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“Did You Hear Love's Fond Farewell?” Some Examples of Thematic Irony in Wagner's Ring

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01411890490449745

1547-7304

Matthew Bribitzer-Stull,

Music and Audio Processing

Abstract Scholars have long enjoyed uncovering moments of irony in Western art music. Unsurprisingly, Wagner's operas have proven exceptionally rich in this regard, although Wagner's ironic usage of associative themes (Leitmotive), has remained largely unmentioned. Wagner's associative themes are central to the composer's vision of the music drama. As mutable entities, they can be placed in new musical contexts without destroying their sense of identity: Irony is, of course, one such form of musical-dramatic recontextualization. A study of examples of thematic irony in Wagner's Ring can help to indentify their musical and semantic underpinnings. Notes 1. All references to scores are given in the following format: music drama/page/system/measure. They refer to the widely available Schirmer piano–vocal scores (e.g., Sg/184/3/1 = Siegfried, page 184, third system, first measure). The abbreviations for the music dramas are as follows: Rg = Das Rheingold, Wk = Die Walküre, Sg = Siegfried, and Gd = Götterdämmerung. This convention is maintained even when orchestrational references are made to the full score. 2. Knowledge of associative themes and attention to their meanings is imperative to a full understanding of the music drama, creating the “discursive community” Hutcheon says is necessary for irony to function. See Linda Hutcheon, Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994), 80–101. A note on methodology: All associative themes are capitalized and presented within quotation marks (e.g., “Spear”) to distinguish them from the objects, characters, events, moods, and scenes represented by the same word (e.g., spear). Most themes are named using Warren Darcy's nomenclature. Darcy's guides to the themes of The Ring are included in the appendix to Matthew Bribitzer-Stull, “Thematic Development and Dramatic Association in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen” (Ph.D. Diss., Eastman School of Music, 2001). 3. Note that this theme is also truncated and transposed to a new pitch level. While the truncation may be reflective of Wotan's unwillingness to linger at the scene, the transposed pitch level is due to the fact that the “Parting Kiss” grows out of the “Wanderer” theme, beginning on the correct pitch to continue the upper-voice sequence in “Wanderer.” 4. Patrick McCreless, Wagner's Siegfried: Its Drama, History, and Its Music, Studies in Musicology (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), 164. 5. Jack Madison Stein, Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973), 129–130. 6. These relationships are made explicit in the text. See Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen von Richard Wagner (Leipzig: 1881–83), v. 6, 52, with Brünnhilde's lines “Zu Wotan's Willen sprichtest du, sagst du mir, was du willst; wer bin ich, wär’ ich dein Wille nicht=” See also v. 6, 146, when Wotan states “Auf wolkigen Höhn wohnen die Götter: Walhall heißt ihr Sall. Lichtalben sind sie; Licht-Alberich Wotan, waltet der Schar.” 7. While there are thematic statements in Wagner's Ring that are not associative, these will not be addressed in the body of this article. As for those themes that do bear extra-musical associations, it is important to remember that all of these have some inherent level of associative indeterminacy. While “Gold,” for instance, may seem to be a simple, easily recognized associative theme, it is not the gold per se that is associated with the music, but the emotional effect of seeing the gold illuminated by the sun through the waters of the Rhine while the Rhinedaughters apostrophize it, etc…. something difficult to capture in words. Thus, we must be wary of any associative interpretation that smacks of unilateral meaning. 8. John Deathridge and Carl Dahlhaus, The New Grove Wagner (New York: Norton, 1984), 112; Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1991), 31; Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 86. 