Previously on The Ring (Jamie Barton knew just the right way to deliver those words in an ominous television announcer’s voice): Sieglinde has just given birth to her son Siegfried; and Brünnhilde has instructed her to hide in the forest. There she is discovered by the Nibelung dwarf Mime. As she dies, she asks Mime to raise the child and to watch over the fragments of Siegmund’s sword, which was shattered during his fight with Hunding.
At the beginning of Siegfried, the third of the four operas in Richard Wagner’s cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen (the ring of the Nibelung), Siegfried has become a young man and more than a handful for Mime to manage. In Francesca Zambello’s San Francisco Opera (SFO) staging the two of them live in a trailer that one might have expected to see in Justified. Mime is busy forging a sword for Siegfried, who manages to destroy every sword given to him. When Siegfried appears on stage for the first time, he is joined by a bear. (The appropriate line here should have been, “He followed me home; can I keep him?”)
A favorite parlor game among musicologists (at least those that still have parlors) is to try to make a case that the entire Ring cycle is the ultimate four-movement symphony. I have yet to read a convincing argument for this case, but there is general agreement that Siegfried is the “scherzo” of the cycle. Mind you, the architecture of the opera has nothing to do with the traditional ternary form; but the comic connotations of a scherzo are unmistakable.
Siegfried (Daniel Brenna) discovers the sleeping Brünnhilde (Iréne Theorin) (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)
There is good reason to believe that Wagner intended the bear as a sight gag, just as he probably expected his audiences to be amused by the somewhat clueless swagger of the title character. For the most part, audiences tend to get that Siegfried is not as dead-serious as the other three Ring operas. However, in my experiences, the most audible laughter does not arise until the final act, when Siegfried encounters Brünnhilde sleeping on the rock where Wotan left her at the end of Die Walküre. Siegfried has never before seen a woman. He approaches the sleeping Valkyrie and rips off her breastplate. The first words he utters then are “Das ist kein Mann!!” (that is no man); and audiences react accordingly!
However many comic moments there may be, however, Siegfried is far from comedy. It is best viewed as a narrative of crossing paths. On the one hand we have the ascent of Siegfried from an abandoned baby to the prototypical hero rescuing a maiden in distress. At the same time, however, Wotan is on a steadily descending path, now spending all of his time on the earth disguised as a wanderer.
Siegfried was supposed to be part of his grand plan; but the path he follows during the first two operas of the cycle reveals itself as little more than “a series of unfortunate events.” Wotan is on the brink of abandoning any grand plans; but what breaks him is when Siegfried’s sword shatters his staff, which has served to document all treaties and agreements. As W. B Yeats put it, “anarchy is loosed upon the world;” and the world no longer has use for supernatural beings.
This is the last we shall see of Wotan, and it is time to credit bass-baritone Greer Grimsley with unfolding the complexity of Wotan’s character over the course of three operas. Wagner wrote his own libretto for the Ring operas, but the project began with a prose draft originally entitled Siegfried’s Tod (Siegfried’s Death) (the English translation was part of the full title). In the opera Siegfried Wotan’s descending path crosses Siegfried’s ascent; and, as a result, Siegfried is the one opera in the cycle that has a definitively happy ending, realized as a prolonged duet for Brünnhilde and Siegfried. Tenor Daniel Brenna (who made his SFO debut in performing this opera) could not have given a more convincing account of that ascent; and we shall have to wait until next weekend to see how he manages the next round of “unfortunate events.”
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