Lecture by Peter Bassett to the Wagner Society in Queensland on 28 February 2006

 

Two performances of Wagner’s works in Asia in recent months have provided an interesting study in contrasts. The Nuremberg State Theatre’s production of the Ring at the Beijing Music Festival last October was the first complete performance of the Ring in China. The Beijing audience was made up of about two-thirds Chinese, one-third foreigners, and the production, now a few years old, was in a contemporary European style without being too avant-guard.

 

 

The singing and orchestral playing were of a high standard, and there was no doubt that Chinese members of the audience enjoyed the music. But I wonder what they made of the idiosyncratic stage imagery, notwithstanding the occasional gesture towards Chinese manners, such as Mime’s use of chopsticks in Act One of Siegfried.

 

Unlike the Chinese, for whom Wagner’s works are still a novelty, the Japanese have long experienced both imported and home-grown productions of the Ring, and at least one home-grown Parsifal in which the Grail Knights appeared more Samurai than Templar.

 

There seems to be growing interest at the moment in drawing on local cultural references in order to bring Wagner’s works closer to audiences and emphasize the universality of his themes. A forthcoming production of the Ring in Washington DC, for example, will incorporate Native American symbolism, and the current Mariinsky Ring alludes to Russian folktales. Personally, I think this trend is a good one and much to be preferred to that other tendency in recent times (especially in German opera houses) of reducing the works to kitchen sink dramas, in which we are likely to find Brünnhilde’s Awakening taking place in a seedy motel room.

 

Bangkok Opera’s production of Das Rheingold earlier this month, launched an ambitious five-year project to mount the first South-east Asian Ring. The production was conducted, directed and designed by Thais, and seemed to me to be entirely within the spirit of Wagner’s work, even though the sets and costumes reflected Thai culture and Asian mythology.

 

For the most part, the costumes were in the Thai Court tradition familiar from paintings and dramatizations of the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana, the story of Rama, an incarnation of the god Vishnu, preserver of the universe. It is certainly possible to draw comparisons between the myths on which Wagner based his narrative and the Ramayana with its stories of struggles between gods and giants, abductions of goddesses, cosmic bridges and so on. Such comparisons may be superficial but they are at least on the same wavelength as Wagner’s narrative and deal with the same sort of lofty philosophical issues.

 

Wagner had no doubt about the advantages of myth over history when it came to operatic subjects, and he was honest enough to recognize that there were times when not even the composer understood all of the implications of his own work. He expressed it this way:

 

‘How can an artist expect that what he felt intuitively should be perfectly realized by others, seeing that he himself feels in the presence of the work, if it is true Art, that he is confronted by a riddle about which he too might have illusions just as another might.’

 

So a director who approaches the work from the viewpoint of another culture, might be able to find things that have not been considered before.

 

The main ideas underpinning the Bangkok production were derived from a Buddhist view of Alberich’s theft of the Rhinegold. From that non-judgmental perspective, this action, which sets the entire Ring in motion, is not in itself evil. The director was determined to avoid the usual moral judgments about Alberich’s action, flowing as they often do from Judaeo-Christian notions of original sin and the need for cleansing or redemption. He took the view that Alberich’s act changes the world from a timeless and non-human state to a cosmos that exists in time and in which it is possible for humans to exist, because change exists - death exists. Alberich doesn’t necessarily make the wrong choice; but the consequence of his choice is that the world actually gets to start moving.

 

Through Buddhist eyes, it is our preoccupation with ‘attachment’, either base attachment in the form of greed, lust, envy etc or noble attachment (love, self-sacrifice and the like) that perpetuates the cycle of action-and-consequence that we call ‘existence’. It is only by letting go of attachment that the ring can ultimately be returned to the primordial state and the cycle cease to be which, of course, is what happens at the end of Götterdämmerung.

 

These notions were alluded to on stage by the ever-present symbol of an enormous Buddhist mandala – a circle, a symbolic picture of the cosmos - dominating the scene and slowly fracturing during the course of Das Rheingold. In Die Walküre next year, the shattered mandala will become the human world itself on which the action takes place.

 

 

On stage, Alberich, played by the English bass-baritone Colin Morris, offered the first of many surprises, arousing as much sympathy as distaste for his behaviour. At one moment priggish, at another comical and even child-like, he showed us a character who was clearly out of his depth even in a world of his own making. With a light, flexible voice, small frame and nimble manner, Morris offered a fascinating variation on the usual Alberich diet of unrelieved alienation and vindictiveness. For me at least, this interpretation was a revelation, and will certainly affect the way I think about Alberich in the future.

