazis appreciated these qualities; in 1938, the order to destroy the synagogue in Nuremberg—right on Hans Sachs Platz—was given with words from the libretto: “Fanget an!” (“Begin!”). Kosky framed the new Bayreuth production by making Wagner and his circle double for the characters in the opera: Wagner is Hans Sachs, and the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi, whom Wagner had humiliated, is the (quasi-Jewish) villain, who sets off a riot at the end of the second act—a riot that here becomes a chilling pogrom. The final aria, sung by Wagner/Hans Sachs, is set simultaneously in medieval Nuremberg and in the twentieth-century Nuremberg courtroom in which Nazi war criminals were tried.

By making explicit their awareness of the problematic nature of the original text, the producers hope to distance themselves from its politics. But it is not necessary to go to such lengths. Great operas are deeply mythic, and to anyone who has studied myths, the double reading of the past and present is always built into the experience of a mythic text. Long ago, Mircea Eliade pointed out that the things that happen now, in mythic texts and rituals, are simultaneously happening then, in illo tempore. Whenever, therefore, we see and hear Wagner’s Siegfried, we read it simultaneously as a tale about a man who lived long ago and far away and encountered things that are not part of our world (like elixirs of forgetfulness), and about matters that we still care deeply about and cannot fully fathom—like death, fear, envy, fathers and sons and daughters, destructive sexual passion.

People have also raised concerns about antisemitism in Wagner’s Siegfried, both in the character of the dwarf Mime and in the emphasis on the racial disparity between Mime and his putative son, Siegfried. But for me, and for the #MeToo era, that is not the burning issue; the burning issue is the whitewashing of a rapist. Wagner’s is merely one of the latest in a series of rewritings of the tale of Siegfried. In one of the oldest sources of the story, the thirteenth-century Norse Thidrek Saga, Siegfried is a cad, who woos Brünnhilde but throws her over when he finds a woman with more money and better political connections, then helps his new friend Gunther to marry Brünnhilde (and persuades her to go through with it), and after that rapes her, disguised as Gunther. As Siegfried became a Germanic cultural hero, his caddishness became a problem, and other variants (such as the Norse Völsunga Saga and the Austrian Nibelungenlied) dragged in a stock folk theme, the elixir of forgetfulness, to cloud Siegfried’s moral responsibility: Siegfried was bewitched so that he forgot that he loved Brünnhilde; it wasn’t his fault at all that he two-timed her. Some texts also denied the rape, insisting that Siegfried slept chastely beside Brünnhilde, placing his sword between them. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out long ago that the reason myths keep repeating the same stories, with variants, over and over, is because they pose problems that cannot be solved. This is surely true of the tale of Siegfried and Brünnhilde.

Wagner’s Ring, which utilizes both the elixir of forgetfulness and the sword in the bed, is nevertheless caught up in Siegfried’s quandary on the levels of both text and hypertext: Siegfried cannot entirely repress his sexual past (his mistreatment of Brünnhilde) nor can Wagner repress Siegfried’s textual past (the Norse and German texts that tell of that mistreatment). The two repressions converge and emerge in the fourth opera, Götterdämerung (“Twilight of the Gods”), when the repressed historical tradition returns to stain the hoped-for moral purity of the noble German hero: a ring proves to Brünnhilde that Siegfried betrayed her and eventually awakens Siegfried’s memory, too. Rings that made people forget and/or remember were, like magic potions, a common ancient theme, but this ring is also the cursed Ring of the Nibelung, which finally triggers the apocalyptic fire that destroys the world.

We might hazard a kind of historical development here: in early variants, Siegfried simply brazens it out, denying and rejecting the woman he has seduced, but later tellings exculpate him by attributing his behavior to a convenient attack of amnesia: plead temporary insanity and you can get away with murder. Or we may be witnessing in these sequential texts not so much the rehabilitation of a cad as the invention of caddishness. In the early texts, a man could treat a woman any way he liked, and people (i.e., other men) naturally approved. But slowly, over the course of centuries, standards changed, and Siegfried’s bad behavior had to be explained away. Where at first he simply abandons Brünnhilde without any justification, in the revised version he lies to society; social pressure makes him pretend to forget. And in the re-revised version he actually thinks that he forgets; now he is lying not to society but to himself. (Or, one might say, he is repressing his knowledge of his guilt.) At this point, the hero is caught between changing ethics, between old-fashioned patriarchal polygyny and a new romantic sympathy for the woman who is betrayed.

The move away from the cult of the cad may appear to indicate a growing concern for the feelings of women, a need to apologize for a man who breaks his promise; but it may also reflect increasing subjugation of women and concern for their chastity, which widens the gulf, the asymmetry, between the acceptable infidelity of a man and the unacceptable infidelity of a woman. This process is therefore not necessarily a sign of moral progress; it is just change—one form of oppression is exchanged for another. We may argue about which is worse: shameless harm or dissembling harm.

In contrast with the medieval sources of the legend, the figures in Wagner’s Siegfried behave very nobly indeed. But Siegfried still needs magic to transform him from a cad into a hero.

Image: "Siegfried und Brunnhilde," an oil painting by Charles Ernest Butler (1909)​

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Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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Sightings is edited by Joel Brown, a PhD student in Religions in America at the Divinity School. Sign up here to receive Sightings via email. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Divinity School News: If you're in Chicago on Friday, November 30th, please make plans to attend Candrarekha's Lament, a public lecture by David Shulman honoring the scholarship and teaching of Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, who will retire from the teaching faculty of the Divinity School at the end of the Winter Quarter. Free and open to the public. The lecture will begin promptly at 4:30 p.m. A reception will follow.