My consistent interest in the work of composer Richard Wagner stems not only from the music, but also from the antithesis of great art and reprehensible personality, as well as Wagner’s profound understanding of the cruelty and emptiness and threat to human existence of contemporary governments.
His music is one thing, but his writings, though they do illuminate the compositions, are another, for the composer inclines to turgidity and prolixity, is often incomprehensible, frequently tedious, and afflicted by rabid anti-Semitism. Judaism in Music, for example, is repulsive, every word of it.
In Wagner’s discursive piece on the Wibelungen, written in 1848, before the prose sketch for the Ring was begun the following year, he ventures that the ancient Frankish chronicles told of an anthropomorphic “Light- or Sun-god” who destroys the monster of the chaos of night. This is then the meaning of Siegfried’s contest with the Dragon, analogous to Apollo’s fight with the dragon Python. When Siegfried later is slain, he becomes divine in that his sacrifice, both a blessing to mankind and an awakening of the moral impulse of revenge, causes the ancient struggle to be continued by ourselves, a recurrent rejuvenation of what is considered the conscious awareness of the immortal relationship of man and nature, ultimately to be personified in Zeus, that is to say, in Wagnerian terms, Wotan, a paramount god arisen from a refined awareness of self.
In the Scandinavian religious myths, the appellation Nifelheim, i.e., Nibel or Nebelheim (the Home of Mists) derives from the subterranean dwelling-place of the Night-spirits—Schwarzalben—distinct from the heavenly dwellers, Light-elves, or Lichtalben. The former hoard the treasures of the subterranean earth. Hence, when light overpowers darkness, as when Siegfried kills the Nibelungen dragon, he gains as victor the Nibelungen hoard the dragon guarded. And, in acquiring the hoard, it also becomes the cause of his death, for the heir of the dragon, in gaining in the future its return through destruction of Siegfried by stealth, causes Siegfried, through death, to himself become a Nibelung.
And so does the cycle repeat, generation after generation, for it is a law of acquisitiveness that resides within the essence of mankind; though each generation must die, the hoard is a representation of the secret of worldly dominance, functioning, as it must, as a law of Nature, and giving to those who believe they have permanently acquired it, an illusion of splendid enjoyment of possession, when the sun, for a portion of the day, appears to rise at dawn.
That is why the practitioners of politics who have power either cannot or will not rise beyond innate impulse to rule in order to serve, and to lift up, those whom they are elected or selected to govern; which is not, it needs to be emphasized, equivalent to be selected to lead.