About this Piece

Synposis:

In Valhalla, the home of the gods, the king, Wotan, instructs his Valkyrie daughter Brünnhilde to protect his son Siegmund in his duel with Hunding. Wotan’s wife Fricka, goddess of marriage, appears. She is appalled that Wotan has allowed Siegmund to run away with Hunding’s wife (and his own twin sister), Sieglinde. She demands that Wotan let Hunding win and defend the sanctity of marriage. This scuttles Wotan’s plan to employ Siegmund in his quest to win back the all-powerful ring, which is now in the hands of the giant-turned-dragon Fafner. Wotan realizes that Fricka has trapped him: If he breaks the oath of marriage, he undermines the laws that give the gods their authority. He succumbs to Fricka’s insistence. Brünnhilde, who is the manifestation of Wotan’s will, returns to the shock that Wotan’s instructions for the imminent duel between Siegmund and Hunding have reversed. 

Siegmund, watching over Sieglinde as she sleeps, is visited by a vision of Brünnhilde, who warns him of his death. Unwavering, he threatens to kill both himself and Sieglinde rather than die by Hunding’s sword. Brünnhilde is moved by his resoluteness and vows to protect him in the duel, thereby betraying her father. Siegmund leaves Sieglinde as Hunding approaches. In the duel, Siegmund takes the advantage with Brünnhilde’s help, but Wotan arrives and shatters Siegmund’s sword, allowing Hunding to deliver the coup de grâce. Brünnhilde quickly collects the broken pieces of the sword along with Sieglinde and escapes. Wotan dismissively kills Hunding and then sets off to punish his renegade daughter.

Program note:

Wagner was inspired by a wide array of Norse mythology in building his pantheon of gods, demigods, and other rare specimens in his Ring Cycle, and they arrive from moment one in Act II of Die Walküre.

We first meet Wotan, king of the gods, projecting an ultimate authority. He doesn’t just control the weather so much as he is the weather. He can teleport across realms and be in multiple places at once. For example, while ruling from Valhalla, Wotan also roamed the mortal world with his son Siegmund as Wälse. But even he is confined by laws and agreements, which are inscribed into and represented by his spear. Perhaps the biggest clue that he is not omnipotent is his hunger for more power. This was satisfied temporarily when he obtained the ring made from the Rhine gold, which he continues to covet.

Next to arrive, the titular Valkyrie Brünnhilde defies gravity on her airborne horse while singing the incisive “Hojotoho!” She and her father Wotan don’t just share the same thought; they are of the same thoughts, and she carries out his will innately. As the eldest of the Valkyries, daughters of Wotan and the earth goddess Erda, Brünnhilde is a demigod with the ability to choose who lives and dies and transcend realms to carry the dead to Valhalla.

Traveling in a ram-drawn chariot, Wotan’s wife Fricka enters from time and places unknown. She is the goddess of marriage and takes her place among a well-rounded ecosystem of gods: Loge controls fire, Donner thunder, Froh fertility, and Freia grows youth-sustaining golden apples.

The saga’s mythological roots allow audiences to forgive any lack of plausibility. But underneath the magic, they are undeniably human figures: fathers, wives, daughters, mistresses, and in-laws—often paying for their own sins, or those of their ancestors, and longing for redemption. That process starts with Fricka. Beyond her moral outrage at the incestuous couple, she is emotionally wounded by her husband’s insensitivity and small-mindedness. The upshot: Siegmund can no longer be defended by Wotan and Hunding must win the deathly match. This reversal of Wotan’s plans is more than a shock; it’s a crisis. Wotan realizes he has recklessly risked everything—family, position, power—and foresees the endgame, the gods withering away. The tortured, self-imprisoned Wotan is cast in the mold of Agamemnon, the most famous patriarch of The Iliad, as brilliantly examined in Katherine R. Syer’s Wagner’s Visions (University of Rochester Press, 2014). Just as Agamemnon chooses to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to settle the Trojan War, Wotan must sacrifice Siegmund and later Brünnhilde to uphold what Syer describes as his “blurred status as a god”—and one on borrowed time. 

During his extended Act II monologue, the music is spare, which is how Wagner frequently conveys important information. On an unconscious level, Wagner communicates in music that provides thinking time—a few seconds between sung lines that say which way Wotan is spiraling. The father’s crisis begets the daughter’s dilemma: Brünnhilde knows what Wotan wants but is ordered to do the opposite. Her resolve to defend Hunding against Siegmund is cemented into place when she appears to the latter, arriving quietly and slowly building to say, “Siegmund! Look at me!” Those who see her are as good as dead. (The 20th-century composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who lived through Stalin’s purges with a suitcase ready to go, quoted this scene repeatedly, most famously in his Symphony No. 15, as an announcement of death.)  

During this vision, Brünnhilde addresses Siegmund in informal German—as a friend. When told that Sieglinde can’t accompany him to Valhalla, he refuses to die. In the long gaps between vocal lines, the orchestra reads Siegmund’s thoughts with brooding basses and quiet timpani suggesting his hourglass is finished. Deeply moved, Brünnhilde vows to protect Siegmund. When Wotan intervenes, Siegmund falls in defeat, though Sieglinde is spirited away by Brünnhilde on her flying horse, Grane. 

What just happened here? Wagner biographer Geoffrey Skelton encapsulated this change with one word: compassion. The upper classes of this world have been too busy consolidating and maintaining their power to truly empathize within a non-transactional relationship. Brünnhilde opens the door to working on behalf of a greater good. One key to Wagner’s evolution is the work of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), whose theories that the world is not rational along with beliefs in the redemptive qualities of love and art gave Wagner’s music the deep worldview and extra dimensions heard in Die Walküre. 

Brünnhilde is anything but maternal. She’s a creature of action, not reflection. But in exercising her agency decisively and independently with humanitarian values only recently acquired, she finds an undeniable gender kinship with Sieglinde. Her action could have come only from an inner sea change prompted by witnessing the depth of Siegmund’s devotion to Sieglinde. More than anything, Die Walküre is about inner discovery. And the greatest one of all is yet to come in Act III.

—David Patrick Stearns

Read about the other acts of Die Walküre:

Die Walküre Act I

Die Walküre Act III