 

The director of the Bangkok production, Somtow Sucharitkul is a most interesting man. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, is a composer and conductor, and his grandfather‘s sister was a former Queen of Thailand, married to King Rama VI. He has homes in Bangkok and Los Angeles. So he straddles two worlds, understanding the Ring from a Western perspective and at the same time bringing to it a Thai/Buddhist perspective. He prepared some production notes for his principals who were drawn from eleven different nationalities. These notes make fascinating reading and I’d like to share a few of his comments with you.

 

This is what he had to say about the prelude and opening scene:

 

“The prelude is nirvana, perfect stillness.

 

But our karmic world cannot admit of such stillness, and already the ripples of motion begin, leading us away from this stillness. The appearance of the Rhinemaidens in a new but closely related key, and the appearance of Alberich in a disturbing and more remote one, clearly mirror the evolution away from nirvana in the music.”

 

 

He goes on:

 

“I am playing the first scene with the Rhinemaidens in traditional costume of mermaids in Thai classical drama. When Alberich appears, the look of the scene will be somewhat influenced by an episode of the Ramayana.  While this will not affect the scene in terms of action or music, it adds an extra dimension by showing a mythic scene that this audience is very familiar with. 

 

We play the opening scene with almost no colour, so that the appearance of the gold through the first crack of the mandala is also the first appearance of real colour in the universe. 

 

 

How do we show the Pandora’s box of good and evil that starts to seep into the world from the moment Alberich grabs the gold?  We show it by moving away from the traditional and into a brave new world of technology and corruption – and true human emotions.”

 

He continues with Scene Two:

 

“First, I would say that all the character types represented in Valhalla are types that one encounters at every high society function in Bangkok and that if we observe these types carefully, Scene Two is going to have a level of searing social commentary on top of the usual bickering-in-heaven. The Gods started off as Gods, but that was sometime during the Prelude. In Scene Two, their godliness is already starting to slip away.

  

Like many Asian politicians, Wotan’s happy to rely on the trappings of ‘ancient culture’ but we will soon see that he’s eminently pragmatic and likes his gadgets. Wotan grows into being a sympathetic character but that growth is yet to come; in this opera there’s a strong streak of Kim Jong Il in the character of a ruler who builds an immense pleasure palace for himself while trying to avoid thinking about the bill.

 

 

Freia:

 

Well, I don’t think Freia’s that unhappy about being carried off by a couple of hunky stevedores. There’s a bit of “the lady doth protest too much” quality to her music. While she’s carrying on and screaming, I think she takes a moment to fix her makeup. There’s a particular type of Thai high society lady that we’re going to show here. 

 

Loge:

 

In a sense he’s a stereotypical Hollywood agent. But in our Thai society setting he’s the New Money guy…a social pariah tolerated because he’s got money … and he can be useful. And at this point, Wotan’s only saving grace is that he is the only God who has taken the trouble to be Loge’s friend. In this, we see the germ of Wotan becoming a “great figure”.  Loge is the first of the gods to embrace the fact that we’re living in a moving history and so is sartorially ahead of the gods – while they’re still partially in their traditional togs, he’s already got the dark glasses and the Hawaiian shirt.

 

The Gods Grow Old:

 

I think that the apples, like the love potion in Tristan, are a bit of a placebo. I would suggest that, ever since Alberich put time into motion, the gods have already started moving towards their own mortality. I think that Fricka, in particular, already feels old. She’s been consumed with worry about it. When she reaches for that tray of apples, and she finds she’s binged out, it sets the whole age panic off.

 

Scene Four:

 

This time in Valhalla we enter a brave new world of transition. When the mandala finally parts completely at the stroke of Donner’s hammer, and the mists actually clear, we are going to see the skyline of a modern Asian city … this is the ambiguous paradise for which Wotan has sacrificed his soul.

 

Alberich’s curse is of course the defining bit of this opera. …but his curse, when you look at what he’s actually saying, is a simple Buddhistic statement of the reality of karma [the process of action and consequence that determines our existence]. Alberich’s “curse” is actually the revelation of the human condition — and the subjugation of the Gods themselves to the laws of karma.”

