Whose Gold Is It Anyway?

For lovers of Wagner's music-dramas, worldwide, it's that time of year again: the opening of the annual Bayreuther Festspiele. This year the Festival will open on 25 July with a new production of Parsifal by the postmodern avant-garde German director Christoph Schlingensief (his first-ever opera production) which, I can say in advance without knowing anything whatsoever about what this guy has cooked up, and with no fear of being in error, will be a politically charged and grotesque perversion of Wagner's timeless masterpiece. New Yorker music critic and weblogger Alex Ross will be covering the event (I don't know whether to extend him my best wishes or my condolences), and I look forward to his reports, both in print and on his weblog, The Rest Is Noise.

Following the Schlingensief Parsifal (on 27 July) will be presented Das Rheingold, the first music-drama of Wagner's epic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, in the now four-years-old Jürgen Flimm production (the production frequently, and with cause, referred to as the Flimmflam Ring), wherein the Nibelung dwarf Alberich curses and forswears love forever, takes a lump of gold from its resting place at the bottom of the river Rhine, forges it into a ring which confers upon him unlimited power, and thereby sets into motion the chain of events which is Wagner's Ring.

Conventional readings of Alberich's initial deed have it that he stole from the Rhine the gold from which he forged his ring, and, indeed, throughout the texts of all four music-dramas Alberich is referred to as a Räuber, usually translated as robber or thief. But the German noun Raub, which ordinarily means robbery, has, when used poetically, another meaning as well; namely, rape or ravish (i.e., seize and carry off by force, or despoil), and it seems to me, within the context of the Wagnerian mythology of the Ring, that poetic meaning more correctly and more accurately characterizes Alberich's seminal deed. How can one be accused of stealing that for which he's paid in full, and is therefore his very own?

The gold of the Rhine — the Rhinegold — cannot be said to be owned by anyone at music-drama's opening. It's certainly not owned by the three Rheintöchter. They're merely its appointed guardians (more about what that entails anon). While the Rhinegold can be said, in a poetic sense, to be owned by the Rhine itself, and the gold's resting place at the bottom of that great river its natural home, it's not its eternal home, for as the Rheintöchter inform Alberich, the Rhinegold may be forged into the ring of power by anyone willing to forswear love, which implies unequivocally that such a one is entitled to take the Rhinegold for that purpose, and therefore become the owner of both gold and ring.

What, then, did the guardianship of the Rheintöchter entail? Surely, it did not — could not — entail their taking physical measures to prevent the removal of the Rhinegold from its resting place at the bottom of the river. The very idea is absurd. It would seem, then, that their guardianship could have entailed nothing other than their informing any prospective fancier of the Rhinegold that only one who first forswore love would be entitled to it. Such a warning, as is made clear in the text of Das Rheingold, was considered by the Rheintöchter to be more than sufficient to ward off any prospective taker of the Rhinegold, for who in that primal, pristine world would even so much as consider doing such a thing given the condition required?

Alberich, that's who, and only because cruelly, if innocently, pushed to the deed by the unthinking behavior of the Rheintöchter themselves in response to his attempts at wooing them. In that sense, the Rheintöchter can be said to have failed, wantonly and abjectly, the principal mandate of their guardianship by themselves creating a condition that all but ensured their guardianship's failure.

By this reasoning — the only reasoning that makes ethical sense within the ethical context of the world of the Ring — it's clear Alberich is by no stretch of the term a thief. He paid, and paid most dearly, for his right to take the Rhinegold from the river for his own, and forge from it the ring of power, which ring is without question his and his alone as the very title of the tetralogy itself (The Nibelung's Ring) proclaims. There's but a single thief in Das Rheingold, and that's Wotan, chief god and maker of laws. When, in Scene 4, Alberich declares that the ring is as much his own as his head, eyes, and ears, and hurls at Wotan — who's just about to forcibly extract the ring from Alberich's finger for his (Wotan's) own use, which he does in the next minute — the charge of Schächer (thief, not, it should be noted, Räuber), he speaks nothing but the truth: technically, legally, and ethically.

So, whatever unpleasant and unsavory things Alberich may be, thief is not among them.

When I informed members of a Wagner list of my intention to post here an article making the case that Alberich was in fact no thief at all in the matter of the Rhinegold, one replied, "If you can get Alberich off that rap the Michael Jackson defense team want to hear from you. NOW!"

My number's in the book.