Thoughts many years ago while hearing Georg Solti
and The Chicago Symphony perform Act
III
Of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung
in concert
1
Here
walks young Siegfried by the Rhine,
armed with a Ring the old
gods lost,
curled in a fist, that ancient gold,
its sun-gut
power crushed to grams
of portable might.
This hero, half-awake,
does not yet know himself.
He
has lived among bears and evil dwarfs.
He knows not what power
means,
nor in his brazen youth believes
the Rheingold
curse’s warning.
As the nixies taunt him, he almost hurls
the
thing into the river — let them have it;
it’s neither good
for food or fighting —
but he yields instead, self-irked
to
danger’s lure — his strong arms
enjoy a good battle. He
savors fear
as though the its loss would soften him.
He will keep the Ring, to see what happens.
Already
you are drugged, young man:
the Tarnhelm poison pours
mercury
across your eyes, blinds you to envy
and to those
who tread along behind you.
You love the hunt, the running ardent
life;
sun-gilded trinkets are nothing to you
since you eat from the nut-trees
and hunt-fire.
You are proud of your strength, your
certitude
oblivious to oaths of greed and lust,
the lure of pleasure the ends with knife-thrust.
As music soars, some listeners both hear
and see. Others have obsidian, dead eyes,
inverted smiles frozen in Republican hauteur,
Mrs. and Mr. Gibichung in furs and wingtips.
She has done nothing to harm anyone.
He has perhaps done a great deal to a great many.
The thin and tender line between cynic
and murderer: one says no heroes live;
the others makes sure all heroes are killed.
This opera is not for its audience. It dwells
in a realm of ideas, forms crystallized
in words sung, spun upon leitmotivs
that make all words much more than their sum.
Siegfried, you do not know
you are being played through, lived through,
a thousands voyeurs and auditors engaged
in your triumph and love and loss.
At
the last, pathetic youth,
when your eyes are cleansed by a
traitorous cup,
when you at last remember everything,
you see how Love and Art are yours,
how you were tricked into giving them away
to fools; the Love you awakened
sent to warm the glutton crowds,
Brunnhilde cast to Mrs and Mr Gibichung,
never to grace your own barren
hearth.
Then at the surge, when wings of worth
flap with
your just demand,
you are just as suddenly slain.
Your terminus erupts in
raven wings
and the All-Father who could have saved you
does nothing. One funeral beat
will serve for all. Everything must fall.
2
Now
proud Brunnhilde,
the spiteful demi-goddess, comes,
armed
with her timeless grace.
Whom have you killed? she
asks
He brought the sun to your side,
you heard his
songs, took me,
his freely given gift, in vain.
Come, light
the pyre, indeed!
Burn all the souls in whom the hero died,
see
if the withering youth in your breast
falls too, like his, when
the world
envelops darkness for an age.
His loss has cost
you me:
I’ll be no muse for coward bards.
All art and
song I strip from you.
Birds even shall be dumb.
Life
without Siegfried
must teach you what you have lost.
There
burns the maiden Art:
museums blaze, books fall
as leaves,
a flaming trumpet
melts, and in the wake
no hearth on earth
shall glow again.
The
floods of time and folly
bear off the Ring, while gods
who
thought themselves undying
turn to dust in an eye-blink.
Now
humankind will worship
a wimp’s god, a bloody thorn,
a
bleating lamb, a sigil.
Go
to the forest black, go where
no church steeple blights
horizon.
Stand there, and on a breeze you hear
Brunnhilde’s
hymn
changelessly re-sung:
to have lived, or died,
in
the love of the human best
is great, and answerless.
[Revised May 2019]
