What did Wagner intend with this character, and how did he envision him being performed? To the first question first. As with all matters Wagnerian, there is an extensive critical literature on all the characters of the Ring, much of it devoted less to who they are than to what they are held to represent according to the philosophical, religious, or political bias of the critic. There’s nothing wrong with that. Wagner was no mean polemicist himself, and indeed he commenced work on the subject of Siegfried at the end of a period in which he had been writing prose, not music, and had been at his most politically active. In his essays from this period, he is thinking through to his full artistic maturity by trying to define what he is really coming to believe—how he and all art (the two are pretty much conflated in his mind) should forge into the future. One thing he articulates is that the fusion of poetry and music in the service of drama must create a “logic of feeling,” which would then become “an ordering principle . . . more forcible than . . . the reasoning march of thought, with its track of causes and effects.” His drama must be sounded so as to overcome “thought-logic” and ascend from mere understanding to feeling directly, through sensory impact. The instinctive human feeling thus aroused, he argues, is self-justifying, is in itself “the moral.”

Now, there are all sorts of objections that can be entered against this vision. The objections and the vision, in fact, constitute one of the fundamental fault lines in thinking about the aesthetics, purposes, and ethics of art—especially the stage arts (or as I call them, “arts of the act”) and their media derivatives, since they alone have this capacity for energized visceral impact. The objections are proper fuel for critical debate. The problem with them, so often met with in recent decades, arises when they are incorporated into production and performance itself, where they constitute betrayal of the interpretive mandate, and are thus an ethical offense greater than any to be found in Wagner’s own argumentations. Wagner did not—of course—intend the “logic of feeling” to become humanity’s existential mode. He meant it as artistic purpose, as the “logic” necessary for the performance event to take its audience on the emotional journey that makes it worth thinking about afterward. Thus, the time for debate about any performed work, or any of the issues it raises, begins with the end of that experience, and must start from an honest accounting of it. Without that, intellectualizations, however learned and sophisticated, are only huffs and puffs of hot air.

Up to the time of the Ring‘s conception^(I), Wagner’s enduring works (Der Fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin) told stories in which elements of Christian legend, trailed by numinous mists, interpenetrated with the “real” world, in the first of these operas a common-folk milieu that could well be contemporary with the composer’s own, and in the latter two in courtly settings with their actions grounded in verifiable events of medieval German history. Now, in search of the transformative musical drama he envisioned, he turned to the world of myth—not just the “myth” of folk legend or medieval bardolatry, but the deep myth of ancient epics. In this prehistorical world, no states have yet formed, and the omniscient Judeo-Christian creator God has not appeared to wrest belief from the family of gods, whose powers are great but not unlimited, and are bound by jurisdictional assignments subject to dispute. These gods are not world-creators, but only the most highly evolved and powerful of several humanoid species obliged to share the world under a pre-existing order. As Siegfried gets underway, the gods are already in decline. Their leader, Wotan, has withdrawn, albeit reluctantly, from his strenuous efforts at directly determining the course of world events, and pins his hopes of accommodation and, perhaps, self-redemption—a topic far too tangled to take on here—on a hero who is of human parentage on both sides, but whose DNA partakes sufficiently of godly descent (for he is in fact Wotan’s grandson) to boast of unusual physical strength and a kind of natural intuition unclouded by awareness of anything that has preceded him.