At the risk of appearing to give credence to various imbecile popular analogies between gay marriage and other highly disanalogous couplings (“man on dog,” etc.) the argument between Wotan and Fricka in Die Walküre began to sound a touch familiar on Tuesday night. Fricka is outraged that Sieglinde has abandoned Hunding (whom she had been forced to marry after being abducted many years earlier) for her long-lost brother Siegmund. This, she says, makes a mockery of the sacred institution of marriage.
Wotan’s rejoinder: The couple is in love, which makes their union more sacred than the loveless one between Sieglinde and Hunding.
Fricka tries another line of attack: A coupling like this—brother and sister—is unheard of! When has such a thing ever happened? Wotan’s wry retort: Well, now, apparently—sometimes things may happen that haven’t before.
Ultimately, of course, we get the dramatic doomsday prediction: If this insult to traditional marriage is allowed to stand, the gods are doomed:
Von Menschen verlacht,
verlustig der Macht,
gingen wir G�¶tter zugrund:
wÃ?¼rde heut’ nicht hehr
und herrlich mein Recht
ger�¤cht von der mutigen Maid.
Now, in this case, the world actually does end as a result (well, an indirect result) of Siegmund and Sieglinde’s mating. But then, this is explicitly myth.
3 responses so far ↓
1 jordan // Apr 18, 2005 at 8:24 am
I don’t think that you can make a reasonable case for siegmund and sieglinde causing the end of the world.
Its true that their child does do significant damage to the world at the end of “Twilight,” but only after he’s been 1) raised by a crazy evil dwarf, 2) tricked by the gods.
Besides, I thought the point of Wagner’s neitzcheanism is that at some point the responsibility for the destruction of the Gods resides with the gods themselves.
2 Julian Sanchez // Apr 18, 2005 at 11:47 am
Well, I’m using an if-not-for sense of “caused” here, I guess; had they NOT gotten together, the world wouldn’t have ended (in the way that it did). Obviously, an if-not-for standard is much too strong in most circumstances to say someone is “responsible” for bringing something about in any very deep moral sense.
3 Cacciaguida // Apr 21, 2005 at 11:07 am
I was there too on Tuesday night. Great performance, I thought — though Diadkova’s Fricka was undermined by a re-blocking that made her too plaintive.
Fricka is both a betrayed wife and a great lawyer. Though she rhetoricizes about marriage vows and incest, her EFFECTIVE argument is that Wotan’s plan for saving the gods is a sham: it requires an agent free of Wotan’s will, and Siegmund is precisely NOT that, despite Wotan’s efforts.
The fact the Fricka is correct on every point she raises heightens the drama of the shattering of relationships (Brunnhilde-Wotan, Wotan-Siegmund, Siegmung-Sieglinde) that her correctness causes.