 

So, these are a few glimpses of the Bangkok perspective  – an authentically Asian one – and one that deserves to be taken seriously. The production enjoyed the rare advantage of having a director who was also the conductor and therefore truly sympathetic to the music. I’m looking forward to Die Walküre next year.

 

Wagner was deeply interested in eastern philosophy and religion, unlike many other composers whose interest amounted only to ‘Orientalism’ - that fad for the superficially exotic that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and even into the twentieth. Superficiality in opera – ‘effect without cause’ Wagner called it - was something he rejected, although composers such as Meyerbeer, Massenet, Delibes, Saint-Saëns, Bizet, Verdi, Rimsky-Korsakov, Puccini and Strauss (to name but some) found that orientalism paid handsomely. Turkish, Indian, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Chinese and Japanese exoticism became all the rage, as exemplified in Delacroix’s painting of  :-

 

 

The Death of Sardanaplus.

 

Orientalism had had its origins (musically at least) in the siege of Vienna in 1683, and evolved from a sort of Turkish battle music played by military bands outside the city walls. In reality, few Viennese actually heard the music and virtually no one remembered it, so what became understood as Turkish style was almost entirely the product of European imagination.

 

Mozart of course succumbed to the exotic in his late ‘teens and early twenties – in the unfinished Zaide (also called ‘The Seraglio’) and his ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’, the most popular of his operas in his own lifetime.

 

At one point, Wagner too might have gone down the orientalist path. At the age of twenty-one he took Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and transformed it into Das Liebesverbot (‘The Ban on Love’). Shakespeare’s work is set in Vienna about eighty years before the Turkish siege, and its theme is the sombre one of weighing human hypocrisy in the scales of justice. The young Wagner turned it into a comedy and shifted the action to Palermo which - if not exactly the Orient - provided a sunnier context for his theme of sensuality versus state-imposed puritanism. The prospect of unfettered sensuality was always part of the allure of orientalism.

 

From the overture to Das Liebesverbot alone, we can see the direction that Wagnerian opera might have taken, and indeed did take in a limited way in the Venusberg music and Bacchanal of Tannhäuser. But after the fiasco on the opening night of Das Liebesverbot in 1835 and then some particularly low points in following years, Wagner struck out in new directions.

 

His life-long interest in philosophical questions led him to the writings of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach and, especially, Arthur Schopenhauer, whose ideas had much in common with Buddhism and Brahmanism. Wagner first encountered Schopenhauer’s writings in September 1854 when working on Die Walküre. In his autobiography he tells us that he read The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, four times in quick succession. He describes it as a work that became vastly important to him. The encounter with Schopenhauer was, in fact, the single most important intellectual event in his life, and it significantly influenced his artistic direction. Almost immediately, he was inspired to write a brief sketch for Tristan und Isolde, which unfortunately is now lost.

 

In the years after 1854, he also read Buddhist and Brahmanic material, notably Burnhof’s ‘Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism’, Holtzmann’s ‘Indian Legends’, Köppen’s ‘The Buddhist Religion and its Origins’, Lassen’s ‘Study of Ancient Indian Civilization’ and Colebrooke’s ‘Essay on the Vedas’. He also read the Ramayana, the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita. We know he studied and thought about these writings because he said so in his autobiography and correspondence, Cosima reported his comments about them in her Diaries, and we can still see many of the original books in his library at Wahnfried.

 

Schopenhauer was extravagant in his praise of the Upanishads, written in Sanscrit between 800 and 400 BC.  He praised them especially for their recognition that our senses are only able to grasp a representation of the world, and that this representation (let’s think of it as the illusory world of ‘Day’) stands like a veil between the subject and the hidden world of timeless reality – which Tristan and Isolde would call the world of Night.

 

For most of his life, Schopenhauer read a few pages of the Upanishads in translation each night before going to sleep, and of them he wrote: ‘It is the most profitable and sublime reading that is possible in the world; it has been the consolation of my life and will be that of my death.’  It’s hardly surprising then that Wagner too came under the spell of these ancient writings.

 

The poem of Tristan und Isolde is laced with allusions to the Upanishads and we find vivid expression of this in Isolde’s final vision, in which the once-living Tristan is translated into waves, clouds, scents, sounds, and finally the ‘immensity of the world-breath’.  The Sanskrit word Atman – meaning ‘breath’ or ‘soul’ - is often used in conjunction with truth, infinity and the supreme deity – something beyond comprehension.  And Atman is related etymologically to the German word for breath, Atem. 

