Now, Really, Richard, Was That Absolutely Necessary?

The incest in Die Walküre, that is, the second music-drama of Wagner's tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Why was it necessary that Sieglinde be Siegmund's long lost sister, and why did Wagner make incest a feature of their relationship? Surely, Sieglinde being just another, totally unrelated female in distress would have served the very same purpose, would it not?

For the answers to these questions we must consult the urtext — the score (music and text) — to see what it has to tell us as it's the only source with the authority to answer such questions, and the only source that counts. We can't make appeal to Wagner's original sources as they're his business exclusively and none of ours, as is anything even Wagner himself might have said on the matter prior or subsequent to the score's completion, as anything they might have to tell us concerning this matter is certain to be misleading at best, and therefore worse than merely worthless.

On consulting the score, we can, straight off, say for certain what the reason for the incest is not. It is not to fulfill a wish by Wotan, Siegmund and Sieglinde's immortal father, that any issue of Siegmund's and Sieglinde's coupling be a pure-blood Wälsung, nor is it Wotan's wish to create a royal race of his direct descendents by that coupling. Quite apart from the fact that neither Wotan nor anyone else in the Ring had anything to gain by either of those outcomes, there's zero warrant, or even so much as a suggestion, in the entire Ring for such assumptions.

We can also rule out the possibility that Wagner was merely attempting to épater les bourgeois by the clear and pointed presentation of incest in a serious artwork for the stage à la the avant-garde types of today and yesteryear. That Wagner intended the brother-sister incest to be outrageous and shocking is certain, but not to us, the audience. Rather, he intended the outrage and shock for certain of those inhabiting the world of the Ring for reasons dramatic, and did so neither willy-nilly nor faute de mieux.

What the score tells us is essentially this: that the brother-sister incest provides the central instance of how Wotan's manipulative plan to regain Alberich's ring by creating a human "free hero" (i.e., free from the influence of the gods, and therefore his own man) went quickly and wildly in directions beyond his control or even imagining, and produced consequences as dire as they were unintended, all traceable in direct line back to Wotan himself ("Zum Ekel find ich ewig nur mich / in allem was ich erwirke!" "With loathing, I find always only myself in everything I create!"); directions determined by Fate which rules the world; a world not ruled, as Wotan then believed, by Wotan, his destiny, and his wishes.

It was beyond Wotan's control that instead of a single human male (his "free hero"), his coupling with a mortal human woman produced instead twins, one of whom was female. It was beyond his control they were separated when children by an act also beyond his control. It was beyond his control that when they again met (the meeting arranged by Wotan himself) they would fall in love. And it was beyond Wotan's control that instead of Siegmund merely taking the magic sword Wotan left for him for the instant purpose of defending himself against Sieglinde's forced-upon-her husband, Hunding, while freeing his sister (Wotan, we are given every reason to believe, loved Sieglinde as well as he loved her brother), and which magic sword was later to be used by Siegmund to slay Fafner so that Alberich's ring could be recovered, Siegmund would instead take the sword to save Sieglinde not only as the act of a brother freeing his sister, or even merely the act of a virtuous male saving a female in distress (and himself as well), but the act of a lover saving his beloved who, again beyond Wotan's control, was subsequently made pregnant by her coupling with her brother, and so carried within her yet another Wälsung.

And it was most certainly beyond Wotan's control that his true wife, Fricka, the goddess of marriage and the domestic hearth, would take all these gone-wrong events, and use them (in Act II of Die Walküre ) as legalistic, moral, and deceit-revealing cudgels to force Wotan to finally admit to himself the sheer duplicity of his ill-conceived plot to gain for himself Alberich's ring, and force him as well to agree to sacrifice his beloved Wälsung son (and by implication, also his equally beloved Wälsung daughter), and forswear forever all his dreams of limitless power, the limitless power that would be his by his possession of Alberich's ring, and thereby change the entire course of the cosmic drama that is Der Ring des Nibelungen.

And what was the moral core of Fricka's cudgel?

That's right. You guessed it. The incestuous relationship between Siegmund and Sieglinde, for even in the pre-historic world of the Ring such a thing had never before occurred; was in fact something virtually unthinkable.

My heart stops beating; my brain reels!

cries Fricka to Wotan.

Marital intercourse between brother and sister!
When did it ever happen that brother and sister were lovers?
[...]
Is it the end, then, of the everlasting gods
since you brought those wild Wälsungs to birth?
[...]
Laughing, you let go your rule over heaven
so as to gratify the mere pleasure and whim
of these monstrous twins,
your adultery's dissolute fruit.

after which brutal if justified verbal pummeling Wotan begins to see that his cause is hopelessly lost even as he attempts subsequently by sophistic arguments — arguments that become progressively more and more lame — to win his case for Siegmund's and Sieglinde's love and all that came before and eventually resulted in it, and all that he expects will come after, and as well begins to see that he must save himself and the gods from his own gone-wrong, self-interested and self-profiting actions, to the duplicity of which he heretofore had blinded even himself. In short, the incest of Siegmund and Sieglinde serves as a veritable epitome of things-gone-wrong that's central to the propelling of the drama to its inexorable tragic end.

And so now we have the answer to the question that provoked this inquiry, and that answer is, Yes, boys and girls, it really was absolutely necessary.