9. In response to Wolzogen's guide to the Ring themes, Wagner remarked that the real interest his themes provoked was the manner in which dramatic transformation “opened up a radical new way of developing musical material.” See Deryck Cooke, I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner's Ring (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 45. 10. Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 30. 11. Darcy's understanding of thematic complexes is used loosely in his guides to the themes of The Ring (see the Appendix to Bribitzer-Stull, “Thematic Development”) and is given more formal treatment op. cit., 172–180. For Carolyn Abbate's discussion of musical falsehoods in Wagner, see Unsung Voices, 19. See also the discussion in Leslie Blasius, “Nietzsche, Riemann, Wagner: When Music Lies,” in Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 93–107 (especially 99–100). 12. The “Dragon” theme first appeared during Alberich's transformation in scene 3 of Das Rheingold (Rg/150/3/1ff). 13. See Hutcheon, Irony's Edge, 101–115, for a discussion of painter Anselm Keifer's ironic usage of Wagnerian references. 14. Jacobellis v. Ohio, 878 U.S. 184 (1964). 15. See, for instance, Mark Anson-Cartwright (“Chord as Motive: The Augmented Triad Matrix in Wagner's Siegfried Idyll,” Music Analysis 15/1 [1996], 57–71), who suggests that a chord itself (in this case, the augmented triad) can be a motive on both the musical surface and at deeper levels. 16. Warren Darcy, Wagner's Das Rheingold (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 46. 17. Thomas Grey, Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 319. 18. Wagner did not endorse the nineteenth-century German neologism Leitmotiv; in Oper und Drama, he preferred Melodie and later Motiv. See Geoffrey Skelton, Wagner in Thought and Practice (London: Lime Tree, 1991), 43. Warren Darcy also rejects Leitmotiv in favor of “associative theme,” as he feels “motive” is inadequate to describe the complex nature (harmonization, phrase structure, etc.) of many of the themes (see Bribitzer-Stull, “Thematic Development,” 331–332). “Associative theme” also avoids many of the incorrect, stereotyped connotations associated with “Leitmotiv” and suggests that the concept of “theme” (rather than “motive”) is the prototypical musical entity for these musical–dramatic constructs. 19. Carl Dahlhaus, “What Is a Musical Drama=” Cambridge Opera Journal 1/1(1989), 109. 20. See Andrew McCredie's “Leitmotive: Wagner's Points of Departure and Their Antecedents,” Miscellanea Musicologica 14 (1985), 1–28, which traces many of these threads. McCredie's discussion includes examples from the following: Monteverdi's use of recurring topoi to link a character with an obliggato instrument or small group of instruments (9); Méhul's and Cherubini's uses of motivic recall and association in a proto-leitmotivic way (12–13); German melodrama ca. 1770–1830, including motives that reflect the drama (7); instances of static reminiscence motives in operas of Mozart and Schubert (14–16); and J.C. Bach's use of motive in a developmental way in Amadi (10–11). See also Julian Rushton, “An Early Essay in Leitmotiv: J.B. Lemoyne's Électre,” Music & Letters 52/4 (1971), 387–401. According to Rushton, Lemoyne used leitmotives in Électre that not only highlighted dramatic moments but served as unifiers in a surprisingly continuous musical fabric given eighteenth-century operatic idioms. (Lemoyne's motives occur mainly in the overture, whereas those of J.C. Bach appear throughout Amadi.). 21. See, for instance, Carolyn Abbate, “Opera, or the Envoicing of Women,” in Music and Difference, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 248, in which she describes a particularly evocative example when music manifests the “unnatural” sound of a woman's groaning by onomatopoeia. See also Peter Kivy's discussion in Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation, Princeton Essays in the Arts 15 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 3–18. 