 

In the love duet in Act Two, when the lovers sing “heart on heart and mouth on mouth, one the breath that binds as one”, and declare: “then I myself am the world”, they are giving utterance to the metaphysical visions of the Upanishads.  Schopenhauer quotes one of his favourite passages: “I am all these creatures, and besides me there is no other being” to illustrate how someone contemplating nature necessarily draws nature into himself, transcending individuality and joining with the sublime.

 

When the lovers resolve: “So let us die undivided, forever one, without end, never waking, never fearing, embraced namelessly in love, given entirely to each other, living only in our love!” they are again drawing on the Upanishads: “As the flowing rivers disappear in the sea, discarding their name and their form, thus the illuminated one, freed from name and form, enters the divine spirit, who is greater than the great.”

 

 

In May 1868, in the diary that he called ‘The Brown Book’, Wagner jotted down some correlations between Hindu/Buddhist concepts, dramatic imagery and modes of expression.  ‘Nirvana’ – the blowing out of the fires of delusion and attachment - the extinction of self – he likened to truth and night.  ‘Brahma’ – the world soul – he likened to music and twilight.  ‘Samsara’ – the deceits of a worldly life, the agitation of selfishness – he likened to poetry and day. 

 

The identification of truth or ultimate reality with night, and selfishness and illusion with day is, of course, at the heart of Tristan und Isolde.  Interestingly too, Wagner equated nirvana with ‘untroubled, pure harmony’ - and who can doubt the harmonic responsiveness of both Tristan and Parsifal to dramatic needs.  Think of the contrast between Klingsor’s agitated chromaticism and the diatonic ‘Good Friday magic’ for instance, or between Tristan and Isolde’s invocation of unity and ‘night’ and the discordant glare of ‘day’ that tears them apart.  Separateness equals discord; unity equals concord. 

 

In May 1856, Wagner sketched out a proposed Buddhist music drama, Die Sieger, (The Victors), based on a story he found in Burnhof’s book. The title was inspired by the Jinas, Indian holy men whose name in Sanskrit means ‘victors’. Their victory was over human passions. Die Sieger dealt with an event in the legendary life of the Buddha, one of whose titles was Jina – ‘the Victor’. Wagner referred to the prospect of completing Die Sieger as ‘a labour of especial love’ – those were his words. He had been attracted to the story for a number of reasons, not the least of which was its theme of reincarnation which he saw as an ideal vehicle for his compositional technique of Emotional Reminiscence. ‘Only music’ he said, ‘can convey the mysteries of reincarnation’.

 

In an extraordinary confession to Mathilde Wesendonck, Wagner wrote:

‘Only thoughtful acceptance of the idea of transmigration of souls has been able to show me the consoling point at which all in the end converge at an equal height of redemption after their differing paths through life, which in time have run divided alongside one another, but which outside time come together in full understanding.’

 

It is worth noting that shortly after Wagner wrote the sketch for Die Sieger in 1856, he changed the text of Götterdämmerung to give it a Buddhist ending (to which I’ll come in a moment). He wrote the first prose sketch for Parsifal in the following April, and then a prose scenario for Tristan in the August. So, Die Sieger, Parsifal, Tristan and the ending of Götterdämmerung all have a lot in common: they are heavily influenced by Schopenhauerean and Hindu/Buddhist ideas.

 

Wagner’s ideas for the unfinished Die Sieger make fascinating reading and throw important light on Parsifal. The main characters are the historical Buddha (also called Shakyamuni) his cousin and closest disciple Ananda, and the maiden Prakriti, who belongs to the Chandala class of untouchables. The Chandalas are outside the Hindu caste system, living beyond village precincts and performing the most menial tasks. We can think of Prakriti as a precursor of Kundry. The Brahmins, the highest caste, despise the Chandalas. We might compare the Brahmins with the ‘chosen caste’ of Grail Knights, who are so quick to disparage Kundry who lives outside the castle wall in thorns and thickets.

 

In his sketch, Wagner provides a brief outline of the work’s main elements:

 

The Buddha is on his last journey. Ananda is given water from the well by Prakriti [compare Kundry’s offer of water to Parsifal]. She is in turmoil over her love for Ananda who, consequently, is in great consternation.

 

Suffering from the pangs of love, Prakriti arranges for her mother to bring Ananda to her. Love’s tug of war follows and a confused Ananda is distressed and moved to tears. However, he is rescued from this predicament by the Buddha.

