Act I Synopsis
Hunding’s hut.
Siegmund, exhausted and weaponless, staggers inside and throws himself upon the hearth. Sieglinde, Hunding’s wife, tends the stranger, and sympathy grows between them. Hunding returns home, and over the evening meal, asks the stranger’s name. “Woeful,” he replies. He is a Wölfing who has been raised and abandoned by his father, Wolfe. A twin sister was born with him, but she was carried off and their mother killed in a raid by an unfriendly tribe. Misfortune follows him everywhere. He is weaponless now from an attempt to save a young girl from kinsmen who were forcing her into loveless marriage. Hunding recognizes him as his enemy but allows him shelter for the night. In the morning, he will fight for vengeance. Sieglinde, much drawn to the stranger, gives Hunding a sleeping potion and returns to the hearth. She shows Siegmund a sword deeply embedded in the tree. Placed there at her wedding feast by a one-eyed stranger who looked kindly on the unhappy, loveless bride, it will belong to the one who can draw it forth. The door suddenly flies open, and as the spring air permeates the room, the two fall deeply in love. To Sieglinde’s questions, the stranger replies that his father’s name was really Wälse, and Sieglinde hails him as her twin, Siegmund, the hero for whom the sword was intended. He exuberantly draws it from the tree, presents it as a bridal gift, and the pair flee into the forest.
by James M. Keller
Richard Wagner’s earliest operas amalgamated the more or less standard traditions of German Romantic Opera (as codified in the works of Carl Maria von Weber and others) and French Grand Opera (a large-scale enterprise typified by Giacomo Meyerbeer and his contemporaries in Paris). He moved increasingly toward realizing his ideal of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a work synthesized from disparate artistic disciplines, including music, literature, the visual arts, ballet, and architecture. The operas of Wagner’s maturity are so distinct that they are often referred to not as operas at all, but rather as “music dramas” in an attempt to underscore the singularity of his aesthetic goals. Nonetheless, Wagner was not averse to extracting sections from these closely woven works to present apart from their operatic context, and on various occasions, he conducted such excerpts as stand-alone concert works.
Die Walküre is the second opera in the gigantic operatic tetralogy known as Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). Taken as a whole, it is surely the most imposing work in the canon of classical music. Wagner labored over it from 1848 until 1874, taking time out to write Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg along the way, and in the end, its four pieces—Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung—would together have a running time of some 15 hours. Wagner turned to medieval Germanic-Nordic legends for his material, most specifically to a group of Icelandic eddas and sagas, an Old Norse prose narrative, and the Middle High German epic Das Nibelungenlied. He processed this material through his own ultra-Romantic sensibilities to yield a highly stylized, in no way colloquial text that evoked ancient roots while rendering it captivating to mid-nineteenth-century audiences. He was nothing if not confident. In a letter to Theodor Uhlig, one of his closest friends and supporters, the composer spoke of his libretto-in-progress: “The whole will become—out with it! I am not ashamed to say so—the greatest work of poetry ever written.”
A thumbnail summary of the Ring’s plot would be an exercise in futility, but its complex strands broadly relate how a potent treasure of stolen gold, forged into a ring, passes through the hands of various gods, demigods, and mortals, bringing tragedy in its wake and ultimately leading to the downfall of the godly race. But one needn’t think about the ring itself in Act I of Die Walküre. It opens with a brief orchestral prelude that sets the scene with musical suggestions of thunder and lightning. The hero Siegmund (tenor), weaponless and wounded, takes refuge in a hut built around an ash tree, the abode of Hunding (bass). He is not at home just then, but his wife Sieglinde (soprano) is.
She and Siegmund sense a chemistry between them, and it starts to grow by the time Hunding arrives. He notes a curious physical resemblance between his wife and this stranger, who launches into an explanation of who he is. He goes by the name of Wehwalt (Woeful), he says. His mother is dead, his sister was abducted years ago, and he has been separated from his father since enemies fell upon them in the forest. Recently, he killed some men in a fight (they were related to a woman in a loveless marriage whom he hoped to aid). Hunding, realizing that those slain fellows were his own kinsmen, vows to battle Siegmund in the morning; but, for the time being, Sieglinde drugs her husband with a sleeping potion. Siegmund recalls that his father had promised him a sword in a time of need, and Sieglinde points out the sword that has been embedded in the ash tree, waiting for a special someone to extract it. Things heat up between Siegmund and Sieglinde, and the storm gives way to a beautiful spring night. As the act ends, carnal passion ignites between the long-separated brother and sister, and one can be sure there will be a price to pay.
Listen for . . . the Wagner tubas
What is the sound of Valhalla? The question sent Wagner on a search for a timbre that could evoke the rich and noble world of the gods, a sound falling somewhere between that made by the horn and that of the trombone. His quest ended with the creation of a new instrument, the Wagner tuba. The composer conceived of the instrument while plotting his Ring Cycle, although efforts to create a model that could achieve the desired tone extended beyond the 1869 premiere of Das Rheingold. The instrument was introduced in 1875 and was used for the first performance of the Ring Cycle at Bayreuth in 1876. Hence the alternate name sometimes applied, the Bayreuth tuba.)
In appearance, the Wagner tuba is similar to the horn but more oval and with a smaller bell. Two forms of the Wagner tuba, tenor and bass, are generally played by hornists, as the instruments share the same mouthpiece and fingering. In Act I of Die Wälkure, Wagner tubas are used to represent thunder in the storm scene.
Wagner tubas remain an uncommon instrument, but they are employed in works by composers who followed in Wagner’s footsteps—in Bruckner’s Symphonies Nos. 7, 8, and 9, and in Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony—and in music by such contemporary composers as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Sofia Gubaidulina, and HK Gruber.
This note originally appeared in the programs of the New York Philharmonic and is reprinted with permission. © New York Philharmonic