22. Debussy, for instance, often quoted or parodied Wagner's music to invoke referential meaning. See Carolyn Abbate, “Tristan in the Composition of Pelleas,” 19th-Century Music 5/2 (1981), 139; and Katherine Bergeron, “The Echo, the Cry, the Death of Lovers,” 19th-Century Music 18/2 (1994), 136–151. 23. These include conventions like dotted rhythms suggesting royal or military fanfares and the minor mode suggesting sadness, darkness, etc. A full exposition of topoi in classical music is presented in Leonard Ratner, Classic Music (New York: Schirmer, 1980), chap. 2. See Hatten, Musical Meaning, passim, for the linguistic theory of markedness as a hermeneutic for musical meaning. 24. See Kivy, Sound and Semblance, 148–151. 25. Frits Noske, “Verbal and Musical Semantics in Opera: Denotation and Connotation,” in Die Semantik der musiko-literarischen Gattungen: Methodik und Analyse—Eine Festgabe fur Ulrich Weisstein zum 65. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Narr, 1994), 35. 26. Stein, Synthesis of the Arts, 64. 27. Certain sounds have associative or linking functions in Wagner (“sch” for sleep, “w” for nature). See Jeffrey L. Buller, “The Thematic Role of Stabreim in Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen,” The Opera Quarterly 11/4 (1995), 59–76. The conspiracy scene in Götterdämmerung Act II, for example, is full of “t,” “b,” “s,” “z,” and “sch” sounds, all linked repetitively with the sense of treachery and murder. Thus, when Hagen sings the words “Siegfrieds Tod” they have been linguistically prepared. See Carolyn Abbate, “Opera as Symphony: A Wagnerian Myth,” in Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner, ed. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 101–102 and 109–110. For a study concerning the role of vowels in the union of phonology and music, see Mathew Rosenblum, “Sound, Structure, and Signification in Wagner's ‘Evening Star’ Aria,” Music Analysis 16/1 (1997), 77–103. 28. Buller, “Stabreim,” 61–62. 29. Sandra Corse, Wagner and the New Consciousness: Language and Love in the Ring (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), 59–60. 30. Marc A. Weiner, “Wagner and the Perils of Reading,” Wagner 18/2 (1997), 76–77. 31. Perhaps the most celebrated of these disputes is the controversy over the figure that appears in Rg/64/1/2 (first four notes in melody). Commentators have referred to this both as a “Love” theme and as a “Flight” theme. Wolzogen refers to it as the “Flight” motive and many later authors followed his example. Hans von Wolzogen, Thematischer Leitfaden durch die Musik zu Richard Wagners Festspiel “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” trans. Ernst von Wolzogen (Leipzig: Feodor Reinboth, 1876), 16. Ernest Newman (The Wagner Operas [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991], 459–460) suggests that “Flight” doesn’t tell the whole story and instead propounds the theory that this theme is really a sort of musical “tic” Wagner falls into. On the other hand, Cooke, Milington, and Darcy all favor the label “Love” for this theme: See Cooke, I Saw the World End, 49; Barry Millington, Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 211; and Darcy (in Bribitzer-Stull, “Thematic Development,” 342). 32. Not unexpectedly, thematic irony can pose notorious interpretive problems. Siegmund's ironic singing of the “Renunciation of Love” in the first act of Die Walküre when he pulls the sword from the tree in Hunding's hut is a case in point (Wk/71/3/1–71/4/2). Although this statement suggests irony, I have been unable to uncover a fitting explanation for the appearance of this theme and remain unconvinced by attempts made by previous scholars. See, for instance, Cooke, I Saw the World End, 1–4, and Darcy, Wagner's Das Rheingold, 48, among others. 33. Richard Wagner, “On the Application of Music to the Drama,” in Richard Wagner's Prose Works, v. 6, trans. William Ashton Ellis (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), 182–183. 34. Cooke, I Saw the World End, 38–44. 35. In addition to Wolzogen, Thematischer Leitfaden, there are many others ranging from nineteenth-century German works (Franklin P. Patterson, The Leit-motives of Der Ring des Nibelungen [Leipzig: Breitköpf & Härtel, 1896]) to Newman's lengthy twentieth-century discursus (Newman, The Wagner Operas). 36. Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, eds., The Wagner Handbook, trans. John Deathridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 451. 37. John Deathridge, “Review of Richard Wagner and the English et al.,” 19th-Century Music 5/1 (1981), 84. 38. Unfortunately, many scholars retain this representational viewpoint. See Deryck Cooke, An Introduction to Der Ring des Nibelungen (London Records, CD 443 581–2, 1995 [rerelease of 1969 recording]); as well as Eero Tarasti, Myth and Music: A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music, Especially That of Wagner, Sibelius, and Stravinsky (Gravenhage: Mouton, 1979), 188. “The motifs directly concerning some actor in the Ring may convey their content in two ways: either they define their object qualitatively when they depict the actor's traits or character, or they define an actor functionally, i.e., depicting his actions in a mythical universe.” 39. Many publications, like the English National Opera Guides, do prefer theme numbers to names. 40. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, “Introduction,” Analyzing Opera: Wagner and Verdi, ed. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 8–9. 41. Millington, Wagner, 211. 42. Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1979), 61; originally published as Richard Wagners Musikdramen (Velber, 1971). 43. Ibid., 62. This grew out of Wolzogen's Schopenhaurian belief in melody as expression of the will, thus influencing Wolzogen toward melodic analysis of Wagner's music. 44. The title in German, found in an unpublished letter from Cosima Wagner to Edmund von Lippman, is “Verherrlichung Brünnhildens.” See Deathridge, “Review of Richard Wagner and the English,” 84. 45. Hutcheon (Irony's Edge, 58–66) explains this multiple meaning through three semantic characteristics: the relational, the inclusive, and the differential. 46. See Lars Ellestrom, “Some Notes on Irony in the Visual Arts and Music: The Examples of Magritte and Shostakovich,” Word and Image 12/2 (1996), 197–208; Ellestrom describes purely musical irony (without reference to texts, titles, and the like) as being “on the edge of unutterable,” dependent mainly on a contrast in mood. See especially 199, 204–207. 47. Robert Hatten, “Review of John Rink, The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation,” Indiana Theory Review 17/1 (1996), 94. 48. Two studies that couple irony with these techniques are Reinhold Schlötterer, “Ironic Allusions to Italian Opera in the Musical Comedies of Richard Strauss,” in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 77–91; and Kenneth Hull, “Allusive Irony in Brahms's Fourth Symphony,” in Brahms Studies 2, ed. David Brodbeck (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 135–168. 49. In his article “Haydn, Laurence Sterne, and the Origins of Musical Irony” (Journal of the American Musicological Society 44/1 [1991], 57–91), Mark Evan Bonds argues that irony in instrumental music goes back to Haydn and to author Laurence Stern, to whom Haydn was compared (64). According to Bonds, irony never achieved the same popularity in music that it enjoyed in literature—particularly in instrumental music, where the question of “saying one thing and meaning another” is difficult to convey (67, 80–81). Rey M. Longyear, in “Beethoven and Romantic Irony” (Musical Quarterly 56/4 [1970], 648–653), describes “romantic irony” by summarizing the work of nineteenth-century German writers Friederich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck. Many articles on irony in Schumann mention his relation to writers Jean Paul Richter and Friederich Schlegel. See Lauri Suurpää, “Schumann, Heine, and Romantic Irony: Music and Poems in the First Five Songs of Dichterliebe,” Intégral 10 (1996), 93–123; Heinz J. Dill, “Romantic Irony in the Works of Robert Schumann,” Musical Quarterly 73/2 (1989), 172–195; John Daverio, “Schumann's ‘Im Legendenton’ and Friederich Schlegel's Arabeske,” 19th-Century Music 11/2 (1987), 150–163; and John Daverio, “Reading Schumann by Way of Jean Paul and His Contemporaries,” College Music Symposium 30/2 (1990), 28–45. Finally, Mary Cicora, in Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions: Hermeneutic Approaches to Wagner's Music-Dramas (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 5, mentions that Wagner's favorite writer since childhood was E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose work is frequently cited as embodying Schlegel's romantic irony. 