 

Prakriti goes to the Buddha under a tree at the city’s gate, to plead for union with Ananda. The Buddha asks if she is willing to accept the constraints of such a union. A dialogue ensues with both apparently at cross purposes. Prakriti speaks in terms of her passion [compare the Act 2 Kundry/Parsifal scene]. She sinks horrified and sobbing to the ground when she hears at last that she must share Ananda’s vow of chastity [again, consider the Kundry/Parsifal scene].

 

Ananda is attacked by the Brahmins, who criticize the Buddha’s dealings

with a Chandala girl [compare the angry Grail Knights’ attack on Amfortas]. The Buddha denounces the caste system. He tells of Prakriti’s previous incarnation in which she had been the daughter of a haughty Brahmin. A Chandala leader had asked the Brahmin for her hand in marriage to his son, who had fallen in love with her. In pride and arrogance the daughter had refused to return the young man’s love and had mocked him [compare Kundry’s mockery of the Saviour in her former life]. Therefore, Prakriti had had to expiate that sin by being reborn as a Chandala herself and suffering the torments of a hopeless love [remember Kundry’s plight, condemned to seek the Saviour she had mocked from world to world].

 

Finally, in expiation of her past and in order to achieve full acceptance amongst the followers of the Buddha, Prakriti declares that she is prepared to share Ananda’s vow of chastity [compare the penitent Kundry in Act III]. Ananda welcomes her as his sister regardless of her caste [compare Parsifal’s baptism of Kundry]. The Buddha’s gives his last teachings [Just as Parsifal gives his final benediction in the closing scene] and departs to the place of his redemption [which of course, in Buddhist terms, is death and the achievement of nirvana].

 

When one recognizes the extent to which Die Sieger overlaps with Parsifal, the latter takes on a whole new significance.  It also makes nonsense of some of the motivations imputed to Parsifal by Gutman, Rose, Millington and others. The Buddha had drawn no distinction on grounds of race or class, attracted followers from all backgrounds and regarded all living beings as fellow sufferers in the endless cycle of existence.  The way to salvation was open to all. As the Buddha had no qualms in offering salvation to Prakriti in Die Sieger, so Parsifal has no qualms in offering baptism to the wretched and despised Kundry.  Far from upholding a system based on exclusivity, Parsifal, the Innocent Fool, having won enlightenment through compassion, establishes a new order based on fellow suffering.

 

The Buddhist elements in Parsifal also take other forms.  A collection of legends dating from the first century AD contains the story of a wounded swan.  The story is a recollection by the Buddha of a childhood experience in which a swan suddenly dropped from the sky and writhed on the ground in front of him in great pain; it had been hit by an arrow.  The young Siddhartha (as the prince who became the Buddha was then called) pulled the arrow out and was caring for the bird when his cousin ran in excitedly, clutching his bow and arrows.  The cousin ran towards the swan to claim it but Siddhartha stopped him, much to the boy’s annoyance.  The cousin then received a lecture on the need for compassion and its role in easing the suffering of all beings.

 

As you know, an almost identical event takes place in Act One of Parsifal.  A wounded swan falls to the ground and a knight draws an arrow from its breast.  Parsifal is brought before Gurnemanz clutching his bow and arrows.  he joyfully admits to his skill in hitting the swan in flight.  Gurnemanz then impresses upon him the heartless nature of his action and does so with such poignant effect that the remorseful Parsifal breaks his bow and hurls his arrows away.  in this way he learns his first lesson in compassion – a lesson wonderfully evoked by the music.

 

Again, amongst the legends of the Buddha is the story of Mara, the tempter figure whose baits are the pleasures of the senses.  Mara had tried to defeat Siddhartha before he had achieved enlightenment, saying to his followers:  “look over there at that sage, clad in the armour of determination, with truth and spiritual virtue as his weapons….  If he should succeed in overcoming me and proclaiming the way to final benediction, then my realm would be empty.  So far he has not won the eye of full knowledge and is within my influence.  While there is time I will attempt to break his solemn purpose.”

 

 

But - continues the legend - Mara, his army and his seductive daughters were defeated and fled in all directions – ‘their rocks, logs and trees scattered everywhere’. 