50. Irony has been a core component of German art from the sixteenth century forward (Longyear, “Beethoven and Romantic Irony,” 648). Romantic irony flowered in German in the nineteenth century. In addition to Longyear, studies that define and engage the concept of romantic irony include Bonds, “Haydn, Laurence Stern, and the Origins of Musical Irony,” 67–68; Cicora, Modern Myths, 4–12, whose discussion of romantic irony focuses on self-referentiality (of music or the composer) in each of Wagner's music dramas; Cicora, Mythology as Metaphor; Dill, “Romantic Irony in the Works of Robert Schumann”; Suurpää, “Schumann, Heine, and Romantic Irony”; and Jon Finson, “The Intentional Tourist: Romantic Irony in the Eichendorff Liederkreis of Robert Schumann,” Schumann and His World, ed. R. Larry Todd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 156–170. 51. See, for instance, Longyear (“Beethoven and Romantic Irony,” 647–664), who frequently refers to evidence in Beethoven's life, letters, titles, and performance instructions to evoke irony. Zoltan Roman (“Connotative Irony in Mahler's Todtenmarsch in ‘Callots Manier,’” Musical Quarterly 59/2 [1973], 207–223) relies on Mahler's program and title to evoke irony. John E. Sawyer's “Irony and Borrowing in Handel's ‘Agrippina’” (Music and Letters 80/4 [1999], 531–559) examines irony in the interaction between music and text or drama. And Linda Phyllis Austern (“Sweet Meats with Sour Sauce: The Genesis of Musical Irony in English Drama after 1600,” Journal of Musicology 4/4 [1985], 472–490) discusses ironic disjunctions between drama and music in seventeenth-century England. A notable exception is Ronald Woodley, “Strategies of Irony in Prokofiev's Violin Sonata in F minor Op. 80,” in The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, ed. John Rink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 170–193; Woodley contends that irony should not be limited to works relying on language. Tonality itself, in twentieth-century Russia, was a natural vehicle for irony in that motive and form could contribute not only to the growth and development of the piece but also to its stagnation and blockage (172–174). 52. Schumann and Shostakovich are the most commonly studied in this regard. See Charles S. Brauner, “Irony in the Heine Lieder of Schubert and Schumann,” Musical Quarterly 67/2 (1981), 261–281; Finson, “The Intentional Tourist”; Dill, “Romantic Irony in the Works of Robert Schumann”; Suurpää, “Schumann, Heine, and Romantic Irony”; Daverio, “Schumann's ‘Im Legendenton’ and Friederich Schlegel's Arabeske”; Daverio, “Reading Schumann by Way of Jean Paul and His Contemporaries”; Ellestrom, “Some Notes on Irony in the Visual Arts and Music”; Christopher Norris, “Shostakovich: Politics and Musical Language,” in Shostakovich: The Man and His Music, ed. Christopher Norris (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982), 181–182, 185; Ian McDonald, The New Shostakovich (Oxford: Fourth Estate, 1991); Carolyn Roberts Finlay, “Operatic Translation and Shostakovich:The Nose,” Comparative Literature 35 (1983), 195–214; David Fanning, The Breath of Shostakovich: Shostakovich's Tenth (London: Royal Musical Association, 1988), 40, 54, 60, 70–71; and Jennifer Gerstel, “Irony, Deception, and Political Culture in the Works of Dmitri Shostakovich,” Mosaic 32/4 (1999), 35–51. 53. Mary Cicora, Mythology as Metaphor: Romantic Irony, Critical Theory, and Wagner's Ring (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998), 6–12. See also 17–31, in which Cicora summarizes the various forms of irony and gives examples for each from The Ring; and 21–22, in which irony is related to Wagner's themes and key choices. 54. Ibid., 5. 55. Hutcheon, Irony's Edge, 137. 56. By presuming the entire Ring drama as past tense, associative themes function as a Greek chorus, commenting on or even foreshadowing dramatic events, allowing for many forms of irony. See Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 91; and Abbate, Unsung Voices, 169–170. Additionally, see J. Peter Dyson, “Ironic Dualities in Das Rheingold,” Current Musicology 43 (1987), 33–51. Dyson explains the dualistic nature of dramatic irony and how it is underscored by repetitions of musical materials. For Dyson, like Hutcheon, irony is representative of a dialectic mindset—the union of thesis and antithesis (33). 57. At this time, I wish to devote a few lines to two observations not included in the body of this article, as they provide further examples of thematic irony in the Ring. Both imply that musical simplicity can have ironic echoes in the complex world of Wagner's Ring cycle. Dahlhaus (Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, 112–113) maintains that the purity and light of the “Sword's” first C Major presentation (Rg/213/1/2–1/4) is ironic because it functions as an ominous bII in b minor (the key of the “Curse”). See also Warren Darcy's commentary on the “Rainbow” (in Bribitzer-Stull, “Thematic Development,” 357), in which he states, “The rainbow is a traditional symbol of hope, but in this case the hope is clearly illusory. Wagner suggests this by the key of Gb, which, 1) enters as a deceptive resolution (Bb: V-bVI) and resolves as subdominant (Db: IV-I); 2) is a tritone away from C major, the key of true light; and 3) is enharmonically equivalent to the F# of Loge's deceptive fire. Also, the rainbow is created by Froh, who symbolizes misplaced youthful optimism.” 58. Expanding on the idea of musico-dramatic contrast, both Betty Sue Diener (“Irony in Mozart's Operas” [Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 1992]) and Hutcheon (Irony's Edge) describe a variety of forms that irony in opera can take. These include several interdependent phenomena: irony in the libretto alone; sudden changes in the music; “contradiction, incongruity, or incompatibility” between the music, text, and drama; use of anticipation and reminiscence; patterning and repetition throughout the opera; and characters who are eirons (i.e., characters like Loge, the wily fox, hypocrite, dissembler, or masked pretender of a drama—see Diener 3, and 35–78). For more on interdependent phenomena, see Diener, 135–140, and 190–193.Hutcheon depicts the many different forms and functions of irony on a sliding scale from least to most cutting (46–56, especially Figure 2.1, 47) and engages irony in the interpretation of art by teasing apart a variety of ironies in specific productions of The Ring (135–140, and 159–166). 59. See Scott Burnham, “Mozart's felix culpa: Così fan tutte and the Irony of Beauty,” Musical Quarterly 78/1 (1994), 77–98; Patricia Howard, “Lully and the Ironic Convention,” Cambridge Opera Journal 1/2 (1989), 139–153; and Joseph Thomas Malloy, “Musico-Dramatic Irony in Mozart's ‘Magic Flute’” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Virginia, 1985). 60. Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven, 172–174. 61. This is the “edge” referred to in the title of Hutcheon, Irony's Edge, which concerns itself with the “bite” or “edge” to irony: that is, its political uses, the consequences of its [mis]understanding, and that which triggers an audience to sense it. 62. Darcy (Wagner's Das Rheingold, 148) reads this second appearance of the “Valhalla” music as a recapitulation or reprise. 63. See Christopher Wintle, “The Questionable Lightness of Being: Brünnhilde's Peroration to ‘The Ring’,” in Götterdämmerung, Opera Guide Series 31, ed. Nicholas John (London, 1985), 39–48; Wintle traces the appearance and dramatic association of the “Valhalla cadence” through later portions of The Ring. 64. Warren Darcy calls this statement of “Valhalla” “flippant.” See Darcy, Wagner's Das Rheingold, 149. 