 

Parsifal, in the course of his wandering, encounters Klingsor with his knights and beguiling flower maidens.  Klingsor says to Kundry:  “Now today we have the most dangerous to meet; the shield of foolishness protects him.’ 

 

Watching Parsifal in his mirror, he comments:  “Whatever the prophesies say, too young and foolish, you fall into my power.  Once stripped of your purity you will become my slave!” 

 

The connections between Wagner’s text and the Mara legend are clear.

 

Parsifal overcomes the knights, resists the maidens, and recovers the holy spear when Klingsor hurls it at him.  Miraculously, the spear remains poised above Parsifal’s head.  In the Buddhist legend, it was not a spear but a discus (some say a thunderbolt) that was thrown by Mara at the meditating Siddhartha.  This missile was transformed into a canopy of flowers that remained suspended over the Buddha’s head.  Klingsor, like Mara, is defeated and, according to the stage directions, the castle sinks ‘as if by an earthquake’ and the garden withers to a desert; or as the Mara legend puts it: ‘rocks, logs and trees are scattered everywhere’.

 

Mara and his cohorts personify the destructive forces that lead to reincarnation - the suffering of many lives and many deaths.  Siddhartha finds the way to end the cycle of reincarnation and thus overcomes Mara and all that he represents.  Similarly, Klingsor and his cohorts personify the forces that lead to Kundry’s reincarnation and her suffering of many lives and many deaths.  Parsifal redeems Kundry from this fate by showing her the way to end the cycle of reincarnation for, as Klingsor had told her: “he that rejects you will set you free”.

 

There are parallels too between the magic garden of huge flowers prescribed by Wagner’s original stage directions (and realized in early productions) and the Hindu/Buddhist imagery of paradise – a sort of temporary realm - where there are flowers of gigantic proportions.  Certainly, such imagery doesn’t come from Wolfram von Eschenbach.

 

For many years, Wagner intended to work on Die Sieger after he had finished Parsifal, and it was only in 1882 that a combination of exhaustion and realism led him to abandon the idea for good. He also felt that he would be duplicating much of what had been said in Parsifal.

 

In Cosima’s diary entry for 7 May 1878, she noted that the sweet fragrance of the Indian Sagarika flower prompted him to say that the reason he would never carry out his Indian project was that he did not know the names of the flowers, and these were an integral part of the subject. On 27 September 1882 (that is, less than five months before Wagner’s death) she wrote: ‘We now talk almost constantly about the Buddha; recently Richard remarked how impossible it would have been for him to set him to music if he had had to concern himself with mango trees, lotus blossoms, etc. He had also told her on an earlier occasion: ‘My difficulty there (with Die Sieger) is the locality and the speech. Christianity is all noble simplicity, but in Buddhism there is so much learning, and learning is very inartistic’. In other words, he had wanted a narrative framework with more familiar (European and Christian) imagery I hence Parsifal.

 

Although the text of Die Sieger was never developed beyond a preliminary outline, we do know what some of the music might have sounded like because Wagner actually sketched out a theme for the Buddha. In July 1878, Cosima wrote the following in her diary: ‘When I was looking through some papers with him yesterday, I came upon the original theme for Sangst du nicht, dein Wissen; I tell Richard that the present theme (meant at first for the Buddha) pleases me far more.’

 

So, what is this theme that was composed originally for the Buddha in Die Sieger?  We know it from the Wanderer’s final scene with Erda in Act Three of Siegfried, where it is used to express Wotan’s new-found wisdom in accepting the coming of a new order and the demise of the gods.  Although the theme is usually referred to as ‘the world’s inheritance’ or ‘the world’s heritage’, as Hans von Wolzogen labelled it, it should, I suggest, be thought of as ‘the getting of wisdom’ or ‘enlightenment’; hence the connection in Wagner’s mind with that defining characteristic of the Buddha – ‘the Enlightened One’.  

 

In the scene in Act Three, after a long silence, Wotan tells Erda that she is not wise, for he is no longer concerned about the end of the gods and, in fact, consciously wills it. What he once resolved in despair, he will now do gladly. At that point, we hear in the orchestra the majestic theme once intended for the Buddha. All the burdens of self-interest and denial are lifted from Wotan’s shoulders, and we share with him a tremendous sense of release and relief. It is truly a moment of revelation. During the first rehearsals, Wagner said that this passage ‘must sound like the proclamation of a new religion’. Indeed it does.