65. “zur lockende Lohe mich wieder zu wandeln, spür ich lockenden Lust. Sie aufzuzehren, die einst mich gezähmt statt mit den Blinden blöd zu vergehn.” See Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften, 5: 267. Often, as with Loge, the appearance of restraint in those using irony masks strong feelings (see Hutcheon, Irony's Edge, 41). The final irony is that Loge eventually does burn up Valhalla at the end of Götterdämmerung, but his key (spelled as Gb) is then subordinated as IV to Valhalla's Db (Gd/340/1/3ff). Even in death, Wotan has the last word. 66. The musical disjunctions creating this “sarcastic tone of voice” are reminiscent of those identified in Carolyn Abbate's definition of musical narrative; see Abbate, Unsung Voices, 26–27. Hatten's dramatic irony plays a role in another ironic statement of “Valhalla,” cited in Buller, “The Thematic Role of Stabreim,” 63. When Siegmund recounts his personal history to Hunding and Sieglinde in the first act of Die Walküre, he mentions returning home to find his father missing. Although Siegmund does not know what befell his father, the appearance of “Valhalla” at this moment (Wk/26/2/3–26/2/5) leaves us little doubt as to his father's identity and whereabouts. 67. See Wagner, “On the Application of Music to the Drama,” 186. 68. This moment may have been musically preordained. David Lewin suggests that “Valhalla,” ironically, contains the “seeds of its own destruction,” as the “Tarnhelm”-esque Riemannian transformations of its middle section, when applied to the whole, result in the corrupted version in “Wotan's Blessing upon the Nibelung's Son.” See David Lewin, “Some Notes on Analyzing Wagner: The Ring and Parsifal,” 19th-Century Music 16/1 (1992), 51–53. 69. See Eytan Agmon, “Functional Harmony Revisited: A Prototype–Theoretic Approach,” Music Theory Spectrum 17/2 (1995), 196–214. 70. According to Porges, Wagner stressed making a performance distinction between these two conjoined themes so as to aid the listener's understanding of this moment. See Heinrich Porges, Wagner Rehearsing the Ring: An Eyewitness Account of the Stage Rehearsals of the First Bayreuth Festival, trans. Robert L. Jacobs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 58. 71. This example is also described in Stein, Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts, 124–125. 72. Perhaps Wagner avoided using f minor, because that key will come to be associated with Siegfried after he slays the dragon; the “Starling Song,” an artifact of Mime, when sung by Siegfried should not appear in Siegfried's key. For definitions of associative tonality, see Robert Bailey, “The Structure of the Ring and Its Evolution,” 19th-Century Music 1/1 (1977), 48–61; McCreless, Wagner's Siegfried, 88–95; and Deborah Stein, Hugo Wolf's Lieder and Extensions to Tonality (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 43–44 and 141–187. 73. Alternately, we might consider this a if the grace note ornament in Siegfried's vocal line is included in the chord. Changing our hearing of this harmony does not, however, affect the argument at hand. 74. Michael Tanner, Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 176. 75. Richard Wagner, “The Artwork of the Future,” in Richard Wagner's Prose Works, 1: 96–97 [emphasis in original]. 76. The “Spear” as an icon of power and the many themes that musically and dramatically brook the power of the spear are described in Cooke, An Introduction. 77. This example is cited in Warren Darcy, “Redeemed From Rebirth: The Evolving Meaning of Wagner's Ring,” in Wagner in Retrospect: A Centennial Reappraisal, ed.Leroy R. Shaw and Nancy R. Cirillo (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), 55. 78. On a more optimistic note, one might conclude that Wagner did indeed intend this as a moment of metaphysical awakening. Although Brünnhilde will not join him immediately, Siegfried here prepares to enter into a posthumous, spiritual union with Brünnhilde, not unlike that experienced by many of Wagner's other operatic couples (e.g., Senta and the Dutchman, Tannhäuser and Elizabeth, and Tristan and Isolde). As such, this could be considered an example of romantic irony. 79. See Noske, “Verbal and Musical Semantics in Opera,” 35–50. 80. This is an example of a technique Dyson refers to as “parodic echo.” See Dyson, “Ironic Dualities,” 33. 81. See Millington's paraphrase of Nietzsche on the dangerous attractions of Wagner's music in Millington, Wagner, 87.