 

The theme occurs again shortly afterwards when Wotan tells Erda: ‘Brünnhild wakes to the hero. Then your child of wisdom will accomplish a deed that will set the world free.’ We now have the juxtaposition of Brünnhilde’s wisdom, and the freeing of the world. The next significant entry comes after Brünnhilde’s awakening, when she tells Siegfried: ‘What you would know, know it from me, for I am wise because I love you’. So, Brünnhilde’s wisdom flows directly from her love for Siegfried. Finally, when Brünnhilde’s fears overwhelm her and she says that her mind is in confusion, her reason is silent and her wisdom seems to be failing her, Siegfried offers reassurance:  ‘Didn’t you tell me’ he says, ‘that all of your wisdom came by the light of your love for me?’ This is the phrase to which Cosima had been referring. Brünnhilde therefore is ‘made wise through love’ in the crucible of her personal suffering. Parsifal takes this further because he is made wise through compassion, that is, by taking on the sufferings of others.

 

A better-known Buddhist connection with the Ring came with Wagner’s 1856 version of the closing scene of Götterdämmerung which, as I’ve mentioned, was written contemporaneously with the sketch for Die Sieger and within months of the first sketch for Parsifal. Although this is often referred to as the ‘Schopenhauer ending’ to contrast it with an earlier ‘Feuerbach ending’, it is unquestionably a Buddhist ending. The words given to Brünnhilde are:

 

From the land of illusion I flee forever;

The open gates of eternal becoming I close behind me:

To the desire-free, illusion-free holiest chosen land,

The goal of world-wandering,

Redeemed from rebirth,

She who understands now departs.

The blessed end of all things eternal,

Do you know how I reached it?

Deepest suffering of grieving love opened my eyes:

I saw the world end.

 

Many people interpret this to mean that she is grieving at having foreseen the impending destruction of the gods and even perhaps the end of the physical world.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Think about what she is saying: no more illusory world of attachment and suffering – no more world of ‘day’ (to use the language of Tristan und Isolde).  At last, she is off the cosmic treadmill of reincarnation with its perpetual quest for peace from world to world. This is the world’s end that Brünnhilde sees and welcomes because, in Buddhist terms, it is the highest goal – nirvana. 

 

Ultimately, Wagner decided not to set these words, relying instead on the tremendous orchestral ending that we now know. In his 1872 definitive edition of the poem, he offered an explanation for not setting all of the words, which were, nevertheless, printed as a footnote: 'The musician had in the end’ he said, ‘in the act of composition, to sacrifice this passage, as its meaning is already conveyed with the greatest precision in the musical expression of the drama’.

 

In other words, he didn’t reject the sentiments, merely the need to reduce them to words.  As he had told Cosima: ‘only music can convey the mysteries of reincarnation’.

 

In the original 1848 sketch for the ending, Brünnhilde, is seen rising above the flames, once more the Valkyrie, leading Siegfried heavenwards to his place in Valhalla – a suitably Scandinavian ending.  There is no cataclysm, and the old order survives. Subsequently, in 1851, the idea of Ragnarök (‘twilight of the gods’) was introduced, in which the gods are to be destroyed. But in the stage directions as we now know them, Wagner doesn’t follow all the details of the Norse mythological accounts in the Eddas.  To do so would have involved introducing all kinds of extraneous material, such as battles between the gods and the frost giants, a fearsome wolf and a sea monster, before the flame giant, Surt sets the heavenly rainbow bridge alight and the blazing world sinks beneath the ocean, leaving only a single man an woman, hidden in a remote wood, to re-people the earth.  There is little of that in Wagner’s ending.

 

However, in the accounts of the death and cremation of the Buddha, which attracted Wagner’s attention in the mid 1850’s, we learn that when the Sage entered nirvana – which remember, was Brünnhilde’s destiny - the earth trembled and firebrands fell from the sky; the heavens were lit up by a preternatural fire and the rivers boiled over. It is not difficult to recognise in a conflation of these images the amazing stage directions at the end of Götterdämmerung.  Nor is it difficult to understand why Wagner referred to the exquisite closing theme (first used as Sieglinde’s paean to Brünnhilde in Act III of Die Walküre) as ‘the glorification of Brünnhilde’ or ‘the theme in praise of Brünnhilde’.  By embracing mortality and achieving wisdom through grieving love, Brünnhilde had revealed the path to inner peace, one that would be expressed definitively in the Christian/Buddhist syncretism of Parsifal.